Overview
What StockYard is
StockYard is a yield layer for tokenized stocks. You stake shares you already hold, keep every bit of your exposure to the underlying company, and earn an APY on top of the position.
Nothing about your ownership changes. If the stock doubles while it is staked, you get the double. StockYard adds a second stream on top of price: rent paid by people who want to borrow the asset, plus a share of the fees the token earns when it trades.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| What you deposit | Tokenized stock you already hold — NVDAx, AAPLx, TSLAx, SPYx and others |
| What you keep | Full price exposure to the underlying stock, for the whole time it is staked |
| What you earn | Lending strategy offer + token fee rewards |
| Current range | 1.0% – 3.8% APY |
| Custody | Non-custodial. You connect a wallet; the position stays yours |
| Unstaking | Any time, subject to the pool's notice period (24h or 48h) |
| Minimum | None. Stake a slice of a position or all of it |
| Fees | Set per pool and shown in full before you sign |
Why stocks sit idle
Every holder eventually reaches the same fork, and until now it only had two prongs. Sell, and you take the gain, pay the tax, and give up the thesis you spent months building conviction in. Hold, and the position sits in a wallet for years earning nothing but price.
Crypto settled this a decade ago: you buy the asset you believe in, you stake it, and it works while you keep holding it. Equities never got that. Someone can hold five figures of a stock for three years and, unless it pays a dividend or they are comfortable writing covered calls through a brokerage, the position simply waits.
That was a reasonable constraint when a share was a row in a broker's database. It stops being one the moment the share is a token. Tokenizing a stock is the boring half. The unlock is that it becomes programmable.
How it works
1 · Connect
Connect a wallet. There is no account to create and no custody handoff. StockYard reads the tokenized stock you already hold and shows which of it is eligible.
2 · Stake
Pick an asset, pick an amount, and deposit into the pool. One signature. The pool page states the strategy, who pays the yield, and what can go wrong before you sign anything.
3 · Earn
Rewards accrue on top of the position. Deposited value, current rate, accrued rewards, and exit terms all sit on one screen. No trading terminal, no order book, no watching a chart all day.
What the APY is made of
The APY rewarded is the offer from our lending strategy plus the token fee rewards that position earns. Nothing else feeds it.
Yield is not conjured. Somebody pays it, for something. A pool that cannot name its payer is a pool you should stay out of — ours included. So every rate on StockYard is shown as its two parts, on the pool card and again in the stake panel before you commit:
| Component | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Lending strategy offer | 0.7% – 2.8% |
| Token fee rewards | 0.3% – 1.0% |
| APY rewarded | 1.0% – 3.8% |
Both components float
Neither part is fixed. The lending offer moves with borrow demand and the fee share moves with trading volume, so the APY you see is a current rate, not a promise. It is never quoted in advance for a future period.
Lending strategy offer
Your staked shares are supplied to traders who want short exposure or leverage in that stock. They pay a rate to borrow, and that rate is the offer our lending strategy quotes back to you.
It is the larger of the two components and the more volatile. Hard-to-borrow names with heavy short interest pay well; quiet, widely-held index tokens pay little.
- What moves it up: borrow demand, short interest, volatility, and news that makes traders want the other side of a position.
- What moves it down: a quiet tape. When nobody wants to borrow the stock, the offer falls toward zero.
Token fee rewards
Every trade of the tokenized stock pays a fee. The share of those fees owed to staked positions is claimed by the pool and paid out to the holders staking it, cycle after cycle, on top of the lending offer.
This component tracks volume rather than borrow demand, which is why it behaves differently: a heavily traded name can pay well on fees even when its borrow market is quiet, and a quiet month shrinks it toward nothing.
Pools
Each supported asset has its own pool, and each pool publishes the same facts: the two rate components, the pool size, how full it is against capacity, and the unstaking notice period.
- Capacity exists because a strategy only absorbs so much size before the rate degrades. A pool near capacity may quote a lower offer or close to new deposits.
- Notice period is either 24h or 48h depending on how the underlying strategy unwinds.
- Partial staking is always allowed. Nothing forces you to commit an entire holding.
Staking & unstaking
Staking takes one signature and moves the chosen amount into the pool. The rest of your position stays exactly where it was, untouched and unstaked.
Unstaking is requested from the same screen. After the pool's notice period the position is returned to your wallet along with any rewards accrued up to that point. There is no lock-up beyond the notice period and no penalty for leaving.
Rewards
Rewards accrue continuously and are shown per position: the current rate, the estimate per month, the estimate per year, and the total accrued so far. Estimates are projections from the rate at that moment, not guarantees — if the rate moves, the projection moves with it.
Risks
Staking a tokenized stock is not a savings account. These are the specific ways it can go wrong.
Lending risk
Borrower default and liquidation shortfalls in fast markets. Collateral is held against every borrow, but a violent move can leave a gap.
Rate risk
Both components can fall to near zero. A position can sit staked for a month and earn almost nothing if borrow demand and volume both dry up.
Smart-contract risk
The pools are code. A bug or an exploit can mean partial or total loss of the staked position, regardless of how the underlying stock performs.
Asset risk
You keep full exposure to the stock, which cuts both ways: if it falls while staked, you take that fall exactly as you would holding it unstaked.
FAQ
Do I still own the stock while it is staked?
Yes. Your exposure to the underlying company does not change for a moment. Staking adds a yield stream on top of the position; it does not sell, swap, or hedge it.
What happens if the stock goes up 40% while staked?
You get the 40%, plus whatever the pool paid over that period. The two are independent.
Can I stake only part of a position?
Yes. There is no minimum and no requirement to commit a whole holding. Stake a slice and leave the rest idle if you prefer.
How fast can I get out?
Unstaking is available any time, subject to the pool's notice period — 24 hours on most pools, 48 hours on the ones whose strategies take longer to unwind. It is shown on the pool card before you stake.
Is the APY guaranteed?
No. It is a current rate built from two floating components, and it is never promised in advance. Any figure shown is what the pool is paying at that moment.
Who is paying me?
Two parties: traders borrowing the asset, and the fee stream the token generates when it trades. Both are named on the pool page.
Do I need to know anything about DeFi?
No. If you can connect a wallet, you can use StockYard. The bar we set is that someone who has never opened a DeFi app understands the product in ten seconds: you own something, you are not selling it, you would like it to do some work.
Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Tokenized stock | A share represented onchain as a transferable token rather than a row in a broker's database |
| APY rewarded | The annualised rate a staked position is currently earning: lending offer plus fee rewards |
| Lending strategy offer | The rate borrowers are paying to borrow the asset, quoted back to the supplier |
| Token fee rewards | The share of trading fees attributable to staked positions, paid out each cycle |
| Pool | The per-asset venue holding staked positions and paying out rewards |
| Capacity | How much size a pool's strategy can absorb before the rate degrades |
| Notice period | The delay between requesting an unstake and the position returning to your wallet |
| Idle | A position you hold that is not staked and is earning nothing but price |