If a 20% better ponzi is better than a 15% one, again, I ask, why not a 1,500% one? There's new shitcoins born every day, promising these kinds of returns.
The part you're missing is that StableGains was simply parking their investors' money on Anchor, collecting the 20% APY, shaving off a quarter of it, and passing the remaining 15% to their investors.
Skipping the middleman is necessarily better because it is inherently lower risk for an absolute guarantee of 33% more upside.*
Investing in something else with even 16% promised returns, let alone 1500%, is not necessarily better because it is almost certainly higher risk.
* When Anchor (Luna/UST) crashed both StableGains and direct users of Anchor suffered the same percentage losses. But direct investors in Anchor had balances which were necessarily 33% ahead of StableGains investors due to not having StableGains shave off their interest earnings.
The reason StableGains initially looked compelling to me was for smaller transactions. Being able to deposit & withdraw smaller amounts of money w/o having to pay gas fees looked good. If you need to pull out $100 to cover your half of dinner w/ a friend, StableGains would make that easy. Trying to pull it out of Anchor Protocol would be more work, and you'd have to pay the gas fees.
There are almost definitely a priori reasons to think a 1500% one is much riskier. 20% is in the realm of possibility considering you could get ~15% yields from crypto.com, there were also some powerful players with deep pockets funding anchor paying the difference, and that there was almost 20bn$ TVL.
Stablegains had nothing going for it, in fact it had all of the risk with none of the reward. 1500% APYs are usually attached to LPs carrying huge risks of impermanent loss rather than stablecoin staking and are usually very transient in that they evaporate within hours.
