And that is why S-1 filings exist - to provide the answer to such questions. Somewhere, for this to work, there must be people paying more than 9.25% to borrow money. Who are they? What collateral are they putting up? Whatever the borrowers are doing must be high risk, or they wouldn't be paying interest that high.
In effect, this is a junk bond they're selling - high interest, with a high chance of losing the principal. Those are semi-legitimate financial products (but see Michael Milliken). However, if you invest in junk bonds, you have to evaluate them, and you don't own just one. You own a broad portfolio of them, collateralized by different things, expecting some of them to fail and some to succeed. This is why there are junk bond funds. Some of which fail, because too many of the risks were correlated.
If someone in the DeFi sector is selling this, the funds are probably being used to finance some other crypto-related scheme. Not building a factory or an apartment building, which you could probably finance at 3-4% right now. So you're probably buying into a speculation that some crypto product goes up. You're buying with a capped upside, an uncapped downside, and no visibility into the risks.
In general, yeah, you're capped at everything you invested basically ceasing to exist. Unless you bought on margin. Then, you can end up owing money, even if the asset is worthless.
Not crypto related, but one of the things that made the financial collapse of 2008 so much worse were the number of institutions that were over leveraged at the time and couldn't make the margin calls when assets started tanking. The fund I worked for at the time was leveraged as high as 40:1 at one point around that period. We exited the crisis leveraged closer to 10:1.
The problem with firms being overleveraged is when the margin call comes, it starts a snowball effect. To make the margin call, you have to liquidate assets, most likely at a loss, which further drives asset prices in the market down, increasing margin requirements in a vicious feedback loop. It's not uncommon for a firm hit with a big margin call like this to end up having to sell everything for pennies on the dollar.
I won't name names, but I worked a few high profile blowups during my tenure in finance, one of which was the very high profile bankruptcy of one of the banks that was allowed to fail in the US another was a boutique hedge fund that doubled down on a bad energy bet. Neither was pretty. But, in both cases, the root cause was the same: failure to properly understand the risk of the investments they were making either in part or in whole. Data quality in the risk system at the large bank was especially atrocious, BTW.
That is a much worse risk than basically any other investment!
If you buy gold, the price will fluctuate, but it won't be lost. If you bought the Dow at the peak in 1929 and held it all the way to the bottom then you lost 89% of your money, but it didn't actually go to zero. When Ponzi schemes evaporate, the money disappears. You can sign on to whatever class action lawsuit comes out of it, but the lawyers are going to eat most of the proceeds.
It's more options trading than "investing", and Robinhood's profits demonstrate that most people lose money on options.
Blockfi's yields remind me of money market funds in 2008. They looked like bank accounts, and paid out mostly sane yields, but the fine print said "not a bank account, may evaporate". Well, when it threatened to evaporate, everyone freaked out: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/money-mar...
When the NFT staking people are advertising yields of 132%, https://twitter.com/Route2FI/status/1492940519965605890 that's a huge blinking red sign that says SCAM SCAM SCAM, but 9.25% isn't as big of a warning as it should be. The moral hazard of every market bubble is sophisticated actors chasing yield on the way up, then claiming you were swindled, bamboozled, and had no idea what you were getting into, and urgently need a bailout when the bubble pops.
It's unlikely that every single borrower would default just like it's unlikely every stock in an index fund would go to zero. I wouldn't really compare it to options trading, junk bonds are a much better comparison. Lower potential return but also much less likely you would lose money than with options.
Obviously the devil is in the details, it's not clear if/how these loans are secured.
The more likely failure mode is that you've lent to something that's leveraged. That can go to zero on a partial drop of the underlying asset. Which is what happened in 2008.
That's how banks make money too. However, banks must also consider the risk of their debtors defaulting on their loans. They pass those risks on to you in the form of very low interests rates on money deposited, while keeping your deposit "safe". It seems like BlockFi was passing the risk on in the form of an undisclosed risk of losing all your money. That's the part the SEC seems to have a problem with:
> The order also finds that BlockFi made a false and misleading statement for more than two years on its website concerning the level of risk in its loan portfolio and lending activity.
The point is there's no free lunch. If you're making 9+% on your deposit don't be surprised if your account is wiped out when BlockFi's debtors fail to pay.
A guaranteed 9.25% APY on crypto deposits when US dollar savings accounts at FDIC banks do 0.50% is odd. Where is the extra money coming from?