Yearn.finance

Yearn.finance, formerly iEarn.finance, is a yield aggregation platform built on Ethereum and launched in January 2020 by Andre Cronje. Yearn manages yield farming and rebalancing strategies using a combination of automation and human decision making on behalf of users who have deposited capital.

Yearn has two yield aggregation products, Earn and Vaults. Earn allows users to deposit stablecoins or wrapped BTC into liquidity pools on Curve to earn fees and governance token rewards. These assets are also lent out on platforms offering high yield and token rewards, adding to the yield earned.

Vaults offer a more automated and managed experience. Users deposit assets such as LINK, Curve liquidity provider tokens, or stablecoins and the Vault pools these assets together and deploys the highest earning yield farming strategy as deemed safe by the community and Andre Cronje. Governance tokens earned as rewards are sold off for the original asset deposited and combined with other fees and automatically rolled into the Vault to compound yield. Strategies can be changed frequently and pooling assets together saves gas costs for users.

Yearn is governed by YFI, an ERC-20 governance token. YFI holders can vote on protocol changes after agreeing to lock up their YFI for 3 days. YFI can also be staked for yield in the governance portal. This yield comes from fees charged to users on Yearn products. YFI was distributed entirely to liquidity providers on Curve and Balancer. There was no allocation for team members or investors.

Yearn's total value locked (TVL) has quickly grown to over $800 million, making it one of the largest DeFi platforms. YFI has a circulating market cap of over $400 million.

Yearn has undergone multiple security and smart contract audits by CertiK, Quantstamp, HackMD, and CryptoManiacs. Yearn has a reputation for launching experimental products very quickly and warns users that their products are in beta.

Last updated 1 year ago