Glossary
Real Yield
Returns paid to token holders from a protocol's actual revenue — fees, not freshly minted token emissions. A reaction to the unsustainable yields of 2020–2021.
"Real yield" is the term that emerged in 2022 to distinguish sustainable, fee-funded returns from emissions-driven APRs that disappear when token incentives run out. A protocol paying real yield distributes a share of actual fees collected from users to its stakers or liquidity providers.
GMX, Synthetix, dYdX, and Aave's V3 fee distribution are canonical real-yield protocols. Whether real yield can replace emissions across the broader DeFi stack is one of the central sustainability questions of the category.