Deploy Finance, a self-custodial Yearn alternative

Disclosure: Deploy Finance publishes this page and offers a competing product that appears in it.

Not financial advice. Crypto, DeFi and perpetual-futures strategies can lose money, including your whole deposit. Yields are variable, and past or backtested results do not predict future returns. Read the risk disclosure.

Yearn and Deploy Finance both automate a strategy for you instead of asking you to run it yourself, but they automate different things. Yearn automates finding and rotating between DeFi yield opportunities. Deploy Finance automates a defined trading mandate, either funding-rate capture or directional perpetual trading, on decentralized perpetual markets.

The closest overlap is a USDC deposit that earns while someone else does the work. The asymmetry is where the USDC goes. A Yearn vault pools it and spreads it across lending and liquidity strategies. A Deploy agent keeps it in your own wallet and trades it on Hyperliquid.

Compare Yearn and Deploy Finance

What is Yearn?

Yearn is a DeFi yield-automation protocol. Its yVaults pool deposits and route them into yield strategies, rebalancing and reallocating as conditions shift so depositors do not have to track and move funds between protocols themselves.

How Yearn vaults work

• Deposit a supported asset into a yVault and receive vault shares representing your claim on the pool. Multi-strategy vaults use a yv prefix, such as yvUSDC, and single-strategy V3 vaults use ys.
• Strategies decide where pooled capital goes: lending markets, liquidity positions, and staking. V2 vaults can run up to 20 strategies at once.
• Yearn V3 makes each strategy a standalone ERC-4626 vault. A V3 vault can hold one strategy or allocate across several.
• Profits are realized at harvest, when the vault's strategies report gains and fees are taken.
• Funds are held in the vault's smart contracts rather than in your own wallet. You hold a claim on the pool, not an individually managed position.

What Yearn charges

Yearn's fees have changed over time. Older vaults charged 2% management and 20% performance. According to Yearn's documentation, vaults deployed through its factory now charge a 10% performance fee, and single-asset vaults typically have no management fee. The performance fee comes out of yield at each harvest, so the rate you see in the app is net of it.

Deploy Finance: autonomous agents on perpetual markets

Deploy Finance runs autonomous trading agents funded and settled in USDC. Each one holds to one fixed mandate rather than rotating between opportunities. The live agents are Income: Funding Rates and Superstar.

• Income: Funding Rates: a market-neutral agent that holds roughly 75% of capital as the spot asset and uses 25% to back a 3x perpetual short of matching notional on Hyperliquid. It collects funding paid by leveraged longs and rebalances automatically.
• Superstar: a directional agent that takes long or short positions on perpetual markets under its defined strategy.
• Self-custodial agent wallet: agents receive scoped, revocable trading permissions. They cannot transfer or withdraw your funds.

Yearn's automation moves pooled capital between whichever lending, liquidity, and staking venues its strategies favor. Deploy's agents run one defined mandate each on decentralized perpetual markets. Income: Funding Rates aims to collect funding spreads without directional price exposure, and Superstar takes a directional stance. Neither Deploy agent is a yield aggregator moving between opportunities.

The yields respond to different things. A Yearn USDC vault earns roughly what DeFi borrowers pay across the markets it supplies, minus fees. Income: Funding Rates earns what leveraged perpetual traders pay to hold their positions. Both reflect demand for leverage in crypto, through different instruments and on different venues.

To start, sign in with email or Google, fund the wallet with USDC, and choose an agent. You receive no vault share and no receipt token. The USDC stays in your wallet, and the approval screen shows what the session key can do before you grant it. You can revoke it at any time.

When should you choose Deploy Finance or Yearn?

Choose Deploy Finance when:

• You want exposure specifically to perpetual funding spreads or a directional perpetual strategy, not general DeFi yield.
• You want your funds individually held in your own wallet rather than pooled into a shared vault contract.
• You want no performance or management fee taken from your results.
• You want an agent to run a fixed mandate end to end, rather than a strategy that rotates across protocols.

Choose Yearn when:

• You want automated exposure to DeFi lending, liquidity, and staking opportunities as they shift.
• You want an ERC-4626 vault share you can hold, transfer, or use as collateral elsewhere.
• You are comfortable pooling funds into a vault's smart contract alongside other depositors.
• You want a strategist-managed vault rather than a single fixed mandate.

Different return sources: Yearn automates allocation across DeFi yield strategies. Deploy Finance runs two live agents with a fixed mandate each on decentralized perpetual markets. No integration between the products is implied.

Two ways to use Deploy Finance

Income: Funding Rates

Choose this agent if you want perpetual funding spreads specifically, rather than whichever venue a strategist has rotated the pool into.

Superstar

Choose this agent for a directional perpetual stance, which a yield-aggregating vault is not built to take.

Learn more

• How to choose an agent
• Income: Funding Rates overview
• Superstar overview
• Best DeFi vaults
• Alternatives to ERC-4626 vaults
• Risks
• Yearn documentation

Start with Deploy Finance

Create a self-custodial Deploy Finance wallet and review the live agents.