yearn.finance(YFI)

Founded in 2020 by prominent Ethereum developer Andre Cronje, Yearn Finance is a suite of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) products that aim to help users maximize their returns from crypto deposits by cleverly leveraging multiple DeFi protocols and taking minimal risk. The Ethereum-based protocol utilizes automated trading and investment strategies deployed across various DeFi protocols to achieve this purpose. These trading strategies are developed and modified by the Yearn Finance community.  

The Yearn ecosystem encompasses a wide array of DeFi products, with the most popular being yVaults. These are token pools that follow investment strategies that often involve multiple other DeFi protocols. 

YFI, the governance token of the Yearn Finance protocol, has a maximum supply of just 36,666 tokens. Holders of the token can vote on and submit proposals to modify the protocol and earn a portion of its transaction fees.

YFI price

YFI is a very volatile cryptocurrency, with its price rising and falling very sharply within short periods of time. From a yearly low of about $30 in July 2020, YFI's price shot up to a yearly high of nearly $44,000 in September 2020. This rapid increase happened in less than two months as the platform saw massive interest and rapidly gained users. However, them redefining their tokenomics had a big part to play in the price surge.

However, YFI then gave up most of those gains over the following weeks, bottoming out at around $7,500 by the start of November. Thereafter, it began a slow and steady climb and had breached $57,000 by the end of April 2021. 

In the following month, May 2021, YFI's price skyrocketed to $95,000 on the back of a marketwide boom, achieving a fully-diluted market valuation of a whopping $3.4 billion. According to our YFI live price chart, this figure marks both its 2021 and all-time high. The price then immediately plummeted, reaching a 2021-low of just under $18,000 in December, and has been slowly trending lower ever since.

How YFI works

The Yearn Finance ecosystem is made up of a suite of DeFi products aimed at helping users maximize the yield on their assets. yVaults, Yearn Finance's most popular product, generates yTokens, a form of Liquidity Provider (LP) tokens, issued upon deposit of crypto assets in a particular yVault. Each yVault has a strategy, developed and modified by Yearn users and typically involves multiple other DeFi protocols, according to which the contained assets are put to work, to earn a yield. A strategy might even entail the use of borrowed money and leverage. Users are free to withdraw their tokens plus any yield they have accrued whenever they choose.  

Yearn Finance also offers multiple other products, such as yEarn, yInsure,  Zap, etc., and is constantly creating and adding new ones to its ecosystem with the help of its vibrant community. Anyone can suggest a new strategy or feature, and it will get implemented if the community deems it worthwhile. Users, with the YFI governance token, are also able to vote on proposals that determine what changes are made to the protocol.

YFI news, updates and highlights

In early February 2021, the YFI community voted to increase the total token supply by 20% as a way to compensate the maintainers of the network. There was an overwhelming vote of 1,670 YFI in favor of the proposal versus just 331 against it. The proposal was implemented and 6,666 new YFI tokens were minted, making the total supply 36,666.

In early March of 2022, Yearn Finance's creator, Andre Cronje, announced he was no longer going to be contributing to the DeFi or cryptocurrency space, sending YFI's price plummeting about 10% in a matter of hours. It's worth noting that he has taken similar decisions twice before, only to reverse course shortly after, and has been largely uninvolved in the development of Yearn Finance.

Frequently asked questions about YFI

• Can you mine or stake YFI?

No, YFI is a governance token, and so it cannot be mined nor staked for rewards. However, YFI holders are rewarded with a portion of the protocol's transaction fees.

• Which are the best YFI wallets?

Some of the best wallets for storing YFI include Trustwallet, MyEtherwallet, Atomic Wallet, and hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor.

• What can you do with YFI?

You can vote for or against governance proposals or submit new ones. You also earn a share of Yearn's transaction fees for holding YFI.

• How can you buy YFI?

You can buy YFI from popular cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, HitBTC, and OKX using your local currency or other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.