We all love hodling our cryptos, and perpetually asking ourselves wen moon, wen lambo. Thing is, once you’re there and you could buy that lambo, you’re probably not going to do it. You don’t want to part with your precious crypto after years of hodling, stomaching the volatility and enduring those gut-wrenching drawdowns. Crypto is fixed supply, and once you’ve spent some, it’s difficult to catch up again. That’s the beauty — and curse — of hard money, forever rising in value against depreciating fiat.

But not all is lost. You can live a little. DeFi has opened the doors to earning yield on crypto. You don’t just get richer in fiat terms as central banks’ printing presses are rattling away, you grow your pile of crypto without having to put new capital in. Whatever your view on which crypto is going to perform best in the long-term, accumulating more of it can’t be a bad thing.

So far, so good. But ‘how yield?’ you may ask. Anyone who’s ventured into DeFi knows the pain. You added some liquidity to a Uniswap pool ages ago but there’s a high rate available with that new yield farming opportunity your mate told you about last night. You get out your Ledger — which drawer did I put it in again? — and open Metamask to remove your liquidity. Doesn’t work. Update firmware on the Ledger. Still doesn’t work. Try another browser. Still not. Update your browser, check Metamask settings, check Ledger settings. Blind signing wasn’t enabled. Great. Must have been reset by the firmware update. You tell yourself to remember that for the next update, but there is that feeling creeping in that that’s exactly what you did last time. Two hours of your Saturday morning are gone, but at least you got your assets out of Uniswap, swapped, and transferred to the lending pool. $437.02 in transaction fees, but you kind of expected that. But hold on, there’s another $2k missing. Probably impermanent loss. Never really got your head around IL, and anyway, it’s too late now. Could have gotten even worse had the assets stayed in the pool. It’s past midday, but at least you are earning that juicy rate now.

As we all know, it doesn’t stop there. You lie in bed at night, wondering whether it was wise to put 20% of your portfolio into a DeFi protocol that you hadn’t heard of until yesterday. You get up to do some research. Raised some money from a token sale. The team do have Twitter accounts, but they are pseudonymous. Active community on Discord and TG. Audited smart contracts. The occasional troll warning of a rugpull. The usual really. Looks solid enough. Your mate isn’t exactly an expert, but he bought some SHIB early on. Gotta take some risk to make returns you think to yourself. Pleased with this insight you go back to bed. Another three hours gone, but it was worth it. Especially the hour in the middle you got sidetracked checking out rare pepe NFTs. Brilliant.

The next morning you want to check how much interest you’ve earned so far, and of course it’s all gone. You mentally kick yourself in the head. Earning yield seemed like the solution to your crypto investment woes, but for now it’s back to speculating on shitcoins to make up for the loss.

You have been there, we have been there. And that’s why we are launching the Akiu DAO. Instead of being a lone ranger in the wild west that is DeFi, you can join the Akiu community and make it a team effort. The DAO can vote on a suite of smart contracts that auto-deploy capital in the best yield opportunities available at any given time. This has a number of advantages:

If you are concerned Akiu takes the fun out of crypto investing and DeFi, don’t be. There’ll be a set of parameters to fine-tune your investment preferences, and analysis tools and a dashboard to monitor your portfolio. You can engage with the community on Discord, Twitter, and Telegram, post memes, and keep the banter flowing. As a token holder you can propose and vote on integrations with new yield opportunities. There’ll be liquidity mining, staking, airdrops on all the other goodies that make DeFi fun. And best of all, there will be fungible LP tokens for assets deposited in Akiu which you can use as collateral elsewhere.