YiFi on The DeFi Drop: Building Honest Yield Infrastructure from the Data Layer Up

Guest: Mihail Arhipov, Head of Product, YiFi

Host: Edward Ward, Portals.fi

Building Honest Yield Infrastructure: Why the Data Layer Comes First

In this episode of The DeFi Drop, Edward Ward speaks with Mihail Arhipov, Head of Product at YiFi, a modular yield discovery and execution stack currently in pre-launch.

The conversation covers why honest data primitives are the foundation of everything, how Portals.fi sits inside YiFi's stack, what wallets consistently get wrong about yield, and what the next wave of DeFi might actually look like.

From Trading Infrastructure to Yield Discovery

Mihail's background is in market infrastructure and trading. Before YiFi, he spent four years building trading and liquidity systems across both centralized and decentralized markets: trading algorithms, routing systems, and liquidity tooling.

He worked in environments where data quality was critical and any inconsistency could completely distort decision-making.

The founding insight behind YiFi came from observing that same problem emerge in DeFi. Accessing sophisticated yield strategies, fixed income structures, multi-step routes, restaking, and leverage loops still requires users to manually navigate protocols, manage bridges and swaps, track positions, and make their own risk assumptions.

The real gap was the absence of a proper infrastructure layer between complex yield mechanics and mainstream users.

"The founding insight was simple. DeFi still lacks a proper infrastructure layer between complex yield mechanics and mainstream users. We decided to build the universal language, built on top of pre-processed financial and on-chain data primitives, so any wallet or consumer app can easily access the metrics a beginner or a pro DeFi user looks at when making an investment decision."

Portals.fi in the YiFi Stack: Execution Abstraction That Actually Works

Edward Ward declared an interest upfront: Portals.fi is integrated into the YiFi stack, Mihail explained why the integration made sense.

Many attractive DeFi strategies are operationally complex for ordinary users. Even a relatively simple fixed income strategy can require swapping assets, minting LSTs, signing multiple approvals, bridging, and wrapping tokens.

Portals Warpdrive packages all of that into a single non-custodial transaction. From the user's perspective, they click deposit, submit one transaction, and it is done.

YiFi also uses the Portals API for yield discovery and draws on the same normalised entity model, chains, tokens, markets, and strategies, that underpins the Portals data layer.

Mihail also mentioned that he had looked at the Portals Foresight simulation API two days before recording and expects to integrate it for transaction previews, giving users a read on expected outcomes before they sign.

Why the Data Layer Comes Before the Front End

YiFi originally planned to launch in the conventional way: a front end with strategy cards, APYs, and deposit buttons. But the deeper they went into the research, the clearer it became that fragmented data was the core problem.

One protocol shares market data via API. Another exposes the same data through RPC calls or subgraphs. Some include incentives in their APY, some do not. One reports APR, another APY.

The result is that the same strategy can display completely different numbers on two different platforms, neither of which is transparently wrong.

"If the APY is wrong, the position value is wrong, the performance attribution is wrong, then everything is wrong. You cannot pretend to be a yield aggregator if your data is missing or incorrect."

Mihail gave a concrete example from his own research: the historical APY for an Ethena strategy was fluctuating around 2 to 3% on one aggregator, and spiking to 7 to 10% on another, with no visible explanation for the difference.

This is the problem YiFi's Position Service and on-chain data integrity layer are designed to solve.

Risk Assessment: Why Audits Are Not Enough

YiFi's risk model is built around protocol, token, and network-level metrics rather than smart contract auditing. The Resolv incident is instructive here.

The attack began with the attacker compromising keys, which falls outside the scope of a typical audit. More notably, Steakhouse Financial, Resolv's risk manager, had published a public risk surface flagging an off-chain dependency concern five days before the hack.

They did not predict the exact vector, but the risk materialised within a week of the warning.

"One of the biggest misconceptions in DeFi is that audits equal safe. As a yield aggregator evaluating risk, you have to look at multiple sources: liquidity, dependency concentration, TVL inflows and outflows, the number of wallets participating, capital in and out."

Mihail was transparent that YiFi has not solved this either and is still actively iterating its risk model.

He pointed to L2Beat and Vaultsfyi as teams doing interesting work in the same space, approaching risk from the pool, protocol, and chain level, including participant wallet counts as a signal.

What Wallets Get Wrong About Yield

Mihail tested more than 20 wallets personally and found the same problems appearing repeatedly.

Sometimes the earn section is missing from the menu entirely. Sometimes the user is redirected to an external app, breaking the UX and forcing them to reconnect their wallet. Sometimes mobile and desktop versions differ in functionality. Position tracking is often incomplete or absent.

The deeper issue is that wallets underestimate two things: the complexity of DeFi yield underneath, and what retail users actually expect.

A user on a centralized exchange can see their estimated future earnings, track their current balance and historical performance, and understand what product they are in without needing to understand the infrastructure.

Move that same user to self-custody DeFi and they encounter multiple transactions to sign, unfamiliar token names, and no coherent picture of what they own or why.

"Most wallets underestimate that yield infrastructure is not just about integrating protocols. Users want to understand what they deposited, what they received, why, what they are earning, and what risks are underneath."

What YiFi Adds on Top of Portals

With Portals handling execution and yield discovery data, what does YiFi add? Mihail's answer: context around the yield itself. The displayed APY on a lending strategy is rarely sufficient.

You also need to know how stable the borrow demand is, how sensitive rates are to utilisation, and whether the yield is likely to remain sustainable.

For a structured vault showing 15% APY, you need to know whether that figure is a spike caused by recent outflows rather than a reliable baseline.

For a looping strategy, the key question is not the displayed APY but the effective leveraged yield, how liquidation risk evolves, and how dependent the strategy is on borrow conditions remaining stable.

Each strategy in YiFi has its own yield composition: how yield is generated differs entirely between an LST strategy and a leveraged lending loop, and the platform is designed to surface that distinction clearly.

Institutions Are Coming and YiFi Is Planning for It

The Galaxy Digital and SharpLink announcement of a $125 million on-chain yield fund came up during the conversation as a signal of where capital is heading.

Mihail confirmed that YiFi is already seeing more institutional interest and that institutions are on the roadmap. Traditional finance already understands lending markets, fixed income, carry and basis trades, and market-neutral products.

DeFi makes those mechanics accessible globally and programmable.

For institutions, YiFi plans to expand strategy metadata, position analytics, and its performance history layer to position itself as a yield intelligence platform for on-chain capital allocators.

TVL Prediction: $90 to $95 Billion by 21 June 2026

With DeFi TVL at $83 billion at time of recording (per DeFi Llama), Mihail's prediction for 21 June 2026 is $90 to $95 billion.

His reasoning: DeFi TVL was $150 billion in October 2025 and the market is not currently in a phase where capital flows blindly into yield. He is watching the RWA narrative closely, noting that Ondo Finance's TVL has nearly doubled since October to almost $4 billion.

His expectation is that the next DeFi wave will look less like speculative farming and more like real on-chain capital markets developing over time.

"I really hope the hacks slow down. Most of them are now publicly investigated, so we know the attack surfaces. I believe that for every attacker, there will be new ways to defend against it."

About YiFi

YiFi is a modular yield discovery and execution stack currently in pre-launch. Built API-first and targeting wallets and dApps, YiFi provides the data integrity, risk assessment, and execution infrastructure that makes sophisticated on-chain yield accessible to mainstream users. Visit yifi.io.

About Portals.fi

Portals.fi is the DeFi Super App, a one-click gateway to the entire on-chain economy. Powered by real-time data and seamless execution, Portals.fi connects traders to over 20 million assets, thousands of protocols, and every major blockchain.

Portals also hosts The DeFi Drop, a podcast featuring conversations with leading builders across DeFi.