The space of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is undoubtedly where all eyes are right now. The value locked in lending protocol continues to surge, and it shows absolutely no signs of slowing down.
Every day is riddled with exciting events. Today, one of the recently launched DeFi tokens, YFI, brings returns upwards of 35,000% to those who got in the party early. The funny thing behind all this is that it was never intended to have any financial value.
On July 17th, Andre Cronje announced the release of Yearn Finance (YFI) – the token for an existing yield aggregating platform.
Yearn Finance, as stated in the post, had about $8 million in assets under management, providing an APY of about 10.58% since its launch.
Cronje also discussed a few other products. The most interesting bit comes toward the end of the announcement.
“In further efforts to give up this protocol (mostly because we are lazy and don’t want to do it), we have released YFI, a completely valueless 0 supply token. We re-iterate, it has 0 financial value. There is no pre-mine, there is no sale, no you cannot buy it, no, it won’t be on Uniswap, no, there won’t be an auction. We don’t have any of it.” – said Cronje.
Needless to say, that’s not how things turned out.
Not only was the token listed on Uniswap, but according to the exchange, it has provided returns upwards of 35,000% in the short week since it has been on it. Currently, it trades at around $3,125 on Uniswap.
And if that’s not impressive enough, the total value locked in its liquidity pool is $371.94 million, according to DeBank.
In other words, even the liquidity locked in the protocol has increased by about 4,600% in less than a week.
This further makes the case for the strong developments going on in DeFi. The total value locked in lending protocols has exceeded $4 billion, according to DeFi Pulse. Maker has reclaimed its top spot, while Aav has dethroned Compound as the second biggest protocol in the field.
Interestingly enough, Yearn Finance has become the 6th largest lending protocol, surpassing the likes of Balancer.