There are also other ways to get these returns outside of DeFi, like by staking ETH, selling covered calls, or various other strategies on centralized services
The crux of the OP’s argument to me is that The company and others in this space position the yields as being “in kind” to savings account yields despite it very much being a different risk ballgame. See the frequent hacks on https://rekt.news/ for example.
Do sites like Celsius explicitly claim to be as safe as insured savings banks? No of course not but they play a similar linguistic game of association to Tesla’s “autopilot” nomenclature.
As with most things do your own research and don’t risk what you can’t lose.
What's the ROI on staking ETH right now? Is it anywhere near the rate that they claim?
>selling covered calls
you're taking on risk when doing that. It works well until you get assigned, in which case you take a massive loss and unable to pay back your investors.
How do you take a “massive loss” on covered calls being exercised? They have defined risk, you give up some potential upside to collect premium. If they are exercised, the underlying is called away.
Selling naked calls has a lot more risk, see the blowup of optionsellers.com on naked natural gas options
>How do you take a “massive loss” on covered calls being exercised?
The loss comes from the opportunity cost of what you could have sold the underlying asset for. That might or might not be "massive", but the potential is definitely there. At the end of the day you're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Maybe it even has expected value greater or equal to the advertised APY, but failing to disclose that and/or pretending like it's guaranteed is deceptive. I'd be pissed if I put my money into some sort of "savings account" with 8% APY, then get wiped out next time there's a spike/dip, because it turned out that they were using it to write covered calls.
The crux of the OP’s argument to me is that The company and others in this space position the yields as being “in kind” to savings account yields despite it very much being a different risk ballgame. See the frequent hacks on https://rekt.news/ for example.
Do sites like Celsius explicitly claim to be as safe as insured savings banks? No of course not but they play a similar linguistic game of association to Tesla’s “autopilot” nomenclature.
As with most things do your own research and don’t risk what you can’t lose.