Who Invests in DeFi When T-Bill Yields Are Higher?

It’s hard to come up with an investment riskier than crypto lending, which offered ridiculous returns of up to and even over 20% APY to anyone who’d put up the crypto collateral that funded various decentralized finance (DeFi) schemes.

It’s even harder to come up with a safer investment than three-month treasury bills, which are highly liquid and backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

But at least those high risks came with potentially high rewards at a time when traditional investments ranging from T-bills to savings accounts were offering tiny fractions of 1%. However, three-month U.S. Treasury bills now offer substantially better rates than crypto lending, with CNBC and MarketWatch quoting a bit over 3.2% on Sept. 13.

And crypto lending? Well, BlockFi, a centralized lender saved from bankruptcy by a timely loan from FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, is now offering 0.1% to 3% APY on many tokens (although some dollar-backed stablecoins still fetch 6% to 7% APY).

Top DeFi lending platform Aave is offering under 2% on dozens of tokens. Another top DeFi lender, Compound, is only offering more than 1% APY on a single token — Tether’s USDT stablecoin — which is 1.44% APY, according to DeFi Rate.

That raises a fairly simple question: Why on earth would you invest in extremely risky lending programs when the safest of investments is paying more? The answer, particularly from the hedge funds and institutional investors who have been playing footsie with DeFi for a while, is that you wouldn’t.

“Two years ago, interest rates in crypto were at least 10% and in the real world rates were either negative or near-zero,” said Jaime Baeza, CEO of digital asset-focused hedge fund ANB Investments. “Now it’s almost the reverse, because yields in crypto have collapsed and central banks are raising rates.”

That has, according to crypto lender Maple Finance CEO Sidney Powell, led to a “higher appetite for Treasuries that has sucked out liquidity from crypto.”

Risky Business

Briefly, crypto lending/borrowing schemes work like this: At the core, a crypto owner deposits, or locks, stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies into lending DApps in exchange for interest, generally termed yield. Borrowers put up crypto collateral worth 125% to 150% of the amount they wish to borrow.

If the volatility of crypto prices knocks that down close to the value of the loan, a margin call is made, and if missed — and it can happen very fast, while borrowers are sleeping — the collateral is liquidated to cover the loan and interest owed.

That latter part can be staggering. One of the outliers offering far more than T-bills at the moment on Aave is wrapped ether, bringing in 15% APY. However, it is being loaned out for 45% APY.

That’s the way it works on DeFi lending/borrowing platforms,…