Methodology

Who Pays the Yield? asks one question of every advertised APY on Solana: is it paid by real borrowers and traders, or by a protocol handing out its own token? Every number here comes from public data, recomputed hourly. Here is exactly how.

Data source and coverage

Pool data comes from DefiLlama's free yields API: current APY split into base (organic) and reward (emissions) APY, TVL and volume, snapshotted every hour. Reward-token prices and 30-day price changes come from DefiLlama's coins API. When we start tracking a pool we load its last 90 days of daily history, so charts work from day one.

We track about 200 Solana pools: every pool that pays token emissions, then the largest pools of each segment, then the largest overall. We skip pools under $250K TVL and “dead TVL” pools whose total APY is below 0.3% (parked liquidity with almost no trading, or collateral-only lending markets).

Each vault is counted once. DefiLlama lists some curated vaults twice, under the host protocol and again under the curator. When a curator listing has the same asset and the same TVL (within 1%) as a pool on another protocol, we show the host protocol's listing and leave the copy out of tables and totals. A pool that has not updated for 48 hours has dropped out of the tracked set; it also leaves the tables, and its page says so. When two pools on one protocol share a name, a short id (like #432c) tells them apart.

Liquidity-manager vaults (such as Kamino Liquidity) deposit into a DEX pool for the same token pair. When a vault holds 90% or more of that pool's liquidity, both are listed, because they are two ways in with different net yields (the vault's is after its fees), and each row names the other. Any total that includes both counts that liquidity once.

The yield by asset pages group single-asset pools (lending markets, vaults, staking) by the token you deposit, with wrapped SOL counted as SOL, and rank them by organic APY (7d).

Segments

Pools are grouped by their protocol's DefiLlama category: Lending & vaults (lending, yield, curated vaults, liquidity managers), DEX, Staking (liquid staking) and Other (real-world assets, derivatives). The Lending & vaults view comes first because that is where almost all Solana token emissions are today. DEX liquidity mining on Solana has largely stopped.

Yield metrics

Organic APY (7d): Yield from trading fees or borrower interest. DefiLlama's 7-day base APY when it has one, otherwise the mean of our daily base-APY averages over the last 7 days.
Organic APY (30d): Mean of daily base-APY averages over the last 30 days.
Emissions APY: The latest reward APY: yield paid in incentive tokens, valued by DefiLlama at the current token price.
Emissions, 30d repriced: The 30-day average reward APY, with each day re-valued at today's reward-token price (today's price ÷ that day's price, averaged over the pool's reward tokens with equal weights). This shows APY that is propped up by a token that keeps falling. It appears once we have at least 7 days of our own price captures.
Real yield ratio: Organic 7d ÷ (organic 7d + emissions). 100% means the yield is entirely organic. Negative organic APY counts as zero.
Reward token 30d: The worst 30-day price change among a pool's reward tokens.

Yield-quality metrics

Stability

Standard deviation ÷ mean of daily organic APY over 30 days. 0 is perfectly steady. Shown once there are 7 days of data.

Trend

Organic 7d ÷ organic 30d. Below 1.0× means the organic yield is falling.

Turnover

7-day trading volume ÷ TVL, for DEX pools. Fee yield depends on it.

Quality flag

The first rule that applies:

Fading: trend below 0.7× (DEX: below 0.5×), or TVL down more than 30% in 7 days.
Volatile: stability above 0.5 (DEX: above 1.0).
Steady: otherwise.
New: fewer than 7 days of data.

DEX fee yield naturally moves with trading volume, so DEX pools get looser thresholds. With a single threshold almost every DEX pool would be flagged and the flag would mean nothing.

Known limitations

DefiLlama doesn't split reward APY per token, so multi-reward pools are repriced with equal token weights.
Concentrated-liquidity APYs (Orca, Raydium CLMM) are pool-wide averages; an individual position's yield depends on its range.
Points programs aren't priced, because no API values them. A pool farming points shows only its token yield.
Meteora pools aren't covered yet; DefiLlama doesn't list them.

Nothing here is financial advice. Back to the dashboard.