Best Yield Aggregators 2026: Compared by Chain and TVL

Short answer: the best yield aggregator depends on the chain your assets live on. On Ethereum and its layer 2s, the largest names by TVL are Convex (Curve boosting), CIAN Yield Layer, Yearn and Stake DAO, with Beefy covering the most chains. On Avalanche, Yield Yak leads. On Sui, look at AlphaFi, Volo and Ember vaults and JewelSwap; on MultiversX, JewelSwap is the multi-venue farming option; on Stellar, DeFindex and Whalehub. TVL figures below are from DefiLlama, read on 5 October 2026.

Chasing yield by hand is exhausting. You stake into a farm, watch the rewards trickle in, claim them, swap them, re-add liquidity, and pay gas at every step. Miss a week and your returns quietly stall. Yield aggregators were built to solve this, and in 2026 they remain some of the most useful tools in decentralized finance.

But not all aggregators are the same. Some auto-compound. Some amplify rewards through governance boosts. Some issue liquid-staking tokens so your capital never sits idle. And critically, they live on very different chains, which shapes the fees you pay, the risks you take, and the opportunities you can reach. This guide compares the strongest options chain by chain, honestly, including JewelSwap, the multi-chain option built for MultiversX, Sui, and Radix.

Best yield aggregators in 2026 at a glance

TVL is a measure of how much capital users trust a protocol with, not of how good its returns are. See our explainer on what TVL means before reading too much into the numbers.

Aggregator	Main chains	Approach	TVL (DefiLlama, 5 Oct 2026)
Convex Finance	Ethereum, Fraxtal, Arbitrum, Polygon	Boosted CRV rewards for Curve LPs	$620.4M
CIAN Yield Layer	Ethereum, Mantle, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain and more	Strategy vaults, mostly on Ethereum and Mantle	$316.1M
Yearn Finance	Ethereum, Katana, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum	Multi-strategy ERC-4626 vaults	$205.5M
Stake DAO	Ethereum plus 9 other chains	Liquid lockers and boosted Curve-style vaults	$155.5M
Beefy	41 chains tracked	Auto-compounding vaults	$122.3M
Harvest Finance	Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, zkSync Era	Automated yield strategies	$23.7M
Yield Yak	Avalanche, Arbitrum, Base, Mantle	Auto-compounding farms	$17.4M
DeFindex	Stellar	Stablecoin yield vaults	$19.4M
AlphaFi	Sui	Yield optimizer vaults	$3.4M
JewelSwap	MultiversX, Sui (liquid staking also on Radix)	Auto-compounded, boosted and leveraged farms plus liquid staking	Under $1M
Whalehub	Stellar	AQUA liquid staking with automated voting	Under $1M

DefiLlama classifies some of these differently: Convex and Stake DAO are listed as "Yield", JewelSwap as liquid staking and leveraged farming. We include them because they do the job of an aggregator for their users.

What is a yield aggregator?

A yield aggregator is a protocol that automates the work of earning yield in DeFi. Instead of manually managing farm positions, you deposit your assets into a vault or strategy, and the protocol handles the rest: harvesting rewards, swapping them, and reinvesting them to grow your position over time. Our full explainer, what is a yield aggregator, covers the mechanics in depth.

The core promise is efficiency. By batching actions across many users and executing them on a schedule, an aggregator captures returns that individuals often leave on the table, and it spreads gas and transaction costs across the whole pool rather than making each user pay alone. If you are new to the mechanics underneath, our beginner's guide to yield farming is a good starting point.

Auto-compounding, boosting, and liquid staking

Three features separate a basic farm from a genuine yield optimizer, and they show up again and again in the comparisons below.

Auto-compounding means rewards are periodically harvested and reinvested for you. Because returns compound on returns, a strategy that reinvests daily can meaningfully outperform the same farm claimed by hand once a month, especially after fees. Our glossary entry on auto-compounding shows the math.

Boosting uses a protocol's aggregated governance power to lift the base reward rate. Many farms pay extra emissions to participants who lock a governance token. Aggregators lock these tokens collectively and pass the boosted rate down to every depositor, so you get the enhanced yield without managing a lock yourself.

Liquid staking keeps your capital liquid while it earns. When you deposit, you receive a token that represents your stake and its accruing rewards. You can hold it, trade it, or use it elsewhere in DeFi, and redeem it later for the underlying. Our overview of liquid staking across chains goes deeper on why this matters.

How we compared the best yield aggregators

Rather than rank protocols on a single headline APY, which changes constantly and is easy to game, we looked at what each one actually does: the chains it supports, whether it auto-compounds, whether it boosts rewards, whether it offers liquid staking or leverage, its fees, its security record, and its dated TVL. Yields move week to week; mechanics, coverage and track record are what really distinguish these platforms. We also checked where the yield comes from, because real yield from fees ages better than yield paid in freshly emitted tokens.

JewelSwap: the multi-chain option for MultiversX, Sui, and Radix

Most aggregators are anchored to a single ecosystem, usually an EVM chain. JewelSwap takes a different path by operating across three fast, low-fee, non-EVM networks: MultiversX, Sui, and Radix. That reach is the whole point, because it lets one interface pull yield from ecosystems that rarely appear on the same dashboard.

JewelSwap combines several strategies under one roof. Its farms run on MultiversX and Sui and include optimized yield farming with auto-compounding, boosted farming through veASH positions, and leveraged yield farming for users who want to amplify exposure. On the staking side, it runs dual-token liquid staking on all three chains (JWLEGLD, JWLSUI and JWLXRD), so the capital you stake stays productive and usable rather than locked away. Each liquid staking token is designed to maintain 1:1 backing; where protocol-owned liquidity is minted, the extra belongs to the protocol's liquidity, not to user claims.

The multi-chain design is not a gimmick. MultiversX, Sui, and Radix each bring fast finality and low transaction costs, which is precisely what auto-compounding needs to work well: frequent harvests only pay off when the fees to execute them stay small.

Farms across leading MultiversX and Sui venues

On MultiversX, JewelSwap plugs into the core DeFi venues, with farms sourcing yield from AshSwap, OneDex, Hatom, and xExchange. On Sui, it taps Cetus, Turbos, and Scallop. This is the aggregator's job done well: instead of hopping between half a dozen apps and manually compounding each one, you access these opportunities through a single interface that harvests and reinvests for you. For the wider ecosystems, see our roundups of DeFi protocols on MultiversX and DeFi platforms on Sui.

Boosted and leveraged yield, explained

The boosted farming layer uses veASH, the vote-escrowed form of AshSwap's token, to lift reward rates on eligible pools. Because JewelSwap manages the vote-escrow position at the protocol level, depositors receive the enhanced rate without locking tokens themselves.

Leverage goes a step further, borrowing to increase the size of your farm and, with it, both potential rewards and risk. It is a powerful tool that deserves respect; our beginner's guide to leveraged yield farming walks through how it works and where the liquidation risks sit, and leveraged farming with Scallop on Sui covers the Sui side. Note that JewelSwap's MultiversX money-market supply and borrowing are paused at the time of writing, so check what is open in the app before planning a leveraged position there. If you want to see the Sui side specifically, our write-up on JewelSwap on Sui covers liquid staking, farming, and NFT lending in one place.

Honest trade-off: operating on three non-EVM chains means JewelSwap is not a place to farm your Ethereum-native assets, and its TVL is small next to the Ethereum giants. Its strength is depth across MultiversX, Sui, and Radix, and that is exactly where it should be on your shortlist. Full mechanics live in the JewelSwap documentation.

Ethereum and layer 2s: Yearn, Convex, CIAN, Stake DAO

Yearn Finance: the Ethereum vault pioneer

Yearn Finance is the protocol that made yield aggregation mainstream. Launched on Ethereum, its vaults popularized the deposit-and-forget model: put an asset in, and Yearn's strategies route it to the best available risk-adjusted yield, auto-compounding along the way. Its current V3 vaults follow the ERC-4626 standard and come in single-strategy and multi-strategy versions. According to Yearn's docs (checked 5 October 2026), fees moved from the old 20% performance plus 2% management model to a dynamic structure, with factory-deployed vaults charging a 10% performance fee, and displayed yields are net of fees.

Yearn's reputation rests on being battle-tested, but no protocol is immune. On 30 November 2025 a legacy yETH stableswap pool was exploited for about $9 million; Rekt's post-mortem notes that Yearn's V2 and V3 vaults were untouched. On 5 October 2026 Yearn held $205.5 million in TVL.

Honest trade-off: Yearn is Ethereum-centric, and mainnet gas can eat into returns on smaller deposits. It is a superb tool for larger positions in a mature ecosystem, less so if you want cheap, cross-chain reach.

Convex: boosted CRV yields on Curve

Convex Finance is the specialist and, at $620.4 million, the largest protocol in the table above by TVL. Built on Ethereum around the Curve ecosystem, it exists to maximize returns for Curve liquidity providers and CRV holders. By pooling users' CRV and locking it collectively, Convex captures Curve's boosted reward rates and passes them along, without asking each user to lock their own tokens for years. Its fee page lists a 17% total fee on CRV revenue, split between cvxCRV stakers, CVX stakers, the treasury and the harvest caller; no fee is taken on other incentive tokens.

Honest trade-off: Convex is narrow by design. Outside of Curve and CRV, it has little to offer, and it inherits Ethereum's gas costs and the specific risks of the Curve ecosystem it is built on.

CIAN Yield Layer and Stake DAO

CIAN Yield Layer runs strategy vaults on Ethereum and Mantle, which held about $216 million and $98 million of its TVL respectively, and with $316.1 million in total it was the largest protocol in DefiLlama's yield aggregator category on 5 October 2026. Stake DAO ($155.5 million) plays in the same boosted-governance space as Convex: its boosted vaults direct its accumulated gauge votes to depositors' LP positions, and its liquid lockers turn locked governance tokens such as CRV into tradable sdTokens. Both are worth a look if you hold ETH or stablecoins and want something more active than a single lending deposit; for stablecoin-specific options see how to earn yield on stablecoins.

Multichain and Avalanche: Beefy, Harvest, Yield Yak

Beefy: multichain auto-compounding at scale

Beefy is the breadth play, with DefiLlama tracking it on 41 chains and $122.3 million in TVL on 5 October 2026. The flow is the familiar one: deposit into a vault, receive a mooToken for your share, and Beefy stakes the tokens on an external platform, reinvests the rewards and repeats automatically. Its documentation notes that funds are never locked, that the performance fee is already built into the displayed APY, and that its zap tool charges 0.05% on deposits. Its BIFI token adds revenue-sharing and governance for those who want to participate more deeply.

Honest trade-off: breadth cuts both ways. With so many vaults across so many chains, the responsibility to assess each underlying farm's risk falls on you. Wide coverage is not the same as curation.

Harvest and Yield Yak

Harvest Finance ($23.7 million) now holds most of its TVL on Base (about $18.3 million), while Yield Yak ($17.4 million) is Avalanche's long-running auto-compounder, with about $12.5 million there and most of the rest on Arbitrum. Both are smaller than the leaders, so check the specific vault's underlying protocol and liquidity before depositing.

Sui: AlphaFi, Volo, Ember and JewelSwap

Sui's aggregator scene is younger and smaller. AlphaFi is the largest dedicated yield optimizer on the chain by DefiLlama's count ($3.4 million). Volo has added vaults alongside its vSUI liquid staking token ($4.5 million in vaults), and Ember runs curated vaults across Sui and other chains ($120.8 million in total). Curated vaults are a different model from auto-compounders; our guide to vault curators explains who is making the decisions. JewelSwap covers the farming side on Sui through Cetus, Turbos and Scallop. If you are staking SUI rather than farming, start with how Sui staking rewards work.

Stellar: Whalehub and DeFindex

If your assets live on Stellar, Whalehub is a focused yield optimizer built on Soroban, Stellar's smart-contract layer, that turns a fiddly manual process into a single deposit.

Here is how it works. You deposit AQUA, the governance token of Aquarius, and receive BLUB, a liquid-staking token, at a 1:1 ratio. Behind the scenes, Whalehub uses its aggregated ICE voting power to vote for Aquarius markets each epoch, harvests the resulting bribes, and routes them back to BLUB holders as compounding rewards. When you want out, BLUB redeems 1:1 for AQUA. It is a clean illustration of the aggregator model: pooled governance power, automated voting, harvested rewards, and a liquid token that keeps your position flexible. To learn more about the network underneath, Stellar's official site is the best reference, and our piece on the gauge and bribe economy explains why vote-directing pays.

DeFindex is the larger Stellar option by TVL ($19.4 million on 5 October 2026), focused on stablecoin yield vaults that wallets and apps can embed.

Honest trade-off: Whalehub is tightly focused on the Aquarius and AQUA ecosystem on Stellar. That focus is what makes it effective, but it also means your exposure and yield are tied to a single market's health.

An adjacent option: Pendle for fixed yield

Pendle is not an auto-compounder, but it often appears in aggregator roundups and holds more capital than any of them ($1.25 billion on 5 October 2026). It splits yield-bearing tokens into principal and yield parts so you can lock in a fixed rate or speculate on future yield. If your goal is predictability rather than automation, it is worth understanding; our yield farming strategies guide shows where it fits.

Comparison by criteria

Stacked against the dimensions that matter, the picture is clearer than any single APY number could make it.

Chains supported: JewelSwap spans MultiversX, Sui, and Radix; Beefy spans dozens of mostly EVM chains; Whalehub and DeFindex are Stellar-only; AlphaFi is Sui-only; Yearn, Convex, CIAN and Stake DAO are Ethereum-focused with layer 2 reach.
Auto-compounding: every protocol here compounds for you. This is now table stakes rather than a differentiator.
Boosting: JewelSwap boosts via veASH, Convex and Stake DAO boost Curve-style rewards, and Whalehub effectively boosts through pooled ICE voting. Yearn and Beefy focus on strategy optimization more than governance boosts.
Liquid staking: JewelSwap offers dual-token liquid staking and Whalehub issues BLUB, so your capital stays liquid while it earns. Most classic vault aggregators keep your position inside the vault instead.
Leverage: JewelSwap and Kai Finance on Sui offer leveraged yield farming natively, a feature most aggregators leave to separate money markets.
Fees: most charge a performance fee on harvested rewards (Yearn factory vaults 10%, Convex 17% of CRV revenue, Beefy built into the displayed APY), so compare net yields, not gross.

Which yield aggregator is best for each chain?

If your assets are on	Start with	Why
Ethereum	Yearn, Convex, CIAN	Deepest liquidity and longest track records; best for larger positions
Ethereum layer 2s and EVM sidechains	Beefy, Harvest	Wide vault coverage and low gas
Avalanche	Yield Yak	The largest Avalanche-native auto-compounder by TVL
Sui	AlphaFi, Volo vaults, JewelSwap	Native vaults plus farms across Cetus, Turbos and Scallop
MultiversX	JewelSwap	Farms across AshSwap, OneDex, Hatom and xExchange in one place
Radix	JewelSwap (JWLXRD)	Liquid staking for XRD
Stellar	DeFindex, Whalehub	Stablecoin vaults or AQUA vote-boosting

Risks to check before you deposit

An aggregator stacks its own smart contracts on top of every protocol it uses, so the risks add up. Before depositing, check:

Audits and history. Who audited the vault, how long it has run, and how the team handled past incidents, as Yearn's yETH episode shows.
The underlying protocols. A vault is only as safe as the DEX, lending market or price oracle beneath it.
Where the yield comes from. Fee revenue is sturdier than token emissions that can be cut overnight.
Impermanent loss. Liquidity-pool vaults carry it; see impermanent loss explained.
Admin keys. Who can upgrade the contracts, and is it a multisig with a timelock?

Our checklist on how to check whether a DeFi protocol is safe walks through each step.

How to choose the right one

The best yield aggregator is the one that matches where your assets already live and how much complexity you want to manage. If you are on Ethereum and value a long track record, Yearn is a natural home; if you are deep in Curve, Convex is hard to beat. If you want to chase yields across many EVM chains, Beefy's coverage is unmatched. If your capital is on Stellar, DeFindex and Whalehub turn manual work into a single deposit.

And if you want fast, low-fee exposure across MultiversX, Sui, and Radix, with auto-compounding, veASH boosts, leverage, and dual-token liquid staking in one place, JewelSwap is built for exactly that. Whichever you choose, understand the mechanics before you deposit, size your risk honestly, and let the compounding do the patient work it does best.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best yield aggregator in 2026?

There is no single best one; it depends on your chain. By DefiLlama TVL on 5 October 2026, Convex, CIAN, Yearn, Stake DAO and Beefy lead on Ethereum and EVM chains, Yield Yak on Avalanche, AlphaFi and Volo vaults on Sui, and DeFindex on Stellar. On MultiversX, JewelSwap is the multi-venue farming aggregator.

Is a yield aggregator safe?

No DeFi protocol is risk-free. Aggregators add smart-contract risk on top of the underlying farms they use, so favor audited, established protocols, understand what your deposit is exposed to, and never commit more than you can afford to lose.

What is the difference between a yield aggregator and a yield optimizer?

The terms are used almost interchangeably. Both automate harvesting and reinvesting to improve returns. "Optimizer" tends to emphasize actively routing capital to the best strategy, while "aggregator" emphasizes bundling many opportunities in one place.

What fees do yield aggregators charge?

Most take a performance fee from harvested rewards rather than a deposit fee. Yearn's factory vaults charge 10%, Convex takes 17% of CRV revenue, and Beefy builds its fee into the displayed APY, so compare net yields between platforms.

Does auto-compounding really make a difference?

Yes, particularly for higher-yield farms and over longer periods. Reinvesting rewards frequently lets returns compound on returns, and pooling the transaction costs across users makes that frequency affordable in a way manual claiming rarely is.

Which yield aggregators work on Sui?

AlphaFi is the largest dedicated yield optimizer on Sui by DefiLlama's count, Volo and Ember offer vaults, Kai Finance offers leveraged yield, and JewelSwap runs auto-compounded farms across Cetus, Turbos and Scallop.

Can I use JewelSwap if I am new to DeFi?

Yes. Start with its optimized farming and liquid staking, which behave like straightforward deposit-and-earn products, and read the documentation before trying advanced features like leverage.