- The cryptocurrency world has been much faster than the traditional world, and now the DeFi space is running at a quicker pace than crypto.
On Tuesday, a new DeFi project for yield farming was launched called Yam. Within a few hours of its launch, the unaudited project saw a whopping $250 million locked in it. Temporarily it even hit a $325 million nominal fully diluted market cap.
We were serious about this being an experiment and the code being unaudited. Please exercise some caution.
— Yam Finance (@YamFinance) August 11, 2020
Even BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes has jumped into farm YAM, which the community can’t decide if it is good or bad.
Shit, is this bad or good? I don’t know anymore https://t.co/CUEbvKixUC
—
Farmer Bluntz
(@SmartContracter) August 12, 2020
No Premine, No Value But Gains & Gains
The launch of YAM came on a gloomy day when the crypto market turned red following bitcoin down. But, DeFi is in its world.
After surging to an all-time high of $125 today, YAM has gone down to $83.68, as per CoinGecko. Similar to another popular DeFi token YFI, “YAM holds zero inherent value,” reads the announcement.
A governance token of Yam Finance, the project is all about farming YAM by staking popular DeFi tokens.
“Distributed in the spirit of YFI — no premine, no founder shares, no VC interests — simply equal-opportunity staking distribution to attract a broad and vision-aligned community to steward the future of the protocol and token.”
By offering a larger APR rate on several digital assets, it has pushed the prices of the likes of COMP and SNX higher as such decoupling from the broad crypto market.
Many of the tokens involved here are enjoying a surge in their prices — in the past 24 hours, COMP has jumped a whopping 43%, LEND 19.76%, LINK 11.62%, Synthetix 19.86%, and Maker by 22.82%.
Farmers Get YAM
“An experimental protocol,” YAM comes with elastic supply, full on-chain governance, and a governable treasury, similar to Ampleforth (AMPL), where the supply expands and contracts as per market conditions intending to target a 1 USD peg per token.
The difference is 10% of each supply expansion (known as a rebase) is used to buy yCRV, a high-yielding basket of stablecoins. This yCRV is then held in a community governed treasury and used to support price stability.
In its ‘fair-farming’ pools, Liquidity Pools (LP) are awarded YAM. There are eight staking pools, including LINK, COMP, LEND, YFI, MKR, SNX, WETH, and ETH/AMPL.
A total of 5 million YAM are there but subject to change by future releases, which are set to occur every 12 hours. Initially, 2 million YAM, 250k per pool, per week will be distributed to users who stake the tokens as mentioned above. The rest of the 3 million is distributed to YAM LPs for the yCRV/YAM Uniswap Pool.
“This was a 10-day project from start to launch,” says the team while “strongly” urging “caution to anyone who chooses to engage with these contracts.”
