What is yearn.finance?
Yearn.finance token or YFI is the governance token native to the yearn.finance platform. The latter is a multi-chain yield farming platform that comes with a suite of unique DeFi products. It’s deployed on Ethereum, Fantom, and Arbitrum networks.
YFI is based on the ERC-20 token standard. It was initially launched on Ethereum and is considered to be the first community-governed project to be deployed on this network.
As a governance token, YFI grants its holders voting rights exclusive to yearn.finance. Besides voting, holders can also submit their own proposals called the Yearn Improvement Proposals (YIPs), Yearn Delegation Proposals (YDPs), and Yearn Signaling Proposals (YSPs). If the submitted proposal receives more than 50% of votes, it will be integrated into the platform.
The yearn.finance token was launched via a fair launch in mid-2022 where 30,000 yearn.finance tokens were distributed among the first users of the platform. It had no ICO or pre-mine event.
There is a total supply of 36,666 yearn.finance coins, all of which have already been minted. This could mean that as YFI becomes more scarce, the YFI price will increase.
YFI coins can be obtained via major exchanges.
You can have a more in-depth look at the yearn.finance price history or the current YFI price on the graph above.
What are the Main Features of yearn.finance?
As mentioned in the What is yearn.finance section, the latter is a suite of products for the DeFi space that mainly serves as a yield farming platform.
Yield farming itself is the process of locking up your crypto assets into a DeFi protocol in the hopes of receiving said protocol’s native tokens as a reward.
Yearn.finance supports stablecoins including DAI, USDC, USDT, and TUSD. By depositing any of these tokens into the protocol, users receive yield-bearing tokens. They include yDAI, yUSDT, yUSDC, and yTUSD. These tokens were introduced as a result of a partnership with Curve Finance.
Moreover, it holds over $103,000,000 in currency reserves that are distributed among protocols such as Aave, Compound, and dYdx in order to deliver the best rates of return.
One of the main goals of the project is to make decentralized finance easy to understand. This way, even investors without technical knowledge will be able to participate and maximize their returns.
Other yearn.finance crypto products include yVaults. Yearn.finance describes yVaults as “savings accounts for crypto assets”. To put it simply, its main purpose is to maximize profits through strategies.
Most importantly, yVaults eliminate the need for deep technical knowledge of the DeFi space to maximize returns. In other words, they serve as a passive form of investing in crypto.
yVaults are considered to be one of the first DeFi solutions to serve as yield farming aggregators.
Yearn.finance doesn’t charge users for withdrawing their earnings, however, it charges a management fee of 2% and a performance fee of 20%.
When it comes to governance, proposals that receive the majority vote are implemented via a multi-signature wallet that consists of 9 members. They are chosen by YFI holders and can be changed via governance voting at any time. At least 6 members must sign in order to implement the proposal.
The project is regularly audited by Certik and Quantstamp, however, this information is not displayed on the website. This was chosen to mitigate the false feeling of security. The founder of the project has commented that no yield farming platform can ever be truly 100% safe as there is always a level of risk involved.
Before getting involved in yearn.finance or any other crypto project, make sure to do your research. You can start by checking out the yearn.finance price history and other statistics on the graph above.
Who Developed yearn.finance?
The yearn.finance crypto project was initially launched in February 2020 under the name iEarn. Its sole founder, Andre Cronje, made some major changes to the project and relaunched it in July of 2022.
Andre Cronje began the development of yearn.finance as a hobby in which he tried to automate the switching of capital between lending platforms in order to provide the highest yield. As time passed, this hobby became an involved process that required Andre to invest over $40,000 of his own money into the project to continue development. Around the same amount of investments was also needed for core audits, hosting, and the final launch of the platform.
This means the entire project was developed and launched from start to finish by Andre Cronje alone. In around 3 months, the value of the project went up to over $1,000,000,000.
Prior to the launch of yearn.finance, Andre was an active member of the crypto community. He was known for his code reviews on Medium and the origin of Aping - a high-risk activity of buying cryptocurrencies the moment they are launched. The latter signifies a severe lack of research which often results in severe losses for investors.
Besides his contributions to the crypto sector, Andre Cronje has worked in the fintech, big data, and insurance fields.
