Negative Real Yield

How it happens

Staking and deposit yields have two possible sources: fees genuinely paid by users, and newly created tokens. Where issuance dominates, the nominal rate is largely a redistribution from holders who do not participate to those who do, and the network-wide real return net of issuance can be at or below zero even while every individual dashboard shows a positive percentage. Denomination compounds the confusion, since a rate quoted in the token itself says nothing about the value of what is earned. Some products go further and pay a fixed rate underwritten from a reserve rather than from borrower demand, which works only while the reserve is replenished. The word yield here should not be read as it is in fixed income: there is no borrower with a legal obligation, no issuer promise, no dividend from profits, and in most designs the rate can be changed by a parameter update.

What you can actually observe

Decompose rewards into the issuance component and the fee component, which is disclosed for most proof-of-stake networks and computable for most protocols. Real yield metrics that net issuance out of the headline rate are published by several data providers, and the staking ratio shows how much of supply must share the fee pool. For fixed-rate products, find the reserve that funds the gap and check whether it has required top-ups.

Precedent

Anchor, the deposit product on Terra, advertised a fixed rate well above what its borrowers paid and covered the shortfall from a reserve that had to be repeatedly replenished, and the arrangement ended with the collapse of the associated stablecoin in 2022.

What makes it more or less material

Check what proportion of the rate comes from fees rather than issuance, whether any reserve subsidizes it, who sets the rate and how easily it changes, and what the rate is denominated in.