Yield App Review Summary
Yield App is more transparent in some issues than other crypto lending platforms. The platform offers higher yields than the competition, so it is gaining popularity.
The platform didn't explain the incorporation structure adequately, and it didn’t disclose which DeFi protocols they are using and how they can generate such high yields.
The fact that you need to buy into the utility token also doesn’t inspire more trust in the platform, as large token holders can easily manipulate the price of the utility tokens.
Key Takeaways From Our Yield App Review:
- High returns
- Simplifying DeFi
- Good risk disclosures
- YLD token required to earn a higher yield
Or compare the currently best crypto interest accounts.
What Is Yield App?
The Yield App is a crypto earning platform with surprisingly high-interest rates, allowing you to earn up to 10% APY on your cryptocurrency with daily rewards.
In this Yield App review, you’ll learn all of the features of the Yield App platform, as well as the risks, so that you can make an informed decision as to whether you want to earn passive income on this crypto platform.
Yield App In Numbers
When doing your due diligence on any platform, you should first look at the statistics.
Yield App has a statistics page updated bi-weekly to give you an updated view of how each asset is performing, the total number of investors, and more in-depth information about its YIELD token (YLD).
Yield App also published a quarterly report, which is available on its blog.
The platform employs 50+ employees and has over $250 million in assets under management, with over 90,000 investors.
Yield App Requirements
To open a Yield App account and earn money on your cryptocurrency through the platform, you need to be able to fulfill the following requirements:
- Be over 18 years old
- Accept the terms and conditions
- Pass the KYC verification process.
- Deposit $100 in your wallet
- Not be a resident of one of 43 countries (including the U.S.)
The KYC verification process has two steps.
The first requires you to be able to provide a photo ID in the form of a passport, driver's license, or national ID card.
The second step requires you to provide a second form of identification to verify your address, such as a utility bill, bank statement, or income tax statement. You will also need to take a selfie to submit during the process.
Risk And Return
Firstly, when depositing your assets on any crypto earning platform, you must be aware of certain potential risks. Any governmental deposit scheme does NOT insure your deposits, and holding a wallet on a crypto earning platform is not a savings account.
There are many scams within the crypto lending and crypto earning industry, and you should be cautious by doing your due diligence before depositing money on any platform.
What Does Yield App’s Insurance Cover?
Previously, the Yield App partnered with BitGo, which provided cold storage wallets. BitGo carried $100 million in insurance protection for users, covering digital assets where BitGo held 100% of the private keys. This covered third-party hacks, insider theft by BitGo employees, and loss of keys.
Yield App moved on from the security system from BitGo and developed a proprietary security infrastructure that fits the company's needs.
This change does mean that Yield App currently does not offer insurance coverage.
How Does Yield App Make Money?
We reached out to the Yield App support team as we could not find any information regarding how the platform turns a profit.
They responded to let us know that the specifics of which protocols are used at any point are not public information.
However, they told us that Yield App uses a combination of DeFi and market-neutral strategies with external managers (such as crypto arbitrage) to generate secure returns on digital assets.
Yield App's revenue-generating activities
- Crypto exchange
- Yield from DeFi and CeFi trading strategies
- Yield from external liquid alpha market neutral fund managers
While Yield App isn't publically revealing it's deployment strategies, users can get insights into the platform's hot wallet addresses:
Is the Yield App Regulated?
Yield App Limited operates the YIELD App platform and YieldApp OÜ, which the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit has issued a Virtual Currency License.
Yield App is currently ‘working to a licensing roadmap’ and working with several regulators, which indicates more protection is coming for users in the form of regulations for its services.
How Is Yield App Secured?
The yield App has different features to ensure the security of your funds. It uses 2FA to decrease the risk of fraudulent use of your account. Yield App also offers features such as an activity log, session monitoring, alert emails and address whitelisting.
The platform is integrated into Amazon Web Services, covering many different security aspects. This includes identity management, connection security, and database security.
Yield App informs users that while it performs reasonable steps to minimize the risk of data leaks or fraudulent behavior, it is still possible for hacks to happen. It ensures that users know that investing in the platform is not without risks to their personal information.
Users’ crypto-assets are not backed by collateral or other hard assets or credit.
The user remains the sole owner of the coins in their wallet. This changes when using the ‘earn’ feature, when the crypto is transferred to the Yield App, which can then use your assets for generating returns. Yield App does not lend out assets to third parties.
Your Return On Yield App
Your return on the Yield App depends on which cryptocurrency you decide to earn interest on. The platform currently supports six different coins, which you can earn interest from. Here are the current rates for all six currencies:
| BTC | UP TO 5% |
| DAI | UP TO 10% |
| ETH | UP TO 5.5% |
| USDC | UP TO 10% |
| USDT | UP TO 10% |
| TUSD | UP TO 10% |
| BNB | UP TO 6% |
Yield App does have a rewards scheme with bronze, silver, gold, and diamond tiers. At the bronze level (formerly tier 1 before the V2 update), users can earn between 2.5% and 6% depending on which coin they are earning on.
Once users have worked their way up to the diamond tier, they can earn between 5% and 10% per year.
See below the requirements for each tier and the returns users can earn.
| Tier YLD staked or locked | Reward on Bitcoin |
|---|---|
| 0 - 999 | 2.5% |
| 1,000 - 9,999 | 3% |
| 10,000 - 19,999 | 3.5% |
| 20,000+ | 7% |
Explore our guide to Bitcoin Lending to earn more interest on your bitcoin.
Is Yield App Safe?
The most significant risk in the crypto space is that a platform will initiate a ‘rug pull,’ and the people behind the platform will run away with all of its investors’ funds.
To minimize the risk of this, you should find out as much information as you can about the company and who is behind it.
Who leads the team?
Yield App was founded in 2020 by Tim Frost, who has previously been involved in many successful fintech and blockchain companies, including EQIBank, and Wirex.
The Yield App is funded by 11 investors and has previously raised US$4.2 million during its funding rounds.
Where is the YIELD App based?
The Yield App is based in Seychelles under Yield App LIMITED, but it has a provider of virtual currency license in Estonia within the European Union.
There is no official information about the company’s headquarters on its website, which increases the risk significantly.
In some of the interviews and on LinkedIn, you will learn that the CEO and their core team are based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Are there any suspicious terms and conditions?
When investing in crypto earning platforms, it is important not to blindly agree to the terms and conditions, as often you might find some sneaky terms.
Lending Risk
If you lend your assets to Yield App through the “earn” feature, there is no guarantee you will get all of your investment back, and you may lose some of your digital assets.
Ownership of assets
You are the sole owner of all digital assets in your wallet until you lend them to the Yield App using the “earn” function.
Potential Red Flags
- Yield App may revise the terms and conditions without prior notice.
- Yield App may lend your assets to third-parties
Our Opinion On Yield App
Yield App is a suitable option for retail crypto holders who want to receive a stable return on their holdings. The platform's virtual currency provider license from Estonia increases its trustworthiness. This license covers the custody services offered by the platform.
The platform also has its own token (YLD), which allows users to move up the tier structure and earn higher interest rates on their digital assets and additional perks.
Yield App charges for withdrawals to external wallets, but aside from this, there are no other fees for using the platform. Except if you are a diamond tier customer, which gives you access to three free monthly withdrawals.
Yield App has an informative blog that addresses common concerns, such as how to spot a rug pull, and holds regular AMA sessions with the Founder and CEO and other lead employees such as the CMO and CIO.
Unfortunately, the platform is not suitable for U.S.-based investors or investors from 42 other countries.
This is positive, as the company doesn’t expose itself to regulatory risks from U.S. regulators.
Overall, the platform simplifies DeFi for users and offers some of the highest rates in the industry, based on the asset you receive your interest in.
Some users praise the quality of Yield App's telegram channel, which is certainly something that you can use to decide whether to use this platform or not.
While the platform doesn’t sell any “misleading” information as some of the competitors, there is room for improvement in the communication of the corporate’s legal structure as this increases your risk significantly.
We have conducted an exclusive interview with the CEO at Yield App as part of our due diligence process. Members of our project can get exclusive insights into the platform's risk management strategies in our exclusive interview.
Usability
Yield App currently supports seven digital assets, including its token. Here you can see the coins and cryptos supported by the platform.
Crypto Interest Account
Earn interest on BTC, DAI, ETH, USDC, TUSD, and YLD.
The YLD token (YIELD token) allows users to maximize profits by reaching Diamond Tier. This requires you to stake or lock 20,000 YLD on the platform.
Silver Tier users and above can lock YLD tokens for 12 months and receive 12% annual interest. If users stake YLD (meaning they retain instant access to their holdings at any time) they can earn up to 6%.
Depending on your tier level, you can earn up to 10% annually on your digital assets once you reach the diamond tier.
The benefit of this token is that you can instantly stake and unstake your YLD and lock all or only a portion of your tokens. You can also convert and transfer between YLD and the other supported assets within the Yield App platform.
The YLD token is available on nine crypto exchanges, including Bittrex and Quickswap.
Fiat
Yield App has launched direct fiat on- and off-ramps for EUR and GBP via SEPA and FPS, using the manual or Direct Connect methods.
It has also partnered with reputable payment service providers Volt and Fiat Republic to make the on-ramping process smoother. With Yield App, you can now get your own virtual International Bank Account Number (IBAN), allowing you to transfer your fiat directly to Yield App.
This solution allows you to seamlessly transfer EUR and GBP from your bank account to Yield App, and withdraw it back into the fiat ecosystem.
There are no deposit fees, but Yield App charges withdrawal fees for taking fiat back out into your traditional bank account.
The minimum deposit amount is only 1EUR/GBP, and the withdrawal fee is 0.1%, with a minimum fee of 15 EUR/GBP. Once transferred, you can swap up to $100k / day with all the listed crypto assets on its platform.
Exchange/Swaps
Users can buy and/or trade the YLD token on nine different platforms. These platforms are 1inch, AscendEX, Bithumb Global, Bittrex Global, Gate.io, KuCoin, SushiSwap, QuickSwap, and Uniswap.
How Fast Can You Withdraw Your Investments?
You can request a withdrawal at any time on the Yield App. If a user wants to withdraw digital assets from a Flexible portfolio into their wallet, the platform aims to be able to perform this immediately.
However, if the user wants to withdraw funds to a third-party wallet, the platform aims to perform this within 72 hours. However, the terms and conditions state that this process can sometimes take up to 30 days.
Here are the fees charged by Yield App for withdrawals to external wallets:
| Asset / Network | Withdrawal fee | Minimum amount |
|---|---|---|
| BTC | 0.0007 BTC | 0.0008 BTC |
| ETH (ERC-20) | 0.01 ETH | 0.03 ETH |
| USDC/USDT/DAI (ERC-20) | $10 | $100 |
| YLD (ERC-20) | 20 YLD | 100 YLD |
| BNB / Binance Smart Chain (BEP20) | 0.005 BNB | 0.01 BNB |
Support
The Yield App has a live chat option on the website.
There is a help center of FAQs; however, if you cannot find the answer to your question, you will need to contact support@yield.app.
When we contacted the support team, they responded within a few hours. However, the response time on the chat is almost instantaneous.
There is also a Yield App YouTube channel with regular AMA sessions.
