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The big boys on crypto markets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP may be slumping today, but DeFi tokens are still on fire. Five of the top six performing tokens in the top one hundred are related to DeFi, and there is a good reason for that.
Enter the Yam
A new yield farming opportunity called Yam Finance has been launched promising huge returns and a revolutionary and fair financial farming ecosystem. Since it launched late on Tuesday, August 11, yield farmers have been loading up on DeFi tokens to stake on the platform to earn YAM.
According to the official blog post, Yam is an experimental protocol with an ‘elastic supply; token, which aims to seek eventual price stability and a peg to the US dollar. With 5 million tokens available, it will take an allocation of 10% and put it into a stablecoin called yCRV, which will be locked into a treasury for protocol governance purposes.
Two million of those tokens went live yesterday, available to users who stake in eight pools on the platform. Staking tokens available are COMP, MKR, LEND, LINK, YFI, SNX, wBTC, and an ETH/AMPL Uniswap v2 pool, and it is no surprise that most of them are pumping at the moment.
The remaining 3 million tokens will be gradually released and earnt by providing liquidity from the previously earnt YAM tokens.
The token itself has surged from that ‘zero value’ to over $125 before a 50% correction, and, according to YAMalytics, the total value staked across those pools is now over $300M.
The most popular pool at the time was the wrapped Ethereum ‘Weth Homestead’ pool, which had accrued over 30% of the total. LINK came in second with 22.7% of the total, and YFI was the third most popular.
Naturally, the Bitcoin maximalists and crypto naysayers were critical, with some labeling it as a scam, Ponzi, and pump and dump. Yam Finance itself, to its credit, did exercise caution with its unaudited smart contracts.
We were serious about this being an experiment and the code being unaudited. Please exercise some caution.
— Yam Finance (@YamFinance) August 11, 2020
DeFi Tokens on Fire
Because the first wave of token releases has been based on staking other tokens, they have largely surged in price today as TVL is drawn down from other DeFi protocols.
The Compound Finance token, COMP, has pumped a whopping 30% to top $230, while Aave’s LEND surged 16%, and MKR topped $700 with a 14% gain. Synthetix’ SNX has also made 8% on the day, and Ampleforth’s AMP was up 13%.
All of this has happened while crypto assets are largely in the red, and markets have dumped $15 billion over the past 24 hours.
This article was first published on Aug 12, 2020.
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