$LIDO

I've been in DeFi since the early days, and one mistake that still haunts me from late 2021 was trying to chase every single high-yield farm that popped up. I remember seeing projects with seemingly absurd APYs, sometimes north of 1000% for a liquidity pool on some nascent DEX, and rather than doing my usual deep dive into the smart contracts, the team, and the tokenomics, I'd ape in with a small, then medium, then large portion of my stack. The allure of the daily compounding was incredibly strong. What I consistently overlooked was the impermanent loss risk from highly volatile new tokens, and more critically, the smart contract risk of these audited-by-nobody projects. I lost a good chunk of $ETH and $USDC over a few weeks jumping from one rug-pull or exploit to another. It really reinforced the idea that if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is, especially in a space as young and experimental as DeFi. Now, my focus is almost exclusively on battle-tested protocols like $AAVE and $LIDO, even if the yields are a fraction of what those moon-shot farms promised.