April 23, 2020
I've been staking and farming on other platforms such as Pancakeswap, Beefy Finance, and Cubdefi.com all of these are under Binance Smart Chain. Then I decided to try out farming my BUSD at Venus using Harvest Finance at 37.48% APY since this is the only token available I have. The APY is still profitable considering it is a stablecoin, so instead of letting it sleep, “Why not let them work at the farm and earn other tokens right?. I am a #BinanceFARMer and I never bothered to farm Harvest Finance because of its gas fees, I am just a small farmer so I don't have much to spend on high fees. Now, that BSC has already integrated with Harvest I grabbed the chance to try the platform for the first time.
But before diving into how I did it, let's have a little background about Harvest Finance and its integration with Binance Smart Chain.
What is Harvest Finance?
Image from Harvest Finance
Harvest Finance is a decentralized protocol that helps yield farmers in finding the most fertile land to sow then harvest. After locating the best place to farm, its system assigns the newest farming schemes to enhance the yields.
Yield harvesting protocol was inspired by the problems faced by young farmers, which are the rising of transaction fees, moving funds between Defi systems, and the complexity of auditing smart contracts.
The platform addresses the key barriers in farming to small farmers in providing a one-stop platform that can easily handle APY tracking, cost of transactions, and develop a fund deployment strategy while securing farmers' fund's safety.
You can find this on harvest FAQ's
Harvest Finance has been audited by Haechi Audit, PeckShield, Least Authority, and Certik. Despite that Haechi found some minor issues with governance and other aspects, the four audit firm has stimulated to issue the protocol with a clean bill of health because the Harvest team was able to fix them.
This is Chad the Harvest Finance Farmer mascot,when you see this figure your mind will be “Ah! That's Harvest Finance!” through Chad who rides the Tractor 🚜 it's easy to recognize harvest finance.
What are FARM and IFARM?
Harvest Finance has a governance token called $FARM and also has a yield-bearing token which is the $iFARM.
FARM is a cashflow token for Harvest. It is available on UniSwap.
IFARM is a yield-bearing token for Harvest. It can be acquired by depositing into FARM on the front page with the Use iFARM checkbox.
Why Harvest Finance Eyed Binance Smart Chain and decided to Integrate with them?
The rapid growth of PancakeSwap since it was launched steal the attention of Harvest Finance as it surpasses 90 Million in daily trading volume. Due to the popularity of PancakeSwap a DEX under Binance Smart Chain, Harvest Finance is looking to hire two smart chain developers to add Harvest to BSC. Harvest is one or of the largest yield aggregators with a $284,715,249.88 Total Value Locked (TVL) currently.
“Binance is one of the largest brands in centralized exchanges and they have expertly leveraged that to incubate their blockchain and DEX, which has become fertile grounds for yield farming and projects looking to entice you away from Ethereum. At Harvest Finance we think this is an opportunity to show that “cross-chain” yield farming is not only possible, but it will also be one of the next major milestones for the yield farming ecosystem.”-Red a moderator from the Harvest Finance team.
With this integration, it will permit users to yield farm on Binance that brings back the rewards tokens to Harvest Finance creating a cross-chain mechanism.
Other developers and traders are not much concerned with originality and thorough decentralization. During an interview with Coin Telegraph, Red said that despite Ethereum is “the king of kings”, Harvest Finance is motivated by profit maximalism.
“Harvest sees a growing number of projects that are attempting to alleviate the pain associated with high gas costs on Ethereum,” said Red. “[...] Harvest is focused on providing the best sources of yield for farmers. If that yield exists on another chain and can be safely utilized, we will turn on the tractors.”
Harvest believes that the more accessible the platform, the more users will come. BSC transaction costs are difficult to ignore for projects looking to provide value for their users.
According to Premia Republic, BSC will serve as a simple path for a larger pool of users who are capable of using smart contracts products, as long as the projects are building with explicit decentralization in mind.
“[We] don't think building on BSc is a bad thing at all. Whether everyone agrees or not, retail and a large portion of the participating market are being priced out of some of the services offered in Defi due to gas fees,”they said.
The bottom point of this integration is the rising gas fees in Ethereum causing pain to farmers. This will also bring more users of Harvest Finance through BSC.
How I farm on Venus using Harvest Finance
Disclaimer: All written here is based on my initiative and experience, if you want to invest. Always DYOR and invest only what you can afford to lose and this is not financial advise. Always remember any kind of investment has risk.
There are a lot of tokens and LP that runs on BSC and are now available in Harvest Finance. In this article, I farm using BUSD at Venus Protocol. I chose BUSD because that's the only available token I have, besides it is a stablecoin and does not fluctuate so much so it's better to let them grow.
I used TRUST WALLET in this.
I open my wallet then proceed to DApps
I already have 30 BUSD in my wallet, but if you want to try it out check Harvest Finance then choose what token you want to stake or let it farm. If you don't have funds yet in your wallet you can buy them at Binance then send them to your Trust wallet.
First - I Pasted the link of harvest finance after that the site home will appear.
Second- On the upper side make sure to replace the network from Ethereum to BSC.
Third- Chose Smart Chain
Fourth- Connect your wallet then click Binance Smart Chain to proceed.
After you click the Binance Smart Chain platforms will appear.
I chose Venus Protocol then click BUSD.
After I click BUSD options will appear then I saw my balance which is 30.05 only. I click MAX then next is DEPOSIT. I paid $.19 for the fees.
After approving the transaction, it shows Approving, just wait for a second.
Once approved, the balance will turn zero while the fVENUS-BUSD became 29.95. To proceed click STAKE ALL.
You will pay for another fee, in this I paid $.64. Then another fees occur worth $.43 to finally finished the transaction I paid the last fee which is $.18.
I paid 4x of fees a total of $1.44, much cheaper compared to the gas fees of Ethereum. First is to deposit, then approve deposit all, stake all, and approved staking.
After approving all the fees, a notification pops that BUSD stake completed, then it was reflected on Staked balance.
After 24hrs of staking I already earned 0.000088779 bFARM, it is not much but an honest work. By the way the APY during the process of staking was only 37.48% but right now it is 30.74%, it changes from time to time.
I finally succeeded staking at Venus using harvest finance.
What to do with bFARM?
bFARM is what I earn from staking my BUSD, if I will harvest it I will get back my BUSD and the bFARM. The bFARM is convertible to $FARM or I will wait for bFARM pool then stake them again and let them multiply.
References;
Closing Thoughts
It was a great experience exploring harvest finance, I wanted to try it before because I keep reading an article from @PVMihalache (special thanks to this awesome guy for guiding me) he is a farmer at harvest finance, but due to gas fees I never tried. Now with BSC integration, I finally tried it, another learnings and another earnings opportunity discovered.
I finally meet Chad!
bFarm can also be converted into any other BSC token with anyswap ! Really great post ! I'm using harvest finance for few weeks too and it really looks great !