Ethereum DeFi is the most painful thing ever and it takes years of coumpound interest to earn back money lost on fees

Look I have half an Eth that has been simply collecting dust in cold storage and it hurts me seeing how I can earn interest with my other assets in DeFi but not with my Eth.

I looked into some DeFi options on Ethereum and did some napkin calculations for the potential fees. I wanted to:

• Move to Metamask: $10 fee
• Stake with Lido for 5% APY and obtain stEth: $124 fee
• Swap half for Eth: $81 fee

• Provide liquidity in a stEth-Eth pool and earn extra interest: $71 fee

  ** At 10% APY it would take me 1 year and 9 months to break even the money lost on fees ** wtf?

I'm sure I can catch a day with lower fees but it would probably still take close to 1 year to break even, not to mention that there are withdrawal fees as well.

I took a look at Layer 2 but they also cost an arm and leg to move there (like $50) and also a ton of money to settle back ($150 + 7 days waiting time) and also transaction fees there are not as low as I would have hoped, some more complex transactions can still cost > $10. I also don't feel safe holding all my Eth on Layer 2 solutions, they are too new and unproven in security (not battle tested).

This was painful, there's no reason for me to move my Eth then. I hope all the rich people are enjoying the open, permissionless financial services that were supposed to bank the poor unbanked...

Rant over.