How to Find The Best DeFi Pools For Your Assets

There’s Compound, Aave, Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve, Bancor, Balancer, Alpha Homora, and countless more defi apps. Many of them have deployments not only on Ethereum, but on Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom, Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Collectively these apps list a legion of cryptoassets, one or more of which are bundled together to form an assortment of pools more diverse than the population of New York.

Decentralized finance is full of investment opportunities, but it’s a strenuous task to find the best ones. Up until recently the optimal strategy included visiting all apps that support the assets you hold, performing the dreadful DYOR, checking each Deposit Annual Percentage Rate (DAPR), compiling a list, and choosing the best numbers. The problem with this strategy was not only the inconvenience of visiting apps one by one, but also the limited — or in many cases, the complete — lack of historical and aggregate data.

Good news is, defi has advanced a lot since it became popular in 2020. Innovation is booming and the aforementioned strategy has become obsolete. Enter Yield Samurai.

Step 1. Selecting Assets

Let’s say that you hold LINK and that you’re looking for the best defi pools to earn interest on it. Open Yield Samurai and search for LINK:

Step 2. More Filters

Click the More Filters button to further weed out undesired results:

In this example we filter out all pools that have less than $100k Total Value Locked (TVL). But you can also filter by other crucial metrics.

Step 3. Sorting

Now that you’ve narrowed down the pool results, sort them by DAPR:

At this point you can see all pools that contain LINK, have at least $100k TVL, and are sorted by average DAPR for the past 7 days in descending order.

Step 4. Narrowing Down The Search

Let’s say that you are not happy with the low DAPR of the pools in the lending table, and that you would like to find a liquidity pool where LINK is paired with WETH, perhaps because impermanent loss for such pools will almost always be negligible:

You activate Exclusive Search to make sure only pools that contain exactly the same combination of assets that you are searching for are shown in the results; you add WETH to the search assets; finally, you expand the liquidity table. Voilà, you end up with all LINK-WETH pools with more than $100k TVL, ordered by DAPR.

As you can see, at the time of writing, there are pools on Uniswap V3, SushiSwap, Uniswap V2, Balancer, and QuickSwap, with some apps having pools on different blockchain platforms, i.e, Uniswap V3 on Ethereum and Arbitrum.

Step 5. Analyzing Individual Pools

At this point, if you’re happy with the search results, you can start analyzing each prospect:

Analyze the available data for all prospects — impermanent loss, DAPR, TVL, etc, for different periods — and you will make a better investment decision.