I feel like we all had to live through the degen farm era to finally admit one thing: most of that “yield” was just noise. We weren’t investing, we were speed-running incentives. APYs came and went, liquidity bounced from farm to farm, and the moment rewards slowed down, everything collapsed. That wasn’t sustainable finance – it was a travelling circus.
What’s happening now feels very different. Yield is slowly moving from being a product you chase to a property of the system itself. Instead of staring at one flashy number, the real question becomes: where does this cash flow come from, how is it engineered, how is risk shared, and can the structure survive over time? That’s the mindset shift I mean when I talk about the “Post-APY Era.”
This is where @Lorenzo Protocol really clicks for me. It treats yield as something you can design, separate, and route – not just emissions slapped on top of a pool. Principal and yield can follow different risk paths, cash flows can be modeled, governed, and combined into real structured products instead of random farms. Capital doesn’t need to rotate every week; it can finally settle into systems that make sense.
The future of DeFi won’t belong to whoever shouts the highest APY. It will belong to the protocols that define how yield exists at the network level. Lorenzo isn’t just offering “another yield product” – it’s building the architecture where yield becomes infrastructure, not bait. That, to me, is what the Post-APY Era really looks like.
