My wife is vegetarian and she often says that it makes life easier by reducing the amount of choices you have when ordering in a restaurant.

Looking at the whole DeFi, HIVE & LEO scenes and trying to decide what to do makes me understand her perspective.

**TOO MANY choices!**

I've been looking into DeFi, Uniswap and wrapped tokens like wHIVE and wLEO trying to decide whether I should dip my toe in the water.

In particular should I **stake** my LEO and/or HIVE and earn from curation and posting, or **wrap** it and put it on Uniswap to earn as a Liquidity Provider.
I'm going to compare the returns available.

Being a Liquidity Provider on a platform like Uniswap means you also have to stake an equivalent value of ETH so the returns available for ETH on centralised DeFi platforms like Crypto.com and Blockfi.com also need to be compared.

Then there are the costs of being a Liquidity Provider that need to be taken into account:
- gas fees and 
- impermanent loss


http://myhealthydish.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/steak-wrap.jpg


## Steak & Chips (interest)

### Staking LEO & HIVE

According the the LEO FAQ:
> A typical return on LEO curation is something in the ballpark of 15-40% APY on the LEO you stake in your Hive account (depending on how good you are at curating content).

I haven't verified this but it seems pretty reasonable given my experience of curating on Hive. These are pretty impressive returns.

Lets be conservative and say you can get 20% APY on LEO and HIVE from curation.

### Earning interest on ETH

[Crypto.com](https://crypto.com/app/31xxxx0co1) offers between 2.5% and 5.5% simple interest on Ethereum deposits depending on term (at call, 1 month or 3 month) and whether or not you stake 10,000 CRO (about $1500) which will also get you a 3% cashback credit card with no fees.
If you sign up and stake 1000 CRO (~$150) we both get a $50 bonus.

[Blockfi](https://blockfi.com/?ref=8251f426) offers 4.5% compound interest on ETH deposits at call.
If you signup and deposit $100 worth of crypto we both get a $10 bonus.

So lets use 4.5% as the return you can get on ETH if you are prepared to spend 15 minutes to signup and do KYC.

Total return on ETH/LEO or ETH/HIVE from staking and depositing the ETH on an interest bearing platform.

If we add the 20% from staking and curation of LEO or HIVE to the 4.5% for ETH, we get and average annual return of 12.25%.

## Wraps & Sushi(swap)

While its still early days on returns for Liquidity Providers, I have seen reports of gross returns in the high teen and even over 20%.

In [this post and comments](https://leofinance.io/hive-167922/@jrcornel/curious-how-much-you-ve-made-as-a-lp-for-wleo-on-uniswap) @jrcornel @nealmcspadden have reported returns of 6-7% on their first few days as wLEO liquidity providers on Uniswap.

There are also more exotic DeFi options such as [SushiSwap](https://sushiswapclassic.org/), which I know nothing about but fitted with the food theme. :-)

Liquidity Provider returns are going to vary widely and it may be that only the higher end returns are being reported (because when your investment is not doing so well you don't usually boast).

But it is important to remember that gas fees will eat away at that return.

Also impermanent loss (aka divergence loss) can also cause capital losses. This is explained in [this post](https://leofinance.io/hive-167922/@khaleelkazi/understanding-uniswap-order-books-vs-automated-market-making).
Frankly it does my head in trying to understand it, but it is something that needs to be considered.

So lets say that gas fees cost you 2% of your return - it may be more it your investment amount is small.

This means you need to get over 14.25% return from wrapping your LEO & Hive to become a Liquidity Provider to match what is available by HIVE / LEO staking and curation combined with interest available on ETH.

Personally, I'm not sure its worth the effort and the risk, but incentives can change the equation.
If you don't have time to manually curate you can still earn decent returns from following quality curation trails, so both options can be fairly passive.

If you are really looking for a higher returns [Crypto.com](https://crypto.com/app/31xxxx0co1) is offering 20% interest on CRO staked for 6 months on its Exchange and 18% for 3 month staking on its App.
There is obviously potential price volatility for CRO but there also is with LEO, HIVE and ETH.

Let me know your experiences and thoughts about what is the best way to go.


***None of this is investment or culinary advice.***




Posted Using [LeoFinance <sup>Beta</sup>](https://leofinance.io/hive-167922/@apshamilton/steak-stake-or-wrap-how-best-to-eat-your-leo-hive-and-eth)