Knowla / Learn / Pools guide / Lesson 2
Lesson 2 of 7
Fee APR and reward APR
Why the same headline yield can be durable or fragile, and what the green and amber bar shows.
The headline number on a pool is its APR: the yield you would earn over a year if today's rate held. It is a snapshot of one moment, not a promise, and it is made of two parts that behave very differently.
The two parts
- Fee APR comes from trading. Traders pay the pool, so the yield follows trading volume against the capital in the pool. It exists only while people trade.
- Reward APR comes from incentives. A project pays out its own token to LPs. It lasts as long as the programme does, and it is worth whatever that token fetches when you sell it.
Why the split matters
Trading fees tend to last for as long as there is demand to swap those two tokens. Emissions can be cut, ended, or paid in a token that falls. A 60% APR that is mostly rewards is a much weaker claim than a 12% APR that is mostly fees.
How Knowla shows it
Every row has a two-colour bar: green for fee APR, amber for reward APR. Knowla calls a pool Fee-backed when fee APR is at least 60% of the total, and Reward-heavy when the total is above 80% and more than 70% of it is rewards. Both are rules of thumb, and both are listed on the methodology page.
See it on the data.
Open the Pools table