Everything you say is accurate, but you’ve omitted the fact that in order to mint another 60 cryptocoins I need to mine the block chain. That is an expensive operation, isn’t it? And it costs real money, in most cases, since the electric company and the computer companies don’t want my cryptocoins, even if the human minors will accept crypto.
You don’t need to mine the blockchain.
Sure, that’s how you get new Bitcoin - because that’s how the Bitcoin blockchain is structured. It’s a proof-of-work system. But there are also proof-of-stake systems, where new coins are issued as rewards for providing liquidity/staking to the system. For these alt-coins - the proprietary coins that run on top of ETH or on their own proprietary blockchain systems - those staking rewards can theoretically be set at whatever you want them to be:
Staking rewards and yield farming are the two most appealing features in DeFi ecosystems. DeFi users will deposit and lock their tokens on the platform to earn a huge annual percentage yield because DeFi ecosystems rely on staked tokens for consensus. This means that if you stake your tokens on a DeFi platform that pays out, say, 1000 percent (yes, they can get that high) annually, you will have 10 times more tokens in a year.
However, because the majority of participants are also staking, the staking rewards amount to token inflation, which drives the price down. This means that in order for you to sell your staked tokens for a profit after a year, the ecosystem must experience a significant increase in new investors to offset the increasing supply. Because it relies on new investors to maintain its value, it is similar to other Ponzi schemes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rufaskamau/2022/05/17/how-the-d…
Again, it’s got a striking similarity to interest rate parity theory in foreign exchange transactions. If you can get a much higher interest rate in a foreign currency than your domestic currency, nominally it looks like you could improve your return by moving your capital to the higher rate. But that’s usually an illusion, because the higher interest rate in the other currency implies that the foreign currency is going to devalue against your domestic currency - so that if you were to try to actually purchase a hedge against the currency exchange risk, it would cost as much (at least) as the potential profit from the interest rate arbitrage.
So basically these deFi “investments” are just like unhedged foreign exchange bets, almost always against a “currency” that’s rapidly inflating its supply. So the interest rates denominated in that foreign currency look stupendous, but you lose any return when you try to convert back to your domestic currency from the rapidly devaluing foreign currency.
Albaby