yearn.finance

Previously known as iEarn, yEarn.finance, was created by a single developer, Andre Cronje. After suffering an exploit in February, 2020 Andre announced he was stepping away from the project after facing backlash from the community. He later returned and the project re-branded to yEarn.finance introducing a suite of new tools such as Earn, Vaults, yInsure, and StableCredit.

The project rose to prominence after introducing its native YFI token. Prior to its launch, the protocol had around $8 million in assets under management which quickly rose to over $400m within the first week. Anyone who deposited liquidity on Curve yPool and YFI Balancer pool within the first week of launch, was qualified to claim YFI. This generated a lot of attention to yEarn.finance and its launch mechanism has helped develop the dApps into an active community, particularly since there were no allocations to the team or investors, meaning it is governed entirely by users.

Multisig Governance Initially, Andre had the exclusive ability to mint tokens but that privilege was later extended to 9 multi-sig owners requiring 6 signatures. These members are active members in the DeFi community and Andre did not include himself as a signatory.

Vaults Launch In Yearn.Finance V2, the team launched a new product called Vaults. It is essentially a smart savings account that maximizes the value accrual of deposited assets. yUSD is the first vault that launched and it reached ~$600M within days. The success of yUSD sparked the community to innovate more on this product, and in the end, yETH was born. yETH vault created so much hype, on the first day alone, users deposited ~$140M worth of ethers. This event triggered Maker(the protocol who made DAI, a key component in yETH accumulation strategy) to increase the debt ceiling in DAI. At the time of writing, The vault still closed temporarily, citing that the current asset under management is sufficient for risk and rewards returns.