Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Welcome to this week’s edition of Tokenised.

If you just opened a bank in the crypto-metaverse, how would you attract depositors to it? There are no bells and whistles you can put on a branch network, no robots that can replace humans as a gimmick, and certainly no wet signature requirements to usher them in. 

Instead, how about you offer them eye-popping yields to deposit their money? Since breaking out in the summer of 2020, decentralised finance protocols have exactly done that, attracting investors by advertising high returns for locking up money. 

But those returns have seen a marked dip recently. Amusingly enough, this has spawned a new generation of projects with shaky (at best) economics that offer high returns, but also expose users to the risk of being the last one out of the gates of a ponzi scheme. 

Let’s jump right in.

The yield is dead. Long live the yield.

Since May last year, an index tracking the value of major DeFi tokens has fallen by over 70%.