Yearn Finance Newsletter #25

Week Ending March 7th, 2021

Yearn Finance

Mar 08, 2021

Summary

Introducing the Yearn Partners Program
Yearn Has Deposited into Yearn
Benefits of Yearn yVaults
Yearn Lazy Ape Has Launched
Yearn.rocks Transitioned to Strategists
State of the Vaults
Partnership Roundup
Ecosystem News

Introducing the Yearn Partners Program

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our Yearn Partners program. Protocols in decentralized finance (DeFi) can join our Yearn Partners program and be eligible to receive a portion of revenue generated from any total-value-locked (TVL) contributed to Yearn products. For example, if another protocol in DeFi integrates our yVaults into their interface and directs users to our vaults they will be eligible to receive up to 50% of the revenue generated. In order to track the TVL contributed, the Partner will have a separate Wrapper Token that wraps our standardized Vault Tokens. These Wrapper Tokens will make it easily verifiable to track and measure the amount of TVL contributed by the Partner into our program. This is important in order to accurately and transparently calculate the revenue share percentage due to the Partner.

Partners will be paid their share of revenues on a monthly basis, and there is no membership fee or other ongoing costs required of the Partner. It is important to note that Yearn will not be reviewing the codebase of any Partners and depositors will rely on the developer team of any protocols they deposit with, even if that Partner is in this program. However, if a depositor uses Yearn’s user interface and contracts, these contracts are under the oversight of Yearn’s developer and security team.

At its core, Yearn values composability and interoperability with many protocols in DeFi. Furthermore, we believe this program helps strengthen our core mission of composability and collaboration to help push DeFi forward.

The program is under the final testing and auditing phase, and Partners will gradually roll out over the next several months. If you are interested in becoming a Partner and joining this program we invite you to submit your information via this link.

Yearn Has Deposited into Yearn

Our yVaults represent some of the most efficient and profitable yield-farming products in DeFi. And as a testament to our faith in our products and their ability to earn substantial yield, we have allocated a portion of our own Treasury into one of our yVaults. Roughly $4m in capital has been deposited into the yvUSDP vault that is earning approximately 78% APY, net of fees. This APY is largely due to our yveCRV-DAO “Backscratcher” vault that enables us to obtain boosted CRV rewards for all Curve Finance strategy vaults.

Benefits of Yearn yVaults

Yield-farming on the Ethereum blockchain can be expensive, confusing, cumbersome, and downright exhausting. Our yVaults aim to remove these concerns for average and sophisticated users that merely want to earn yield with almost zero effort. Our yVaults pool capital together and earn yield collectively. By pooling capital together and harvesting yield for the entire vault, we are able to socialize the gas costs related to yield-farming across the entire vault. In other words, it is much more economical to yield-farm in the vault than yield-farming alone as the gas costs are shared across depositors. With rising gas costs on the Ethereum blockchain, this is a huge advantage for smaller farmers who are unable to harvest frequently.

Our yVaults also harvest yields periodically, sometimes even on a daily basis. This periodic harvesting enables the vault to compound rewards that would be very gas intensive for a solo farmer. In addition, for Curve Finance specific yVaults we lock a portion of the CRV rewards earned into our yveCRV-DAO “Backscratcher” vault. This vault enables all Curve Finance vaults to obtain boosted CRV rewards. For more information on how the boost works on Curve Finance, see our explanation at the bottom of our latest State of the Vaults.Some of our vaults have the base CRV reward rate boosted by 2.50x, and unless the individual depositor has locked up a significant amount of CRV they would be unable to obtain this boosted rate. Therefore, our yVaults have two key benefits for depositors (1) they are more economical than for solo depositors by socializing gas costs, and (2) many of our vaults have boosted CRV rewards, leading to higher APYs, thanks to our “Backscratcher” vault.

Yearn Lazy Ape Has Launched

PowerPool has launched the Yearn Lazy Ape (YLA) index that consists of several v1 Yearn yVaults. The YLA is a diversified, dynamically-weighted portfolio of five v1 yVaults. PowerPool will incentivize this index with additional CVP rewards, their native governance token, for holders of the YLA that stake the token in the gauge. Additionally, the YLA will enable users to swap between one of the underlying v1 yVaults without withdrawing and depositing from the vaults.

You can read their Medium post here and deposit into the YLA here.

Yearn.rocks Transitioned to Strategists

Yearn.rocks was previously an interface we used to access some of our experimental vaults. These vaults were not listed on our vault website as they were for testing purposes. Due to the experimental nature of these vaults and the higher level of risks involved, we have transitioned Yearn.rocks to the Yearn Strategists. The Strategist team will maintain the vaults and the interface to interact with them and be renamed to ape.tax. Interactions with these experimental vaults are no longer under the oversight of Yearn, but instead by a separate team of Strategists.

These vaults are experimental in nature and contain a higher level of risk than the vaults listed on our website, but if you are interested in viewing or interacting with them you can do so here.