For months, the term “yield farming” has been a recurring meme in the crypto space, with users of Ethereum's decentralized financial ecosystem relentlessly using it to describe their pursuit of ever higher yields.
It was surprising, then, that there was no DeFi project exploiting this meme to its advantage, at least until Harvest Finance (FARM) arrived. A little less than two weeks ago, a group of developers launched the project with the aim of giving "bread to the people" and making the "hard work" of using Ethereum and DeFi "easier" - here the quotations in real time.
Since its launch about two weeks ago, there has been a surge in adoption - the project currently has a cryptocurrency worth $ 384 million. Its token also has a market capitalization of over $ 10 million.
What is Harvest Finance?
Harvest Finance is a DeFi protocol that groups user funds, then uses them in yield farms to get the maximum return with the minimum outlay. The platform currently supports top stablecoins such as Tether's DAI, USD Coin and USDT, along with two tokenized Bitcoins and a Curve token for the RenBTC-WBTC pool.
The stablecoins are currently active in Swerve, a fork of Curve that promises to be more decentralized and "community owned" than its predecessor. Swerve has over $ 600 million of total blocked value in its contracts.
Unlike other yield farming protocols, Harvest has an add-on for the FARM token. In summary, 30% of the profits made by companies are used to buy FARM, which means that the coin basically provides dividends to the owners.
Competitor of Yearn.finance?
Famous decentralized finance commentator and analyst CryptoYieldInfo suggested that the recent direction Harvest and FARM are moving in suggests that the project could become a competitor of Yearn.finance (YFI): “This might be a strange comment, but if $ YFI has a competitor, it could be $ FARM. Several leagues below of course. But it is worth keeping an eye on ”.
However, it is important to note that unlike Yearn.finance the protocol has some security issues. First, there is no multi-signature configuration, which means that the control of the strategies used by the farms and the distribution of the coins are currently controlled by pseudonymous developers.
As we saw in the case of SushiSwap's chef Nomi, while developers may be transparent at first, things can change over time. It appears that Harvest tends to prioritize yields over safety.
Yearn.finance, on the other hand, did not change its stablecoin strategy from Curve to Swerve, presumably to ensure that users did not lose funds in the event of a bug in Swerve contracts.
In any case, Harvest is under review by PeckShield and other major companies in the industry. PeckShield released a preliminary “integrity check” report and found no logical errors in the contracts.
