As soon as Publish0x announced they were implementing iFARM as a new tipping token I knew the Publish0x Bump was incoming (see LRC, when implemented as a tipping token it was trading at $0.005, today it's has been holding steady trading between $0.20-$0.70). I quickly went to work investigating exactly what iFARM was, the potential benefits and how I could best utilize my rewards for maximum gains.
What I found was pretty impressive. If you're unfamiliar with Harvest.Finance, there's a pretty good writeup here that can go through the basics of what they do. In a nutshell though, Harvest is a yield aggregator and FARM is their profit share token.
iFARM is an interest bearing token that acts a receipt of FARM staked in the profit sharing pool on Harvest. As of writing this, one iFARM can be redeemed for ~1.165 FARM. APY can vary, but holding iFARM gives between 30-55% APY, which means if you bought iFARM today, if price remains the same than that same iFARM could be worth 1.3-1.5x what you bought it for in a year's time.
In my research I came across three main ways someone could maximize their Publish0x iFARM earnings. Today I'd like to share all three of those with you. I think it's easiest to break them down into three expertise levels, with the starter level being friendly to a crypto newbie and the advanced for those who are already very familiar with DeFi and crypto in general. So without further introduction, let's get into it.
Beginner
As I said above, this strategy is for complete crypto/DeFi beginners. If you're not a newbie you can go ahead and skip along to the next strategies. This one is pretty straightforward. The number one thing that needs to be understood about iFARM when you're a crypto beginner is that you're already earning.
Just by holding iFARM in your wallet you have access to Harvest's profit sharing pool, which sits between 30-50% annual percentage yield (APY). If you would rather swap out your iFARM for another asset, you could do so by going to Harvest.Finance and unstaking your iFARM for FARM then selling on Uniswap or Bancor - but you might be hard pressed to find better yields in something respectable.
I know this is pretty easy to do, just hodl and chill but if you're brand new to DeFi or crypto in general, I don't recommend doing anything else besides hodling and learning. Harvest is one of the premier yield aggregators out there so holding onto their token isn't a bad idea while you learn more about DeFi.
Intermediate
This strategy is for those who are more familiar with DeFi and crypto at large. Rather than just hodling your iFARM, you can put it to work. There's a couple different ways to do that but I'll focus here on one that's a little bit simpler and should be common place for any regular DeFi user, providing liquidity.
Unfortunately there's not a large amount of liquidity for iFARM on Ethereum, at least not enough to make any money. However if we head over to Polygon, Quickswap has ample liquidity for us to make some money. If you're unfamiliar with how to connect your wallet to the Polygon network, there's a pretty good guide here made by the Polygon devs.
This is particularly attractive as you're not only earning interest on your iFARM but also liquidity provision fees on top of that. Plus potentially getting a head start for when Harvest opens up their Polygon farms :).
Advanced
Last up are the advanced strategies. This is definitely not for everyone, this is only for those people that have a strong understanding of DeFi and are willing to add some additional risk to what they're already holding. I've found two main options here, number one is to use your iFARM as collateral on Ruler Protocol. Number two is to use it as collateral to mint fCASH.
Originally I was using my iFARM as collateral for loans on Ruler, since the release of fCASH I've shifted my focus there. There's nothing wrong with Ruler either, I just like the flexibility fCASH can provide. fCASH is a synthetic asset developed in conjunction with UMA Protocol. Users can lock their iFARM as collateral to mint, there is no peg but at a known expiration date fCASH will be redeemable for $1 of iFARM.
There's a lot of different options of what can be done with your fCASH, I won't go into all of them here. But there is a nice infographic that Harvest made that goes through a few of them. Personally I like to buy up fCASH when it's trading around $0.90 or less. With expiry on the 30th of Sept it's like getting an extra 30% APY on iFARM I plan to redeem in Sept (which is also earning 50% APY). Harvest also has a Uniswap v3 vault for the fCASH-USDC pair that receives additional UMA rewards that might be worth using as well.
If you have questions regarding fCASH I highly recommend checking out that infographic I linked above or heading over to the Harvest Discord. There's a ton of info and people you can bounce questions off there.
Closing Thoughts
That's about all I got. I know there are some other ways to maximize your return on your iFARM that might involve unstaking it for FARM and using it to farm other pairs (such as FARM-ETH or FARM-GRAIN), but I wanted to focus primarily on using the token we get from Publish0x. Next up will be a post about ways to use Ampleforth. Let me know if you have any thoughts!
Thanks for reading, hope you got something out of it!
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