A new legend?
YFI price crossed $38,000 today in many major exchanges. YFI started to trade on Uniswap in the month of July’20 from the price of $32. Price of YFI has really exploded since then and it is now the costliest cryptocurrency. YFI is the governance token of Yearn.Finance, a DeFi protocol developed by Andre Cronje, a South African Software developer. Yearn.Finance is a yield aggregator for lending platforms that rebalances for highest yield during contract interaction and moves the assets between various liquidity pools. YFI token holders can vote for the governance decisions of the protocol and it has a maximum supply of only 30,000 tokens. Low supply is obviously the biggest driver of YFI price explosion. Andre Cronje created YFI to be used as a valueless token but governance of the platform was found to be too vital. Thus a token created for the voting purpose surpassed the price of Bitcoin and created a new history.
Yearn.Finance hosts UIs for the Earn, Zap, APR, and Vaults products – image from their website
YFI 30 days price movement from Coingecko
YFI is an outstanding tale of fair launch and fair governance. The project was always open source. Andre, the creator has handed over the project to the community for the sake of true decentralization. Andre reportedly spent $42,467 on building the platform of Yearn.Finance and double of this on audits. He didn’t keep any token for himself. Andre is a crownless king now. YFI is a fairy tale! But the mammoth rally of YFI has initiated so many YFI forks/clones also. Let’s have look at those.
YFII (DFI.money)
YFII is the first fork of YFI. China’s crypto community forked YFI to create YFII. YFII is the hottest DeFi token in the nascent DeFi ecosystem of China and it is being dubbed as ‘Chinese DeFi’ by some nationalist groups of China. YFII was announced by this medium post on 26th July 2020. YFII is a fork of YFI project with YIP-8 implement. YIP-8 basically halves YFI weekly supply the same as Bitcoin. YFII has a maximum supply of 40,000. YFII was dubbed as a scam initially and Balancer blacklisted the token but the recent ATH was $6000 in many exchanges and it is doing well.
YFII website: https://dfi.money/
YFV (YFValue)
YFV is another fork of YFII. The project was announced by this medium post on 17th August 2020. YFV is the governance token of YFValue protocol. The project aims for more inclusion and intends to bring the true value of yield farming finance accessible to all users. The unique feature of the YFValue is voting of the inflationary rate of the supply and a referral system with automatic burning done fully on-chain. YFV has allowed small players to join the DeFi Yield Farming. YFV has a maximum supply of 15,750,000. YFValue is successfully audited by cybersecurity experts of the Arcadia Group and it is one of the first YFI clones to be audited by a third-party security audit.
YFV website: https://yfv.finance/
YFIE (yfiexchange finance)
YFIE is another fork of YFI. The project was announced via this medium post on 22nd August 2020. The maximum supply of YFIE is 50,000. The website is in beta currently and not properly functional. They want to keep things secret till launching. YFIE is the governance token of the platform but the platform has another token called YFIS, which is generated through staking of YFIE. YFIS use case is not known.
YFIE website: https://yfiexchange.finance
YFL (YF Link)
YFL is a modified clone of YFI. The project was announced via this medium post on 7th August 2020. The aim of the project is to achieve more for the Link marines with the help of a Defi-backed governance token. The project originated from Link community. The developers said that, “We took Andre Cronje’s phenomenal work, forked it, and adapted it for marine use. We’d get the party started by finally bringing some well-deserved yield to LINK marines.” They basically forked Andre’s Yearn contract and switched it to accept LINK instead of yCRV. The website is functional but currently in beta. The maximum supply of YFL is 52,000.
YFL website: https://yflink.io/
YFFI (yffi.finance)
The project is recently launched. The website is in beta and much details aren’t available about the project. YFFI is the governance token of the platform. The maximum supply of YFFI is 30,000 as per CoinMarketCap but 58,125 as per Coingecko.
YFFI website: https://www.yffi.finance
Wifey.finance
The project was announced by this medium post on 3rd August 2020. The team said, “By now, you’ve had your blue, pink, and orange flavours of the day. They’re boring. Leave them. Come party with your new, Green love, WIFEY! WIFEY is your YFI clone that gives you the most.” They joined hands with the C.R.E.A.M protocol, a Compound fork to leverage yield farming, for the distribution of the token.
Wifey.finance website: https://wifey.finance
Cronje envisioned YFI as a valueless token but that won’t be the case anyway. The skyrocketing price of YFI and its clones are signalling that only. More and more clones are on the way. Recently Aave has included YFI as collateral in its platform. YFI will be used for lending and borrowing also. How long will the boom sustain? The tokens have use cases and the low supply is a great price driver. The clones/forks obviously took off easily. DeFi is the buzzword in the crypto space and yield aggregation is here to stay. Yes, all these experiments are making DeFi riskier. All YFI clones may not sustain down the line but the world is witnessing a great financial revolution. Fork, clone or copy! It is always possible to play the DeFi game in a different manner.
Cheers!