Ratings · Measured, not sponsored
Yield aggregators
Every comparison in this category leads with the APY — the number the depositor controls least and the protocol controls most. We ranked on the thing you are really buying: who gets to move your money, and what happened the last time they got it wrong.
Buy a fixed return to a known maturity. No strategy can be changed under you — because there is no strategy. It is also the hardest product here to understand.
Six years, $568m, no exploit, immutable core mechanics. Entirely dependent on one ecosystem.
States its fee schedule plainly and shows APY net of it. Also the protocol with two eight-figure incidents and two different outcomes for depositors.
What we did · August 27, 2026We read what each protocol tells a depositor about where their money currently is, checked whether the advertised yield is net of the fees, and catalogued the incidents alongside what happened to the people who were in the vault at the time.
A past bailout is not a policy you are covered by
Same protocol. Two years apart. Whether depositors were made whole depended on the treasury, the moment and the decision — not on anything a depositor could have read in advance. That is why 30% of the score here is who holds discretion over your money and what the record shows they did with it.
Check what the vault actually holds
A large share of the capital in this category routes into the same handful of lending markets and staking tokens anyone can reach directly. Where that is true, the aggregator is charging a performance fee and adding a second layer of contract risk for automated compounding. Where it is not — fixed-maturity yield, vote-boosted rewards, genuinely leveraged strategies — it is doing something you could not do yourself, and the fee is a real price for a real service. Open the vault before you decide which one you are in.
The ranking
Click any row for the quick read, or open a company for its full profile and per-criterion scores. Measured August 27, 2026. How we rate.
HOW WE SCORED THIS — CRITERIA AND WEIGHTS+
A yield aggregator is a power of attorney over your money: you deposit, and somebody else decides which protocols it goes into, changes that decision without asking you, and takes a cut of what comes back. So the score is led by who holds that discretion and what has happened when they used it badly — not by the APY on the front page, which is the one number every comparison in this category leads with.
Who can change a strategy, how fast, and whether a timelock or a multisig stands between a compromised key and your deposit. Then every incident on record with what happened to depositors: Yearn’s DAI vault lost about $11m to a price-manipulated Curve strategy in February 2021 and repaid users from the treasury; a misconfigured legacy contract cost roughly $10m more in April 2023, with no comparable make-whole. Same protocol, opposite outcomes.
Whether the current strategy and its underlying positions are published in a form a depositor can read, whether the advertised APY is net of fees, and whether historical performance is available rather than a trailing best number. A vault that shows a yield and not its composition is asking for trust it has not evidenced.
Total value locked at a stated timestamp, and how long the protocol has operated through full market cycles. In a category where the product is discretion, a long record is itself evidence.
Published performance and management fees, quoted from the protocol’s own documentation, and whether the displayed APY already has them deducted. Where a protocol’s fee schedule is not stated plainly in its own docs, that is recorded as a finding rather than estimated.
Chains with real deposits and the range of assets supported, from public data at a stated timestamp.
Weights sum to 100. If we cannot verify a criterion, we delete it rather than score it on impressions — read the methodology.
Is there a free alternative?
For most stablecoin deposits, the aggregator is a fee on top of a rate you could take directly.
The largest vaults in this category route into the same handful of lending markets and staking tokens that anyone can access in two clicks. What you are buying is rebalancing and compounding, and what you are paying is a performance fee plus a second layer of smart-contract risk on top of the underlying protocol’s. That trade is worth it for complex, actively managed strategies and for gas-expensive compounding at small size. It is usually not worth it for parking stablecoins in a market you could have deposited into yourself — check what the vault actually holds before deciding which case you are in.
What changed since last time
- 2026-08-27Category published.Aggregator comparisons rank on displayed APY. The APY is the number the depositor controls least and the protocol controls most.
Questions
What am I actually buying from a yield aggregator?+
Discretion. You deposit, and somebody else decides which protocols your money enters, changes that decision without asking you, and keeps a share of the result. That is a genuine service — rebalancing and compounding are work, and at small size on a cheap chain automated compounding really does add return. But it is also a second layer of smart-contract risk stacked on top of the underlying protocol’s, and a fee on a rate you could often have taken directly.
Which aggregator is safest?+
On evidence, Pendle and Convex sit at the top for opposite reasons. Pendle removes the discretion entirely: you buy a fixed return to a known maturity, and no strategy can be changed under you. Convex has six years, $568m and no exploit, with immutable core mechanics — but it lives entirely inside the Curve ecosystem, so a Curve problem is a Convex problem.
If a vault gets exploited, will I be repaid?+
Sometimes, and you cannot predict which time. Yearn repaid the victims of its February 2021 DAI vault exploit out of its own treasury, minting 9.7m DAI against YFI to do it. When a misconfigured legacy yUSDT contract was drained for about $10m in April 2023, there was no comparable make-whole. Same protocol, two years apart. Treat a past bailout as evidence about a moment, never as a policy you are covered by.
Is the advertised APY the yield I will receive?+
Only where the protocol says so explicitly. Yearn’s documentation states that displayed APYs are net of its fees, which is the standard the whole category should be held to. Elsewhere you have to check whether the number is gross, whether it is a trailing best-case, and whether it includes token incentives that will not be there next month. A yield figure with no stated basis is marketing.
When is an aggregator not worth it?+
When the vault routes into a lending market you could deposit into yourself in two clicks. Then you are paying a performance fee plus a second contract risk for automated compounding you could do manually. Open the vault, read what it actually holds, and if the answer is “the same market you were going to use anyway”, use that market instead.
How this is funded
It is not. There are no affiliate links on this page or anywhere on this site, no paid placements, and no sponsored positions. Nobody in this table can buy a place in it, accelerate their inclusion, or influence a score — and none of them paid us anything, because there is nothing here to buy. The full policy.