APR and APY get used almost interchangeably in casual conversation, but they measure meaningfully different things, and the gap between them is exactly why the same underlying return can be advertised as two different-looking numbers depending on which one a platform chooses to display.
APR: simple interest, no compounding
APR (Annual Percentage Rate) reflects simple interest earned over a year, with no compounding involved. If you stake an asset at a flat APR, your rewards accrue at a steady rate without those rewards themselves generating further rewards along the way.
APY: the same rate, reinvested
APY (Annual Percentage Yield) factors in compounding, rewards are periodically reinvested, so they start earning their own rewards, which snowballs the total return over the course of a year. Given an identical underlying rate, APY will always show a higher number than APR, because it's accounting for growth-on-growth that APR simply doesn't model.
Why platforms lean toward showing APY
A larger-looking number is naturally more attractive in a listing, so it's common for platforms to advertise APY figures rather than APR, not necessarily to mislead, but because it's the figure that reflects what an investor could plausibly realize if rewards are automatically compounded rather than left idle. The catch is that not every platform actually auto-compounds by default, so the advertised APY sometimes assumes a reinvestment behavior you'd need to opt into or manage manually to actually achieve.
What this means when comparing offers
When two platforms show different numbers for what claims to be a similar product, checking whether you're looking at an APY or an APR is the first thing worth confirming, comparing an APY figure against an APR figure for a supposedly similar opportunity isn't a fair comparison, even if the underlying rates are actually close.
Edge Staking shows APY-style figures wherever a platform or protocol provides them, since that's the metric most commonly published across the industry, but the underlying takeaway holds regardless of the tool: always confirm which of the two you're reading before comparing across platforms.