yEarn.finance is a DeFi lending protocol built on Ethereum. It was made to alleviate popular DeFi protocols for non-savvy users and provide the largest profit to the holders of cryptocurrencies. yEarn.finance is an ecosystem relying on DeFi lending protocols to maximize APY (annual percentage yields) for its users.

YFI is the token of the project that was launched on July 17, 2020. At this, creators of the project warned all members of the ecosystem that there was no ICO or pre-mine, and the tokens have no value.

The background of the project

yEarn.finance started as a hobby project. Its creator Andre Cronje spent 42,467 USD on its development and double that sum on hosting and audits. He borrowed 20k USD on his house to finish the project.

When Andre Cronje created a programming code that enabled switching between different DeFi protocols, to deliver the highest yield to the investor, he decided to make it public. By that time, he was a well-known person in the crypto community as he often published his in-depth code reviews on Medium. He also worked closely with the teams of Curve Finance and Aave projects. His reviews written for Crypto Briefing contributed to his popularity.

The goals of Yearn.finance

yEarn.finance was launched with one simple goal to make profitable investing easy for users. The founder of the project believes that the sphere has become so complicated that the average person doesn’t understand it and doesn’t know how to interact with it. Therefore, a clear interface for simple user experience was created to cater to the needs of those who are not technically savvy to understand all nuances of the DeFi crypto-industry. Besides, the platform is the first experiment of this kind and, certainly, therefore, entails excitement and curiosity of the cryptocurrency community.

yEarn.finance platform

At the time of writing, the pool includes four stablecoins (USDT, DAI, USDC, TUSD) with the currency reserves of more than 103 million USD (Assets under management, AUM). These reserves are sent to different protocols that offer the best rates of return including Compound, Aave, dYdX. Other protocols of the ecosystem include ytrade.finance that allows users to long or short stablecoins with 1000x leverage and yliquidate.finance, using Aave flash loans (uncollateralized) for liquidation of funds.

The project yEarn reuses the code Synthetix for the most part, the one that was employed for the similar DeFi project Curve. The system presents its own rules that are subjected to modification. It also features configurable fees, control mechanisms, and its own maintenance controls.

It is possible to table the proposals to the yearn.finance ecosystem only if 33% of YFI token holders agree to do so. When the minimum requirement is reached, there is an opportunity to veto it with 25% of YFI token holders who oppose it. When the proposal is approved for voting, more than half of YFI holders must vote to support it to pass. Only then the changes to the protocol of the system can follow.

Placing stablecoins in the pool Y gives the members of the community an incredible 896% APY. It is connected with the fact that the YFI incentive token is shared among token holders. It makes the platform the best farming pool at the time of writing. Since the launch of the token, over 60 million USD of new capital had been deposited into the Y pool in one week only.

yEarn.finance security

The platform applies to the leading companies Quantstamp and Certik for the security audits, which are regularly conducted. However, Cronje provided this information with the results of checks only after the unaudited Yam.Finance project collapsed. At this, he commented that audits don’t make the project 100% safe. He prefers not to reveal the results of audits as he thinks that the sign ‘audited’ gives users the feeling of false security.

It’s worth remembering that yPools are considered more dangerous than other DeFi products such as Compound as they provide capital for a range of protocols that may themselves be vulnerable.

YFI token

YFI is a governance token issued by the platform yEarn.finance, a liquidity aggregator that offers the automation of yield farming strategy via lending pools. The resource performs different functions for DeFi users as it moves their digital assets into the liquidity pools and then moves them out when it finds the best yields. The reward tokens are mined by moving the funds from one asset to another in case it is more profitable.

Though the creator of yEarn called the asset “a completely valueless 0 supply token”, the token immediately bounced up after its launch having exceeded Bitcoin’s price in just a month. The token features considerable trading volume and there is a huge demand for it, for instance, on Binance.

Once users deposit their liquidity in the pools of the platform, they get yTokens showing the amount of the deposited funds. yTokens are staked to earn YFI. The largest part of this procedure is actually occurring on Curve, an automatic market maker that became known to all after the release of the COMP governance token.

This is the first project on Ethereum with the governance control handed over to its token holders. The creator of the asset fully delegated the governance rights to holders of YFI and this is one more reason that attracts the token holders.

One can buy YFI tokens on decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap, which is the best option, as at least 40% of all trades refer to the trading pair YFI/WETH (wrapped ETH). It can also be found on such centralized exchanges as Poloniex and CoinEx. Since YFI is an ERC-20 token, users can choose any wallet with support of ETH tokens. Such hardware wallets as Keepkey and Ledger provide extra security for your digital assets.

yEarn.finance team

The founder of the project Andre Cronje, a programmer who studied law, programming, computer science program. He worked in the sphere of insurance, fintech, big data, and distributed ledger technologies. Being fascinated by decentralized finance protocols and incredible yields offered to investors for stablecoins, he started to explore the sphere and came out with a project known today as yEarn.