If you just sit in Tether sure, but the ecosystem of stablecoins gives you access to DeFi yield opportunities with much better "passive" interest than bank deposits or treasuries, so the bet is a little more sophisticated than dollar for dollar.
Actually the DeFi yield opportunities are not any better than Treasuries on a risk-adjusted basis. You might not be familiar with the actual risk level, including counterparty risk. Some of the cryptocurrency grifters have intentionally obscured that issue.
I’m confused. Banks and credit unions pay interest on savings because they can loan or invest that money with higher yields then the interest they pay to the customer/member.
How exactly do cryptocurrencies finance their DeFi yields to their investors? The only way I can think of is with the money of future investors, but that is a pretty blatant Ponzi scheme.
Yeah, that still doesn’t make sense. If that were to be sustainable you would have charge higher interest on the loans then you give to savings. That means a customer has the potential of getting a loan in an alien currency which they’d have to sell to USD, and then buy some more of that alien currency to pay it back with much higher interest then if they would have just gone to a bank/credit union/loan agency.
These DeFi yields must be funded in other ways than just loans.
> If that were to be sustainable you would have charge higher interest on the loans then you give to savings.
Which is exactly how protocols like Compound work, although 'governance tokens' are also issued simply for using the system.
> These DeFi yields must be funded in other ways than just loans.
Which? DeFi stands for Decentralized Finance, which pretty much means the rules are easily available - as long as you talk about a specific example, not spherical cows.
I’m sorry but I’m still confused. Who are the people taking these inconvenient, unoptimal and expensive loans, when they can get better and cheaper loans through traditional means? Something doesn’t smell right.
Also ‘governance tokens’? This smells like another term for “money from new users entering the system”. Which is precisely how Ponzi schemes work.
EDIT: I went on a little scouting mission on google (well DDG actually) to find out if I could borrow some USDT on the Compound and how much it would cost me. But I mostly came across articles explaining how you could make money by doing the opposite (buying Tether and lending it), and numerous dashboards with all sorts of hard to understand data with the prices of various cryptocurrencies and some rates I couldn’t understand. I suspect that the only people borrowing USDT are actually also speculators that are invested in the cryptocurrency market (perhaps they are trying to short it).
Interest on lending, and trading fees from liquidity pools. During a bear market in crypto certainly these yields will decline.
The 2 sources I mentioned above are essentially flows that accrue during the bull markets. It's not magic, when people want to long assets they borrow stables. If you lend into these markets you'll get the yield. With liquidity pools you can get some transaction fees even during market volatility and draw-downs, in the short term at least.
When you hold Tether, you're taking a risk that your Tethers might not be redeemable in USD. As far as I know, this risk isn't compensated in any way, shape or form.
When you deposit your Tethers somewhere, you're taking an additional risk, namely the risk that you might not get the deposit back. The interest that you get on deposits is compensation for taking that risk, but not for the other risk.
For sure, holding tether (or any stablecoin) without investing it is pointless. It can't go up, but might go down. The only reason to hold it (longer than to do a transaction) is if you're making a return.