If you've landed on a list of Starknet staking options and found yourself staring at a column of percentages wondering which one to trust, you're in exactly the right place — and asking exactly the right question.
What the Numbers Mean
Two figures appear on almost every staking comparison: APY and TVL.
APY (Annual Percentage Yield) is the return you'd earn over a year if everything stayed the same — the token price, the reward rate, the pool size. That last part matters: nothing stays the same. A high APY quoted today can fall sharply within weeks if more people join the pool, if reward emissions are cut, or if the underlying token drops in price. APY is a snapshot, not a promise.
TVL (Total Value Locked) is simply how much crypto is sitting in a given pool or protocol. A larger TVL means more people have used it, which usually means more eyes on the code and a longer track record. The largest pool currently listed on Starknet is endur's STRK liquid staking option — liquid staking meaning you stake your tokens and receive a tradeable receipt token in return, rather than locking them up with no flexibility — sitting at a TVL of $3.65M and an APY of 6.8%. That's a relatively modest pool size by DeFi standards, which is worth keeping in mind when weighing how battle-tested it really is.
Why Comparing Beats Chasing
The instinct when you see a list of yields is to scroll straight to the top and pick the biggest number. That's understandable — but it's also how people get caught out. In DeFi (Decentralized Finance, where protocols run on code rather than banks), a dramatically higher APY almost always reflects dramatically higher risk: thinner liquidity, newer and less-audited smart contracts, or reward tokens that may lose value faster than they accumulate.
The more useful habit is to look across the full picture — APY alongside TVL, the asset type, and how long the protocol has been running. The comparison table lets you sort and filter Starknet pools side by side, which makes those trade-offs visible in one place.
Before going further, the honest question to sit with is: do you understand where this yield is actually coming from? If the answer is unclear, that's a signal to keep reading before doing anything else — not a reason to avoid the space entirely.