Sometimes, when looking at liquidity pools in DeFi, the first thing people pay attention to is the APR. The higher the number, the stronger the desire to immediately add liquidity to such a pool. At first glance, everything seems simple: a high APR should mean high returns. But in practice, this does not always work.

The fact is that high APRs often appear in new or still unstable pools. At first, liquidity is attracted there due to increased rewards, but over time, the situation can change quickly. The price of the token may start to decline, trading volumes may fall, and the final return may turn out to be completely different from what was expected.

Another issue is related to volatile losses. When one of the tokens in a pair changes significantly in price, part of the yield may simply offset this movement. As a result, a high APR works more as a risk balancer than as a guaranteed profit.

Therefore, over time, many begin to look not only at the percentage yield, but also at other things. For example, how long the pool has been in existence, what its liquidity is, and whether there is stable user activity. All of this is clearly visible through the liquidity infrastructure, for example on STONfi, where you can observe how different pools behave within the $TON network.