Yearn Finance Newsletter #12

Week Ending November 22nd, 2020

Nov 23, 2020

Welcome to the 12th edition of the Yearn Finance Newsletter. Our aim with this newsletter is to keep the Yearn and the wider crypto community informed of latest news, including product launches, governance changes, and ecosystem updates. If you’re interested in learning more about Yearn Finance, follow our official Twitter and Medium accounts.

Summary

An Introduction to Yearn 2.0 yVaults
YIP-55: Formalize the YIP Introduction & Voting Process Passed
YFI Debt Ceiling Increase Vote on MakerDAO
Feel the Yearn 2 App Released
Sneak Peaks at Yearn 2.0 Website UI
Yearn State of the Vaults
Governance Updates (YIPs)
Ecosystem News
Resources

An Introduction Yearn 2.0 yVaults

We are hard at work developing and testing Yearn 2.0 yVaults that will be released in the next few months. We do not have a scheduled date for their release, but we will notify the community when they are ready. Currently, the code for the primary components of the 2.0 yVaults are under audit, and we have a secondary audit scheduled to commence in the near future.

2.0 yVaults will be a significant improvement from our current yVaults and will also incorporate a new fee structure—passed by governance in YIP-51 & YIP-52. In short: There will be no withdrawal fees, instead there will be a 2% management fee and a 20% performance fee. The management fee will be assessed at each timestamp the harvest function is called. For more details regarding the YIPs that altered the fee structure read here and here.

The 2.0 yVaults will also allow for multiple strategies per vault with programmatically adjustable debt limits. This will enable a yVaults to engage in different strategies that incorporate different protocols. For example: The yETH vault may have part of its funds in Curve.fi farming CRV, and part of its funds in Compound farming COMP. This is an improvement as our current yVaults are only able to engage in one strategy per vault. Additionally, each strategy will be assigned a debt limit that can be programmatically adjusted by the Strategist. If the strategy is very profitable, or shows promising signs, the Strategist can allocate more funds from the vault to it. The ability to adjust funds between strategies will conceivably improve overall profitability for the yVault.

Strategists will also be sharing ½ of the 20% performance fee. This is aimed to align incentives between Strategists, yVault depositors, and YFI holders (governance), as the Strategists’ financial compensation will now be closely tied to the performance of each vault. Additionally, Strategists are paid their performance fee in yVault shares, incentivizing them to continuously improve profitability for the respective yVault. There are approximately 20 Strategists working to craft ingenious strategies for our upcoming 2.0 yVault release and we are very excited to see what strategies will emerge. The increased competition between Strategists to have their strategies approved and implemented will hopefully breed innovation that will benefit all participants within the Yearn ecosystem.

The future is looking very bright! Stay tuned for more updates.

YIP-55: Formalize the YIP Introduction & Voting Process Passed

There has been confusion among members of the community regarding whether Snapshot votes are binding and the overall YIP introduction, deliberation, and implementation process. YIP-55 was introduced last week in order to clearly define and formalize these processes.

Governance votes will now use Snapshot for formal voting, and votes conducted via Snapshot are binding. Further, there are now clear guidelines regarding how new YIPs must be introduced, voted, and implemented.

YIP-55 was approved with over 99% of the eligible vote on November 22nd. You can view the proposal here.

YFI Debt Ceiling Increase Vote on MakerDAO

On November 12th, YFI was added to the MakerDAO ecosystem to enable opening a collateralized debt position (CDP) and mint DAI using YFI as collateral. Shortly after launch the debt ceiling for YFI (7m DAI) was reached. A new executive vote was recently introduced to the MakerDAO governance forum that would increase the debt ceiling for YFI from 7m to 20m DAI.

This executive vote passed on November 21st, and is scheduled to be implemented on November 24th. You can view the proposal here.

Sneak Peaks at Yearn 2.0 Website UI

Members of the Yearn designer team have been hard at work crafting an updated version of the Yearn website UI. We are blessed to have the most talented and dedicated designers in all of crypto. At the moment, there is no specific timeline for the new UI release, but you can view some of the work-in-progress sneak peaks in this tweet. Special thanks to x48_crytpo and all designers working on the update.

Feel the Yearn 2 App Released

Community member, Graham, has completed and released a new version of the Feel the Yearn app. This app displays the following information for each yVault:

Annualized ROI based on most recent weekly, month, and since inception data;
Total vault holdings;
Total strategy holdings;
Personal holdings within the yVault; and
Personal lifetime earnings.

This app is useful to monitor annualized ROIs for each yVault as well as your own personal holdings and performance. You can view the updated app here.