yearn.finance

YFI Price

What is Yearn Finance?

Yearn Finance is a suite of products in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that provides lending aggregation, yield generation, and insurance on the Ethereum blockchain. The protocol is maintained by various independent developers and is governed by YFI holders.

It started out as a passion project by Andre Cronje to automate the process of switching capital between lending platforms in search of the best yield offered, as the lending yield is a floating rate rather than fixed rate. Funds are shifted between dYdX, AAVE, and Compound automatically as interest rates change between these protocols. 

The service offered includes major USD tokens such as DAI, USDT, USDC, and TUSD. For example, if a user deposits DAI into yearn.finance, the user will receive yDAI token in return, which is a yield-bearing DAI token. 

Later on, it collaborated with Curve Finance to release a yield-bearing USD tokens pool that includes four y-tokens: yDAI, yUSDT, yUSDC and yTUSD, it is named as yUSD. 

Yearn Finance debuted the vault feature after its token launch, igniting a frenzy on automated yield farming and is considered the initiator of the category of yield farming aggregator. Basically, the vault will help users to claim yield farming rewards and sell it for the underlying assets. 

Vaults benefit users by socializing gas costs, automating the yield generation and rebalancing process, and automatically shifting capital as opportunities arise. End users also do not need to have proficient knowledge of the underlying protocols involved or DeFi, thus the Vaults represent a passive-investing strategy. It is akin to a crypto hedge fund where the aim is to increase the amount of assets that users deposited.

History of Yearn Finance

Yearn Finance was launched in July 2020 and its governance token, YFI was released to the community through a fair launch. At its initial release, because there were no fundraising nor valuation placed on Yearn Finance, the market did not fully comprehend the value capture and not able to figure out the market value for it.

As Yearn Finance continued to attract liquidity by allowing people to easily earn and participate in DeFi, YFI token went from $30 to $43,000 within 2 months from its launch.

In 2021, Yearn Finance continues to solidify its position as the gold standard for yield aggregator in which it managed to hit an all-time high of $91,000 on May 12th, 2021 alongside with the peak of the cryptocurrency markets.

What is Yield Farming and Delegated Vaults?

Yield Farming refers to the activity of depositing and locking capital in a DeFi Protocol for the reward of the protocol’s native tokens. DeFi protocols need to bootstrap capital to provide liquidity for exchanges, lend to borrowers, underwrite insurance risk, etc. It acts as an incentive to attract users to use the protocol while generating hype, giving out part of its native tokens. 

Other than simple yield farming, Yearn Finance also released a product named delegated vault. Delegated vaults basically use any assets as collateral to borrow stablecoins and recycle the stablecoins into a stablecoin vault. Any subsequent earnings are then used to buy back the asset. 

For example, one of the delegated vaults is yETH, where users can deposit ETH and expect to have more ETH when they withdraw. The ETH is sent to Maker DAO as collateral in order to draw DAI where the DAI will be invested into the DAI vault, with subsequent earnings used to buy back ETH. 

Why is the founder, Andre Cronje controversial or famous? 

Andre became one of the most famous DeFi thought leaders as he launched Yearn Finance single-handedly, witnessing YFI price went up by roughly 55x in less than 3 months, valuing Yearn Finance by more than $1 billion. He is vocal on Twitter with his ethos of fair token launch and having a bias on launching experimental projects before audits, which gave birth to one of the DeFi main activities “Aping”. 

Aping basically means buying the tokens the moment it launches in Ethereum mainnet before fully knowing the function of the tokens. It normally involves directly interacting with the Ethereum contract before a website UI is out or buying it straight from DEX such as Uniswap. It is a high risk activity, causing many investors to lose their fund to scams. But the lure of getting early access to tokens that might go up rapidly in price is attracting tons of speculators. 

One of the examples is when Andre launched EMN, a game economy engine called “Eminence” that was subsequently hacked for $15 million. Subsequent launch of the KP3R token, a network that facilitates keepers to perform automated tasks on behalf of requestors, saw the price go up by 22x in less than 3 months, valuing KP3R at more than $100 million. The activity of aping will not die down anytime soon with numerous projects achieving high valuation within a short span of time. 

What is the Yearn Finance Alliance?

During the weeks of 24 November until 3 December 2020, Yearn Finance announced the Merger and Acquisition (M&A) of multiple protocols, essentially forming an alliance revolving around YFI. 

1. SushiSwap joined as its Automated Market Maker (AMM) arm.

2. Cover joined as its insurance arm.

3. Cream joined as its lending arm. 

4. Akropolis joined as its institutional service provider for yVaults and upcoming lending products.

5. Pickle joined as one of its strategists. 

There are even multiple Yearn Ecosystem Index tokens launched such as YETI by Powerpool and YPIE by PieDAO.

What are the fees in Yearn Finance?

Yearn Finance v1 charges a withdrawal fee of 0.5% plus 5% performance fee from the gas cost saved.

Yearn Finance v2 follows the traditional hedge fund fees structure of 2/20 where it charges 2% for management fee and 20% for performance fee. Yearn Finance v2 was launched on 19 January 2021.

What is YFI token?

YFI is the governance token for the Yearn Finance protocol. It can be used to vote and receive cash flows from the fees earned by the protocol. 

YFI initiated the first community-fair-launched token distribution, giving out 30,000 tokens to early protocol’s users by a surprise yield farming announcement back in 17-July-2020. 

Where can you buy yearn.finance?

YFI tokens can be traded on centralized crypto exchanges. The most popular exchange to buy and trade yearn.finance is Binance, where the most active trading pair YFI/USDT has a trading volume of $2,365,266.21 in the last 24 hours. Other popular options include HTX and Bybit.

What is the daily trading volume of yearn.finance (YFI)?

The trading volume of yearn.finance (YFI) is $19,455,346.51 in the last 24 hours, representing a 14.90% increase from one day ago and signalling a recent rise in market activity.

What is the all-time high for yearn.finance (YFI)?

The highest price paid for yearn.finance (YFI) is BTC4.1733, which was recorded on May 12, 2021 (over 3 years). Comparatively, the current price is -94.40% lower than the all-time high price.

What is the all-time low for yearn.finance (YFI)?

The lowest price paid for yearn.finance (YFI) is BTC0.003452, which was recorded on Jul 18, 2020 (about 4 years). Comparatively, the current price is 15,862.60% higher than the all-time low price.

What is the market cap of yearn.finance (YFI)?

Market capitalization of yearn.finance (YFI) is BTC2,516.6286 and is ranked #313 on CoinGecko today. Market cap is measured by multiplying token price with the circulating supply of YFI tokens (34 Thousand tokens are tradable on the market today).

What is the fully diluted valuation of yearn.finance (YFI)?

The fully diluted valuation (FDV) of yearn.finance (YFI) is BTC2,749.8954. This is a statistical representation of the maximum market cap, assuming the maximum number of 37 Thousand YFI tokens are in circulation today. Depending on how the emission schedule of YFI tokens are designed, it might take multiple years before FDV is realized.

How does the price performance of yearn.finance compare against its peers?

With a price increase of 0.30% in the last 7 days, yearn.finance (YFI) is underperforming the global cryptocurrency market which is up 6.60%, while outperforming when compared to similar Polygon Ecosystem cryptocurrencies which are up 0.00%.

How to add yearn.finance (YFI) to MetaMask?

Adding yearn.finance (YFI) to MetaMask allows you to view your token holdings, trade on decentralized exchanges, and more. To add them, you’ll need to import YFI as a token. You can copy YFI’s contract address (0x0bc529c00c6401aef6d220be8c6ea1667f6ad93e) and import it manually, or if you've installed MetaMask's chrome extension, add YFI to MetaMask with one click on CoinGecko.

Add YFI to MetaMask.