I'm a beginner so I put it in the Beginners & Help section.
Coinbase offers "Cosmos" with a yearly annual return of 17.66%.
I did some research on Cosmos and its future looks bright.
On my research, it says to only Stake on huge platforms, such as Coinbase.
I realize the drawback is you freeze your funds for a certain amount of time.
The other drawback is because of Crypto's ups and downs, you might lose money if it goes down. But that's true of any crypto, including BTC.
As far as I can tell, the annual return stays at 17.66% for the duration.
Is there any drawback I'm missing?
Why don't people just buy Cryptos that they can stake?
First of all that's not real staking, exchanges are just calling that staking. Staking is you can do without depositing your coins to any CEX. Real staking is participating to secure the chain and you can do it in your own computer without moving your coins/tokens.
Not all people want to "stake" in exchanges because they don't trust CEXes. There are different methods to stake but in most cases you don't need a lot of know how to do it by yourself. Also some people prefer PoW over PoS so they dislike coins that use staking.
That's not necessarily true; Binance, for instance, offers a variety of earning methods, such as savings, yield mining, or staking through decentralized platforms. It's not truly decentralized, but my point is that actual staking can be conducted through exchanges without a lock-in period on some occasions.
In my personal opinion, staking is worth it if you're capable of finding the right coins and vaults to invest in and, more importantly, if you only deal with decentralized platforms, such as Beefy or Supra Finance, which usually offer greater APYs than centralized exchanges, and without a lock-in period, you're free to withdraw whenever you please.