Earn

The umbrella label DEXs use for the section where you supply capital instead of trading: staking, liquidity pools and vaults. The products behind it differ sharply in what they actually do with your money.

Definition

Earn is an interface label, not a product. On most perpetual DEXs it names the page that gathers everything you can do with capital other than open a position, and the things gathered there have little in common beyond appearing under the same heading.

What is usually behind it

Staking a protocol token, which typically pays a share of protocol fees, sometimes emissions on top, and sometimes comes with a lock-up or an unbonding period.

Supplying liquidity to a pool, where you hold the pool’s assets and take the other side of the traders using it.

Depositing into a vault, where a strategy, a designated trader or the protocol itself deploys your capital and you receive a share of the result.

The risks are not comparable. Staking exposes you to the token and to the lock-up. A liquidity position exposes you to the assets and to impermanent loss. A vault exposes you to whatever the vault does, which can include trading losses that reduce your deposit.

Reading the yield figure

A number on an Earn page is a summary of a past period, an emission schedule, or both, and neither predicts what you will receive. Where rewards are paid in a protocol token, the figure also depends on that token’s price holding up.

The questions that matter are more concrete than the percentage. Where does the income actually come from, who pays it, what happens to your deposit if the thing paying it goes badly, and how quickly can you get the capital back.

Where you will run into it

As a top-level menu item on GMX and on most perpetual DEXs, grouping products that deserve to be evaluated separately rather than as one category.