The concept of Yield Farming surely creates an imagination of agricultural activity to any mind new to cryptocurrency and the blockchain space. While yield farming may sound a bit obscure, the concepts that apply to farming crops to generate yields have a correlation to these two buzz words that have captivated the world of decentralized finance (De-Fi).
Yield Farming is the current hype of De-Fi, and has hugely become popular among all De-Fi protocols. Protocols that integrate yield farming or liquidity rewards enable user participation in cryptocurrency markets in a passive way. The main reason why it is one of the trending sectors is the promise of huge returns, whether real or imaginary, that are associated with it by many. Yield farming requires little experience and effort, a lot of people have found success in yield farming as a source of passive income. So, how does it really work and how on earth is there a farm in crypto?
In its basic form, yield farming refers to any blockchain protocol that enables any person with some holding of crypto tokens to ‘lock-up’ those holdings with a custodian(the protocol) and in return, they distribute rewards; these rewards are typically distributed as protocol governance tokens. In order words, rather than just keeping one’s crypto assets idle in one’s wallet, one can choose to offer it to a service provider and earn some form of interest.
A fundamental example of this is in lending protocols, creating a peer to smart contract lending/borrowing service. The holder lends his crypto assets to a platform, which in turn makes use of the assets in return for attractive interest payments. Stated simply, to yield-farm in cryptocurrency you must handover custody of your crypto assets to a particular De-Fi platform. In doing so the protocol rewards users, the platform does this as they have some system of benefiting from having token custody. Another common example of yield farming is through providing liquidity to an AMM in return for liquidity incentives -- tokens allotted to liquidity providers. These projects require liquidity to facilitate swaps and bootstrap growth, so it is a win-win for both parties.
De-Fi started on the Ethereum network, so it is no surprise that yield farming from the outset was exclusive to the Ethereum blockchain, with the rewards being in the form of Ethereum-based tokens. The De-Fi space has continued rapid innovation, as other blockchain platforms with yield farming capability have been created and are competing strongly with Ethereum, especially the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
One of the very earliest forms of Yield Farming appeared in 2018 when a Chinese Exchange, FCoin, created its native token FT, tied its value to the transaction fees of its users, and issued the FT coins as rewards to its users. A portion of FCoin’s revenue was also distributed to her users in proportion to how many FT tokens each user held.
Those were the early days of Yield Farming, but the practice became prominent in early 2020 when a blockchain credit platform, Compound Protocol, began issuing its native COMP tokens as a reward to early users. These rewards were allocated to bootstrap growth to the platform in addition to the default interest payments users received.
The very wide acceptance of Compound Protocol’s approach set off a chain reaction of platforms incorporating similar liquidity incentives into their strategy. Ultimately, this lead to the very fast proliferation of platforms offering yield farming opportunities in an effort to capture the market. A perfect example of this is what is coined as De-Fi summer (June-July 2020), where the first explosion of De-Fi platforms occurred.
Two reasons account for this. First is the attraction of good returns on investment. Many new projects offer yield farming opportunities, with rewards in the form of the project’s native tokens. Lots of people aspire to be early farmers in the hope that the tokens will swiftly increase in value such that they can trade their earnings and make a good profit.
Secondly, lots of Yield Farming platforms offer interest rates far higher than traditional fiat banks. Hence more and more people are going into yield farming rather than keeping money in the bank.
Despite all the promises and glitter that yield farming is, it has some very notable downsides and risks worthy of mention.
Users who adopt Ethereum-based De-Fi projects (the majority of De-Fi users) face very expensive transaction fees, especially in high congestion periods. It is not uncommon to experience transaction fees of tens of dollars and sometimes, hundreds. In fact, a ridiculously high amount of $486 was once registered as a transaction fee in 2020! This creates implications for the average De-Fi investor, those who go into yield farming with a small deposit may discover that it will take them a long time before they can earn enough to be in profit after the deduction of transaction fees. This issue is not so much of a problem these days as blockchains such as the BSC boast much lower transaction fees in comparison to the Ethereum Network.
Another risk for yield farmers is the highly volatile nature of cryptocurrencies. There could be situations where a platform’s reward token falls so much in value over time that a farmer may never be able to recoup his investment.
Again, it is not a pleasant experience to lose your hard-earned money to thieves, but this is a very real possibility as far as yield farming and crypto are concerned. Lots of scam projects have entered the market aiming to capitalize on hype and fraud investors. They set up their platforms, and after investors have committed their funds, the operators shut down their channels and disappear with investor’s funds. It is extremely wise to tread carefully when choosing a yield farm to invest in.
Finally, the software programs that power digital currencies often have loopholes that can be exploited by hackers. This possibility is high with projects whose codes have not been audited by a credible third-party. If there are loopholes in the smart contracts, investors’ funds are at high risk because once the loophole is discovered by malicious parts the entire funds in that farm can be siphoned in a moment. A classical case is that of Harvest.Finance that lost more than $20 million in a hack.
In conclusion, the concept of Yield Farming is gaining great traction and attracting much attention from the crypto community and even venture capitalists. There are many platforms that a prospective yield farmer can consider. These include yield farming networks such as Synthetix, Curve.Finance, Compound Finance, MakerDAO, Balancer, Pancake Swap etc. In the final analysis, the key to finding the right farm that will suit you is to carefully Do-Your-Own-Research (DYOR).
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): Ladies and Gentlemen, on behalf of BSC News, I would like to welcome Crudeoil Team for an AMA! shall we get started crudeoil team ?
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Oh yeah LFG!!
Q1 lets start off with knowing more about the team behind crudeoil finance, tell us more about the team members and their past experience
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: First of all, I would like to thank BSC NEWS and all the admins for arranging this AMA. They have been behind us since the beginning. Amazing
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): thanks for the kind words!
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: My name is Pyro and My colleague is Petro engineerI. We are two of the cofounders of Crudeoil Finance. We have a team of like minded individuals who thought of introducing a unique crypto philosophy to the community and started working on Crudeoil.
Most of us have a long history in Crypto and I myself have been in the crypto field since 2013 and others also have many years of combined experience in the crypto industry.
Q2 How did the project come about?
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): Nice. I'll take this one
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Yeah go ahead my man
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): well... while we were discussing novel crypto concepts, we were disgusted with how “inflationary staking” was causing a massive sell pressure causing tokens values to drop. Therefore, we wanted to implement a deflationary token where the holders would have to think twice before selling. This would encourage holders and the token value as a result.
So we wanted to implement this in the real world. Initially, we wanted to try our concept on ETH network first but due to the heavy fees in gas we decided to move to Binance Smart Chain. So, we have started our development later Q4 2020/ Early Q1 2021 and here we are today.
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): deflationary will never go wrong..
Q3 i believe the presale of oil has been completed and now diesel is done too? or the public can stil get the chance to buy them?
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Obviously, we were overwhelmed by the affection shown by our community. We were massively oversubscribed in our $OIL private sale and the public sale was finished within 3 seconds. We had both these sales on a simple platform.
Second, our $DIESEL private sale was oversubscribed and then we recently had our Public Sale Phase 1 on our own Launchpad https://launchpad.crudeoil.finance taking into account all the learning from $OIL sale. Frankly we ran into some technical difficulties during the DIESEL public sale phase 1 , Nevertheless, This public sale phase 1 was also sold out very quickly. Each day is a day to learn for us. I think our difference is that we put our heads down and listen to the community. We are definitely on a continuous improvement track.
Our Public sale phase 2 will be conducted soon on a popular platform. More details will be available soon on that. Community will be able to buy from that round. Or else they can buy from an AMM once the token is listed
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): im sure the public will be glad to know more about that..
Q4 let us know how you felt about the presales of both tokens, was it better handled in the second round ? or if you can turn back time what would you have done better?
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): Good one indeed
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Indeed!! as we said, we ran into some difficulties. however we could be able to pull through and close the sale in 2.5 hours with 1400BNB raising as a result (we have refunded 100BNB excess)
Each day is a day to learn for us. I think our difference is that we put our heads down and listen to the community. We are definitely on a continuous improvement track.
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): The community has been amazing and providing us with a lot of positive feedback and suggestions to changes. We have listened to all of them and continuously work on improving our product offering. We are definitely on a continuous improvement track.
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): learning everyday makes us stronger and listening to the community makes the growth organic for sure
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Massive learning curve for us. The interest was overwhelming. We got a loyal fan base behind us
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): thats great!
Q5 Tell us more about $oil and $diesel, whats their use case and whats their differences?
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: certainly. $OIL is our first token and it has a deflationary architecture. every transaction is associated with a burn. Therefore the total supply goes down even as we speak. Holders will have a chance to Stake/Farm Binance smart chain assets (BEP20) and get staking/farming rewards from OIL tokens. We are actually building an ecosystem around $OIL which was our first token. $DIESEL on the other hand is a fixed supply token. This will be the medium for buying and selling NFTs on our upcoming NFT marketplace. Both tokens will play a massive role in our upcoming yield farm optimizer. Holders and stakers will have huge benefits (yet to be revealed) $DIESEL on the other hand, does not have a burning function. There will be no burn mechanism implemented hence we can use it to list it on a centralized exchange. (We got so many offers to get it listed on centralized exchanges due to the burn feature we couldn’t get it done) $OIL and $DIESEL are integrated when $OIL holders are provided with benefits later on when all $OIL tokens are minted and unlocked after staking
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): wow big stuff, NFT and listing plans will be great and those holding the tokens will be excited
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Just wanna add one more point here. We received a listing request from a top tier CEX. More details to be announced once the deal is done.
Q6 from your medium articles, it shows that you take great care of the public safety when purchasing the tokens. How are you protecting the community that have invested in the project? any audits?
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): of course. security is very important isnt it?
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): defo
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: I think @crudeoileng should take this
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): Certik is our smart contract audit partner and you can see our project listed in their onboarding projects list.
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): great stuff and we spoke to them in an ama not long ago too!
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): Furthermore, we have always been educating our community not to fall for scammers. We have always been communicating with our community to stick to our group for all communication. We have also experienced a massive DDOS attack recently. Since then we have upgraded our platform infrastructure and moved to sophisticated AWS platform with ultra high security. We understand that security is a continuous improvement but not just a one-time task. So, we are committed towards continuous improvement.
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Adding the website link here: https://certik.org/ Just wanna give a shout out to Marco from certik
Q7 after security, im sure the public wanna know what are the strategy in place to assure the value of their investment maintained, if not go higher?
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: I got this one. In terms of $OIL, its the deflationary feature. It is something to do with human psychology. if people dont sell, the price will hold. If people sell, they are playing into the holders hand. just a beautiful concept. Also, Yield aggregator/optimizer fees will be distributed among the DIESEL and OIL token Stakers on our platform. Furthermore we will have soo many value addition to the project other than the optimizer. We already launched the IDO platform (already getting massive interest from so many projects). Plus we have plans to launch our own NFT market place, AMM. Frankly the initial idea was to build on Ethereum and contribute to its ECOsystem. As you all know and aware, Gas price is killing ETH dapps at the moment. So we moved onto #BSC. So far, we have been getting a lot of positive feedback from our community
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): Thats great stuff and you answered the question as to why BSC too..
Q8 you spoke about partnership, is there any that you are allowed to let us know? and how will they be able to partner crudeoil?
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): I'll take this one. Of course! partnerships are a two way thingy. We get exposure to our project across established communities. Similarly, these projects will also get the exposure to our community. In addition, we will utilise the product features they are good at. For example, when it comes to stakd, OIL holders are able to stake OIL LP to earn Stakd on their platform. On the other hand we have recently partnered with BillionHappiness as well. We will soon be hosting their public sale on our own Launchpad. https://launchpad.crudeoil.finance Similarly, we also established a partnership with Certik who would do the smart contract Audit of our token. Certik is arguably the best smart contract auditing firm out there in the market
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): thats great news too! BHC supporters will be equally excited about this
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): We have been approached by well known (That’s all we can say at the moment) IDO/IFO platforms in the space. We are still negotiating terms to conduct our Public sale phase 02. Some of the partnerships are still in the research phase. We are discussing how we can improve ourselves while collaborating with each other and contributing to the BSC ECO system. We can’t put out the names yet but the community will come to know in due course.
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): we always strive to under promise and over achieve in the progress of a project 🙂
Q9 brings me to the next question, how does crudeoil finance earn money to fund the team and future development?
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: This is an extremely important question. The reason why we never allocated any token portion towards the team at the beginning was to build the trust among the community. There is no point of raising funds and also having a piece of token pie by the team at the same time (Even though many projects tend to do that). Let me break it down to points how we are gonna handle the business in the future (from funds perspective)
🛢 Every OIL transaction has 2% fee inbuilt. 1% goes to the project team wallet and 1% permanently burnt. We can utilize that for our expenses.
🛢We have raised enough funds to run the project for 2 years with calculated predicted burn rate
🛢We have a plan to utilize a portion of yield farm optimizer fees towards project expenses which is our main product among many.
🛢We launched our own launchpad. Projects can apply for fundraising through our platform. We charge a reasonable fee which can be utilized for the betterment of our project as well. Our public sale phase 01 was conducted there. We have one planned around 7-10 of this month with Billion Happiness. They will conduct the phase 2 of their sale on our platform.
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): I’m sure the public will be pleased to know of this plan for funding
Q10 lets talk about what are the current development, besides the phase 2 sales of $diesel and paternership? are there other things that you guys are building?
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): I’ll take this one. So, we are fast at development on multiple fronts. With respect to $Oil, we are adding more and more LP pools to our platform so that our loyal community can earn more $OIL by staking those tokens. On the other end, we are developing and improving our own Launchpad to host more token sales while cultivating multi-dimensional partnerships.
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): nice i like the part of growing together with other projects, it definitely will make the projects stronger!
Q11 we have cover most of the past and present stuff, what is the roadmap for future development?
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: In terms of future development, we are working on our own yield optimizer platform.
With respect to $DIESEL, we are developing the NFT marketplace. And many other surprises which we will announce pretty soon. you can get a detailed timeline here: https://docs.crudeoil.finance/roadmap-1 Dates are subject to change. We hired couple of developers and development is in fast phase now. We will be able to launch the products even before the mentioned dates.
Q12 thats nice and i would say alot of ppl will be looking forward to the great development of crudeoil, how about providing us with links that allow the public to learn more about your crudeoil finance, eg social media/medium/tg etc.
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance: All details could be found below.
🛢 Website: https://crudeoil.finance
🛢 Email: contact@crudeoil.finance
🛢 Twitter: https://twitter.com/crudeoil_fi
🛢 Telegram Chat: https://t.me/crudeoilfinance
🛢 Telegram Channel: https://t.me/crudeoilfinance_ANN
🛢 Blog: https://crudeoilfinance.medium.com/
🛢 Github: https://github.com/CrudeoilFi
🛢 Docs: https://docs.crudeoil.finance
🛢 PitchDeck: https://docsend.com/view/x9puqwhca8ciwbt4
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): we are almost done with the questions from me, after that i will unlock the room for some live questions from our audience, once the questions flow in, i will lock the room again for you to choose a few questions to answer..
Q13 It's my famous last question in BSC news, whats the alpha you can offer us besides what we have talked about previously?
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Oh Alpha here we goo..
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): its never enuf haha
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: ha ha! That’s a secret! Kidding! Well.. As I said at the beginning, we are working on a unique concept and working towards a revolution. We will soon be introducing customizable vaults to our portfolio. We believe this will be huge in the days to come with the ever increasing popularity of staking and the $OIL eco system will be at the forefront of it. We have so much planned for the optimizer. Your very own KDOT gave us some alpha suggestions which are amazing. We discussed internally and we will implement them once the platform is live. You will see the magic once the platform goes live. Till then our lips are sealed. There you go! The news was broken here at first.
Crypto Shrimp (AMA Host): Thank you for the time being here at BSC News AMA, Im sure the public will love the project more than ever now!
You guys have great team work even during the AMA we can see how you guys are not cutting into each other, that tells a lot too! I wish you guys all the best and hope you enjoyed your time in this AMA!! Transcript for the AMA will be out shortly and we will let you know about it. For those who have more questions and wanna learn more about CRUDEOIL FINANCE do check out the links below:
🛢 Website: https://crudeoil.finance
🛢 Email: contact@crudeoil.finance
🛢 Twitter: https://twitter.com/crudeoil_fi
🛢 Telegram Chat: https://t.me/crudeoilfinance
🛢 Telegram Channel: https://t.me/crudeoilfinance_ANN
🛢 Blog: https://crudeoilfinance.medium.com/
🛢 Github: https://github.com/CrudeoilFi
🛢 Docs: https://docs.crudeoil.finance
🛢 PitchDeck: https://docsend.com/view/x9puqwhca8ciwbt4
Pyro - Crudeoil Finance: Oh yeah amazing. I expected nothing less than this sir. you have an amazing community
Petro Engineer (Crudeoil Finance): Lovely community
Whatever ways you may look at it, and no matter your bias of the current market conditions, one thing is for sure, the market is in a Bull run. It’s not looking likely to slow down in the coming days, weeks, and months. There seems to be increased optimism driving the hype and growth of this cycle. Many analysts have suggested that the current Bull run will be the largest in history, surpassing that of 2017. The scope of the article will be heavily dependent on the cryptocurrency market. With this current cryptocurrency rally, many people are wondering what period this cycle will end.
The market is either in a Bullish trend (prices continuously rising) or a bearish trend (prices continuously decline). Both the Fundamental and Technical Analyst use trends to pick positions as it is counterproductive to go against the trend. It is still important to note that some traders adopt different styles of trading, such as mean reversion.
The start and end of a market cycle can be completely unpredictable and spontaneous. Often, analysts do not correctly get hold of the market trends until the market is well into the cycle. The market may be rational or irrational more like having a mind of its own. But, a noteworthy aspect of a trending market is the ability to take advantage of its price movements, whether in the short (sell) position or the long (buy) position.
“The trend is your friend until it stops being one” is a phrase used popularly by trend-following traders. It could also serve as a basis for a piece of vital advice on taking profitable positions in such cycles.
The Bull market is a period of increasing optimism and greed. Tools have been created to measure this, such as Alternative.me. The bear market is characterized by increasing pessimism and fear. These emotions drive the price down as investors choose to short or hold their money in reserves.
Market trends are typically used in the stock market and other market types like cryptocurrencies, derivatives, forex, and index markets. The term Bull and Bear is associated with the movement of both animals when they make vicious attacks. For example, a Bear will attack its victim with its paw sliding down on them, while the Bull attacks by charging towards its victim.
Currently, the crypto market is experiencing a boom, a charge in increasing optimism, and an increasing price, putting it in a bull market.
Bitcoin entered its current phase of the Bull run since the fall of last year, 2020. It started with the DeFi boom of August. Simultaneously, Bitcoin exceeded its All-Time High prices, causing alternative coins to take on such increasing buying pressure and price. Almost all major cryptocurrencies in the market have hit and surpassed their ATHs. Thus, it is essential to understand a bit of what makes a Bull market.
Increased Buying Pressure: Market participants heavily bid on a coin/stock/commodity. It’s not smart to go against the trend by shorting; you may likely get Rekt (a term used to describe a trader or trade that is a continuously losing position). When buyers dominate the market, it is much easier to make money following suit.
New projects: You can’t take away the fact that people want to cash in hard on a Bull market. Increasing strings of new projects have arisen, trying to sell investors various forms of dreams. Newbies traders should beware of these occurrences in hype cycles.
Periodic Decline (Sharp Sells): Bull runs don’t mean that price will continually rage without having a bit of correction along the way. The price doesn’t move in a straight line, so it is fair that buyers tend to take profits and re-enter on retracements. Overall, in a Bullish market, the positive sentiments are high.
Longer Timeframe: When looking at a Bull market trend, you typically look from a more extended timeframe. Traders typically use high time frames such as the 4HR, D, W, and M charts. These timeframes allow traders to track trends or months or even years. As with other market analysis techniques, the longer timeframes are more reliable and valid than shorter timeframes.
Understanding the characteristics of a Bull market is a fundamental first step. Knowing how to take advantage of the market is the next most important.
Buy and Hold Strategy: As mentioned earlier, it is unwise to fight a trend by taking a counter position. Your trades are most likely to hit their stop-loss price or get liquidated. A strategy for newbie traders and investors is to buy and hold a stock or coin in this market type. It’s much more comfortable than entry and exiting your positions sporadically.
Buying Retracement and Increasing Positions: Because the market is in an uprising trend, smart investors will take increased positions every time the market makes a correction. It is unlikely that the price will continuously go up. Corrections and slight reversal are expected. Every time the market makes such a declining price move, it corrects back upwards. Picking long-term positions is therefore healthy in this type of market trend.
The market is the playing ground where expertise is tested. In the Bull market, the novice trader is advised to stay with only verified projects. There will be plenty of projects out of thin air offering mouth-watering returns to steal from unsuspecting members of the community. Especially with mostly unregulated cryptocurrencies, the chances of losing your money are pretty high.
In the Bull market, trade cautiously and be wary of fast market changes. There will be sharp market reversals like that witnessed during the Coronavirus pandemic. In a bullmarket, BTC has historically pulled back 30-40% about seven times in each cycle. Currently, BTC has only undergone two of these pullbacks.
Anyone can profit from any market trend, whether a bull or bear market. What separates the novice from the experienced trader is the approach adopted. Due to sharp market declines and quick recoveries characterized in the bull market cycle, retracements often shake weak hands. Test, retest, and backtest your trading strategy to stay profitable.
Lastly, don’t blindly jump into projects without doing your research; the possibility of losing your money is high—better more than less. For now, may the Bull be with you!
Stated simply, to yield-farm in cryptocurrency you must handover custody of your crypto assets to a particular De-Fi platform
The concept of Yield Farming surely creates an imagination of agricultural activity to any mind new to cryptocurrency and the blockchain space. While yield farming may sound a bit obscure, the concepts that apply to farming crops to generate yields have a correlation to these two buzz words that have captivated the world of decentralized finance (De-Fi).
Yield Farming is the current hype of De-Fi, and has hugely become popular among all De-Fi protocols. Protocols that integrate yield farming or liquidity rewards enable user participation in cryptocurrency markets in a passive way. The main reason why it is one of the trending sectors is the promise of huge returns, whether real or imaginary, that are associated with it by many. Yield farming requires little experience and effort, a lot of people have found success in yield farming as a source of passive income. So, how does it really work and how on earth is there a farm in crypto?
In its basic form, yield farming refers to any blockchain protocol that enables any person with some holding of crypto tokens to ‘lock-up’ those holdings with a custodian(the protocol) and in return, they distribute rewards; these rewards are typically distributed as protocol governance tokens. In order words, rather than just keeping one’s crypto assets idle in one’s wallet, one can choose to offer it to a service provider and earn some form of interest.
A fundamental example of this is in lending protocols, creating a peer to smart contract lending/borrowing service. The holder lends his crypto assets to a platform, which in turn makes use of the assets in return for attractive interest payments. Stated simply, to yield-farm in cryptocurrency you must handover custody of your crypto assets to a particular De-Fi platform. In doing so the protocol rewards users, the platform does this as they have some system of benefiting from having token custody. Another common example of yield farming is through providing liquidity to an AMM in return for liquidity incentives -- tokens allotted to liquidity providers. These projects require liquidity to facilitate swaps and bootstrap growth, so it is a win-win for both parties.
De-Fi started on the Ethereum network, so it is no surprise that yield farming from the outset was exclusive to the Ethereum blockchain, with the rewards being in the form of Ethereum-based tokens. The De-Fi space has continued rapid innovation, as other blockchain platforms with yield farming capability have been created and are competing strongly with Ethereum, especially the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
One of the very earliest forms of Yield Farming appeared in 2018 when a Chinese Exchange, FCoin, created its native token FT, tied its value to the transaction fees of its users, and issued the FT coins as rewards to its users. A portion of FCoin’s revenue was also distributed to her users in proportion to how many FT tokens each user held.
Those were the early days of Yield Farming, but the practice became prominent in early 2020 when a blockchain credit platform, Compound Protocol, began issuing its native COMP tokens as a reward to early users. These rewards were allocated to bootstrap growth to the platform in addition to the default interest payments users received.
The very wide acceptance of Compound Protocol’s approach set off a chain reaction of platforms incorporating similar liquidity incentives into their strategy. Ultimately, this lead to the very fast proliferation of platforms offering yield farming opportunities in an effort to capture the market. A perfect example of this is what is coined as De-Fi summer (June-July 2020), where the first explosion of De-Fi platforms occurred.
Two reasons account for this. First is the attraction of good returns on investment. Many new projects offer yield farming opportunities, with rewards in the form of the project’s native tokens. Lots of people aspire to be early farmers in the hope that the tokens will swiftly increase in value such that they can trade their earnings and make a good profit.
Secondly, lots of Yield Farming platforms offer interest rates far higher than traditional fiat banks. Hence more and more people are going into yield farming rather than keeping money in the bank.
Despite all the promises and glitter that yield farming is, it has some very notable downsides and risks worthy of mention.
Users who adopt Ethereum-based De-Fi projects (the majority of De-Fi users) face very expensive transaction fees, especially in high congestion periods. It is not uncommon to experience transaction fees of tens of dollars and sometimes, hundreds. In fact, a ridiculously high amount of $486 was once registered as a transaction fee in 2020! This creates implications for the average De-Fi investor, those who go into yield farming with a small deposit may discover that it will take them a long time before they can earn enough to be in profit after the deduction of transaction fees. This issue is not so much of a problem these days as blockchains such as the BSC boast much lower transaction fees in comparison to the Ethereum Network.
Another risk for yield farmers is the highly volatile nature of cryptocurrencies. There could be situations where a platform’s reward token falls so much in value over time that a farmer may never be able to recoup his investment.
Again, it is not a pleasant experience to lose your hard-earned money to thieves, but this is a very real possibility as far as yield farming and crypto are concerned. Lots of scam projects have entered the market aiming to capitalize on hype and fraud investors. They set up their platforms, and after investors have committed their funds, the operators shut down their channels and disappear with investor’s funds. It is extremely wise to tread carefully when choosing a yield farm to invest in.
Finally, the software programs that power digital currencies often have loopholes that can be exploited by hackers. This possibility is high with projects whose codes have not been audited by a credible third-party. If there are loopholes in the smart contracts, investors’ funds are at high risk because once the loophole is discovered by malicious parts the entire funds in that farm can be siphoned in a moment. A classical case is that of Harvest.Finance that lost more than $20 million in a hack.
In conclusion, the concept of Yield Farming is gaining great traction and attracting much attention from the crypto community and even venture capitalists. There are many platforms that a prospective yield farmer can consider. These include yield farming networks such as Synthetix, Curve.Finance, Compound Finance, MakerDAO, Balancer, Pancake Swap etc. In the final analysis, the key to finding the right farm that will suit you is to carefully Do-Your-Own-Research (DYOR).
