Harvest Finance

As yield farming became more prevalent and lucrative in the summer of 2020, decentralized finance (DeFi) users on Ethereum needed to complete increasingly complex and gas intensive operations in order to achieve the promised high APY's associated with these strategies. Harvest Finance was created so that users could achieve high yields while saving on gas costs. By pooling deposited assets into strategized vaults and harvesting yield at opportune times, Harvest Finance allows users to simply deposit their asset while the protocol performs the necessary transactions to maximize yields. Once a user deposits tokens in a vault, they'll receive an fToken ERC-20 token. For example, if a user deposits into the USDC vault then they'd receive fUSDC. This fToken token represents a depositors share of the associated vault. Deposits can be withdrawn at any point, and as deposits are withdrawn the corresponding amount of fToken tokens will be burned.

After launching in September 2020 the protocol reached over $1b TVL by mid-October. The core development team behind the project is anonymous and controls the implementation of new vault strategies and creating new vaults themselves. The native project token, FARM, was distributed in a fair-launch manner (no pre-mine, no investors) when the project kicked off. After reviewing weekly FARM emissions, the community voted to reduce the weekly emission rate by 4.45% and also to cap the supply of FARM tokens at 690,420. The emission reduction vote also resulted in a burn of 14,850.108 FARM tokens.

The project suffered an exploit in late October 2020. Through the use of flash loans the exploiter was able to net ~$24m from the protocol. As expected, the TVL in the project dropped from ~$1b to ~$335m and the FARM token dropped from ~$255 to ~$100. The FARM token price has been steadily increasing since January 2021 as has the TVL in the protocol.