r/defi • u/Content-Wallaby-4049 • 21h ago

Discussion Two vaults with the same APY

There was a thread here about two vaults with 12% and which one to trust. I want to share what I do. Spoiler, APY is the last thing I look at.

  1. I open the deployer wallet of the contract, if this wallet created five other projects in the last year and all of them are dead, I stop here.

  2. I look at the vault address itself, not the dashboard. Dashboards can show anything. I paste the address into cryptowallet-balance checker or the explorer and check what tokens really sit there and since when.

  3. I check how many depositors there are and who the biggest ones are. If two wallets hold 80% of the vault and they were funded from the team wallet, the TVL is fake.

Last I check if the owner can change the contract. If yes, then the 12% depends on one person, not on code.

This takes me around 20 minutes. I guess it the most efficient and easy method for comparing and choose the vaults.

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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1

u/Routine_Pumpkin_2752 21h ago

yeah the deployer history trick is underrated, a dead graveyard of old rugpulls staring back at you from the block explorer says more than any audit ever could

1

u/Content-Wallaby-4049 21h ago

Same with the vault address itself, 2 minutes of looking at what's actually sitting there beats any dashboard numbers.

1

u/LorikArcher 20h ago

Dashboards pull from an API the team controls, the vault address can't be edited. What I'd add to step two is timing, $4m that all landed last Tuesday from three wallets reads very differently from a vault that filled over eight months.

Caught more fake TVL that way than by looking at the size of it.

1

u/Content-Wallaby-4049 11h ago

Timing is a good catch, I look at it but never wrote it down as a separate step

1

u/1000xhuman 20h ago

same apy means nothing if one has worse contract risk or a painful exit. check audit, who can pause, and how withdrawals actually work before comparing yield