What Is Yield Farming? | CoinMarketCap

Yield farming is the practice of staking or lending crypto assets in order to generate high returns or rewards in the form of additional cryptocurrency. This innovative yet risky and volatile application of decentralized finance (DeFi) has skyrocketed in popularity recently thanks to further innovations like liquidity mining. Yield farming is currently the biggest growth driver of the still-nascent DeFi sector, helping it to balloon from a market cap of $500 million to $10 billion in 2020.

In short, yield farming protocols incentivize liquidity providers (LP) to stake or lock up their crypto assets in a smart contract-based liquidity pool. These incentives can be a percentage of transaction fees, interest from lenders or a governance token (see liquidity mining below). These returns are expressed as an annual percentage yield (APY). As more investors add funds to the related liquidity pool, the value of the issued returns decrease accordingly.

At first, most yield farmers staked well-known stablecoins USDT, DAI and USDC. However, the most popular DeFi protocols now operate on the Ethereum network and offer governance tokens for so-called liquidity mining. Tokens are farmed in these liquidity pools, in exchange for providing liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

Liquidity mining occurs when a yield farming participant earns token rewards as additional compensation, and came to prominence after Compound started issuing the skyrocketing COMP, its governance token, to its platform users.

Most yield farming protocols now reward liquidity providers with governance tokens, which can usually be traded on both centralized exchanges like Binance and decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap.

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Yield farmers, and most protocols and platforms, calculate the estimated returns in terms of annual percentage yield (APY). APY is the rate of return gained over the course of a year on a specific investment. Compounding interest, which is computed on a regular basis and applied to the amount, is factored into the APY.

Since the DeFi summer of 2020, yield farmers have been chasing eye-opening thousand percent APYs. However, these protocols and coins may be highly risky and susceptible to rug pulls. Furthermore, the yield is earned in the form of protocol tokens, and is subject to highly volatile price swings.

Yield farming can be incredibly complex and carries significant financial risk for both borrowers and lenders. It is usually subject to high Ethereum gas fees, and only worthwhile if thousands of dollars are provided as capital. Users also run further risks of impermanent loss and price slippage when markets are volatile.

Most notably though, yield farming is susceptible to hacks and fraud due to possible vulnerabilities in the protocols’ smart contracts. These coding bugs can happen due to the fierce competition between protocols, where time is of the essence and new contracts and features are often unaudited or even copied from predecessors or competitors.

Examples of vulnerabilities that resulted in severe financial losses include the Yam protocol (which raised over $400m in days before a critical bug was exposed) and Harvest.Finance, which in October 2020 lost over $20 million in a liquidity hack.

DeFi protocols are permissionless and dependent on several applications in order to function seamlessly. If any of these underlying applications are exploited or don’t work as intended, it may impact this whole ecosystem of applications and result in the permanent loss of investor funds.

There has been a rise in risky protocols that issue so-called meme tokens with names based on animals and fruit, offering APY returns in the thousands. It is advised to tread carefully with these protocols, as their code is largely unaudited and returns are whim to risks of sudden liquidation due to price volatility. Many of these liquidity pools are convoluted scams which result in “rug pulling,” where the developers withdraw all liquidity from the pool and abscond with funds.

As blockchain is immutable by nature, most often DeFi losses are permanent and cannot be undone. It is therefore advised that users really familiarize themselves with the risks of yield farming and conduct their own research.

Originally published at https://coinmarketcap.com.

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