Most yield systems, both in TradFi and DeFi, force you to bet against yourself.

Lock into long-term bonds or CDs and eat the early withdrawal penalty when rates move against you, or a better opportunity arises. Stake your assets in a DeFi protocol for 90 days, six months, or a year, hoping the emissions don’t taper, the token you’re paid in doesn’t crater, and nothing better comes along while your capital sits frozen.

Immobility is the common, problematic line connecting these dots.

The world moves on. Opportunities emerge. But your capital remains locked up, leaving you unable to respond to or capitalize on such opportunities. We designed Seasons to solve this conundrum.

Hold 10,000+ $SEAS and yield starts flowing directly into your wallet as a diversified mix of liquid, alternative assets. Not in $SEAS.

You’re free to use these assets however you like, whenever you like. Swap them for stablecoins. Redeploy them into another protocol. Let them ride.

The point is, you retain full control over the assets distributed to you, while your principal — the 10K+ $SEAS holding that qualifies you as a node — remains intact, continuously generating more yield in any market condition.

This is a fundamentally different relationship with yield than most systems offer, traditional or otherwise. In conventional models, accessing your yield means breaking the position. Cash out a bond early, and you realize a loss. Break a CD, and you forfeit interest. Exit a DeFi lock-up, and you sacrifice future distributions. The principal and the yield are tangled together, and the system penalizes you for wanting liquidity.

With Seasons, there’s nothing to untangle. You derive independent benefits from both your $SEAS holdings and your yield-payout assets, and there are no enforced, inflexible lock-ups or liquidity penalties on either.

This way, you can respond to markets and capitalize on exciting opportunities in real time, without touching your principal, exiting your position, or giving up the yield source entirely.

In TradFi’s context, Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse in 2023 was, at its core, a lock-up failure. As bond yields climbed, the bank’s long-term bond holdings led to massive unrealized losses, and seeking liquidity meant crystallizing a portion of this gaping hole. And when the news got out, depositors ran on the bank, eventually killing it. Duration was the weapon. Liquidity pulled the trigger.

Likewise, when UK-30 Gilt yields spiked by 160+ basis points over three days that year, pension funds with 3:1 leveraged positions and long-term bond holdings faced imminent insolvency, prompting an emergency Bank of England intervention.

This pattern repeated itself in DeFi, albeit with different names.

Convex’s boosted APYs went from 10–40% down to below 1% as CVX emissions tapered, a 91% decline over roughly 4 years. Aave’s organic lending rates collapsed by more than 64%, to 1.14%, as borrowing demand evaporated during the 2022 bear market. Anchor’s 20% APY on UST, funded largely by Terra Foundation subsidies, ended in a $60 billion death spiral.

All of these cases signal how capital committed to rigid, unsustainable structures gets crushed when conditions change. And whether you read Heraclitus or just spend a lot of time on Crypto Twitter, you’ll know that conditions always change.

Check out our State of Yield 2026 report for an in-depth analysis of how these factors played out, causing chronic yield compression.

There’s a subtle, yet crucial, difference between compounding and captivity.

Long-term instruments, whether in TradFi or DeFi, often pitch lock-ups as “compound your rewards automatically.” But what they really describe is the removal of your ability to choose. Your yield gets recycled back into the same position, whether or not that position still makes sense.

Compounding, however, is an option with Seasons, not a constraint. As a node, you can use your yield-payout assets to buy more $SEAS. This increases your node weight, so you earn more yield, which is compounding. You can, nevertheless, also choose to do something else with your yield assets — say, diversify them elsewhere or simply hold.

Our mechanism doesn’t dictate your strategy. You do, while always being in full control of your assets (they never leave your wallet, unless you move them). And this matters more than it may appear on the surface.

In a world where decisions made in closed-door policy meetings can reshape yield curves overnight, and crypto narratives shift drastically from one week to the next, the ability to adapt your strategy without dismantling your yield position is a genuine edge.

$SEAS is thus a productive asset that generates other assets, and those assets flow freely into whatever you decide is the best, most productive use for them.

The deeper problem with lock-up models isn’t merely the yield decay or the emission dependency. It’s that they reduce your degrees of freedom in an environment where adaptability is everything.

That’s why we designed Seasons’ distribution mechanism around a different principle: yield should expand what you can do, not limit it. More assets, more options, more flexibility. Without asking you to surrender control of your principal or your decision-making power.

Because the systems that survive aren’t necessarily those that offer the highest APYs in week one. They’re the ones whose core mechanics make sense and work reliably even in week fifty or five hundred, regardless of short-term fluctuations and changing market conditions.

Freedom drives prosperity. Freedom is what we deliver.

Seize your opportunities, $SEAS the yield.

Join us in transforming global yields with Yield 3.0.

General Resources: 🌐 Website | ✳️ LinkTree | ⚫ Beacons | 📃 Docs

Connect with the Seasons community: X (Twitter) | Telegram | Youtube | LinkedIn | Substack | Medium | Paragraph

Originally published: https://medium.com/seasons-blog/your-yield-your-rules-breaking-the-lock-up-trap-7d613d3eb813

Most yield systems, both in TradFi and DeFi, force you to bet against yourself.

Lock into long-term bonds or CDs and eat the early withdrawal penalty when rates move against you, or a better opportunity arises. Stake your assets in a DeFi protocol for 90 days, six months, or a year, hoping the emissions don’t taper, the token you’re paid in doesn’t crater, and nothing better comes along while your capital sits frozen.

Immobility is the common, problematic line connecting these dots.

The world moves on. Opportunities emerge. But your capital remains locked up, leaving you unable to respond to or capitalize on such opportunities. We designed Seasons to solve this conundrum.

Hold 10,000+ $SEAS and yield starts flowing directly into your wallet as a diversified mix of liquid, alternative assets. Not in $SEAS.

You’re free to use these assets however you like, whenever you like. Swap them for stablecoins. Redeploy them into another protocol. Let them ride.

The point is, you retain full control over the assets distributed to you, while your principal — the 10K+ $SEAS holding that qualifies you as a node — remains intact, continuously generating more yield in any market condition.

This is a fundamentally different relationship with yield than most systems offer, traditional or otherwise. In conventional models, accessing your yield means breaking the position. Cash out a bond early, and you realize a loss. Break a CD, and you forfeit interest. Exit a DeFi lock-up, and you sacrifice future distributions. The principal and the yield are tangled together, and the system penalizes you for wanting liquidity.

With Seasons, there’s nothing to untangle. You derive independent benefits from both your $SEAS holdings and your yield-payout assets, and there are no enforced, inflexible lock-ups or liquidity penalties on either.

This way, you can respond to markets and capitalize on exciting opportunities in real time, without touching your principal, exiting your position, or giving up the yield source entirely.

In TradFi’s context, Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse in 2023 was, at its core, a lock-up failure. As bond yields climbed, the bank’s long-term bond holdings led to massive unrealized losses, and seeking liquidity meant crystallizing a portion of this gaping hole. And when the news got out, depositors ran on the bank, eventually killing it. Duration was the weapon. Liquidity pulled the trigger.

Likewise, when UK-30 Gilt yields spiked by 160+ basis points over three days that year, pension funds with 3:1 leveraged positions and long-term bond holdings faced imminent insolvency, prompting an emergency Bank of England intervention.

This pattern repeated itself in DeFi, albeit with different names.

Convex’s boosted APYs went from 10–40% down to below 1% as CVX emissions tapered, a 91% decline over roughly 4 years. Aave’s organic lending rates collapsed by more than 64%, to 1.14%, as borrowing demand evaporated during the 2022 bear market. Anchor’s 20% APY on UST, funded largely by Terra Foundation subsidies, ended in a $60 billion death spiral.

All of these cases signal how capital committed to rigid, unsustainable structures gets crushed when conditions change. And whether you read Heraclitus or just spend a lot of time on Crypto Twitter, you’ll know that conditions always change.

Check out our State of Yield 2026 report for an in-depth analysis of how these factors played out, causing chronic yield compression.

There’s a subtle, yet crucial, difference between compounding and captivity.

Long-term instruments, whether in TradFi or DeFi, often pitch lock-ups as “compound your rewards automatically.” But what they really describe is the removal of your ability to choose. Your yield gets recycled back into the same position, whether or not that position still makes sense.

Compounding, however, is an option with Seasons, not a constraint. As a node, you can use your yield-payout assets to buy more $SEAS. This increases your node weight, so you earn more yield, which is compounding. You can, nevertheless, also choose to do something else with your yield assets — say, diversify them elsewhere or simply hold.

Our mechanism doesn’t dictate your strategy. You do, while always being in full control of your assets (they never leave your wallet, unless you move them). And this matters more than it may appear on the surface.

In a world where decisions made in closed-door policy meetings can reshape yield curves overnight, and crypto narratives shift drastically from one week to the next, the ability to adapt your strategy without dismantling your yield position is a genuine edge.

$SEAS is thus a productive asset that generates other assets, and those assets flow freely into whatever you decide is the best, most productive use for them.

The deeper problem with lock-up models isn’t merely the yield decay or the emission dependency. It’s that they reduce your degrees of freedom in an environment where adaptability is everything.

That’s why we designed Seasons’ distribution mechanism around a different principle: yield should expand what you can do, not limit it. More assets, more options, more flexibility. Without asking you to surrender control of your principal or your decision-making power.

Because the systems that survive aren’t necessarily those that offer the highest APYs in week one. They’re the ones whose core mechanics make sense and work reliably even in week fifty or five hundred, regardless of short-term fluctuations and changing market conditions.

Freedom drives prosperity. Freedom is what we deliver.

Seize your opportunities, $SEAS the yield.

Join us in transforming global yields with Yield 3.0.

General Resources: 🌐 Website | ✳️ LinkTree | ⚫ Beacons | 📃 Docs

Connect with the Seasons community: X (Twitter) | Telegram | Youtube | LinkedIn | Substack | Medium | Paragraph

Originally published: https://medium.com/seasons-blog/your-yield-your-rules-breaking-the-lock-up-trap-7d613d3eb813