A brief history
Yearn.finance was launched by independent developer Andre Cronje in 2020. Cronje has a long career in cryptocurrency and has held positions at smart contract ecosystem Fantom and CryptoBriefing. One of the aims of yearn.finance is to simplify DeFi investment and activities such as yield farming for the broader investor sector. The platform makes use of various tools to act as an aggregator for DeFi protocols such as Curve, Compound and Aave, to bring those who stake cryptocurrency the highest yield possible. Yearn.finance makes a profit by charging withdrawal fees as well as 5% gas subsidization fees. Due to its governance model, these percentages are subject to change by consensus at any time.

YFI in practice
YFI is the cryptocurrency that governs the yearn.finance platform. Anyone who holds YFI tokens can vote on the rules users must follow when using yearn.finance. To be enacted in yearn.finance’s code, a proposal needs more than 50% of the votes. Anyone on the platform can propose, but only YFI holders may vote on it. YFI has an initial fixed supply of 30,000 tokens (which could increase if YFI holders elect to do so). YFI is also used to encourage users to lock cryptocurrencies in yearn.finance and its contracts running on Balancer and Curve. Users who hold YFI can receive revenue collected by the protocol in the form of fees. The yearn.finance system retains $500,000 of fees and distributes the rest to YFI holders. Additionally, yearn.finance capitalizes on a practice commonly called “yield farming,” in which users lock up crypto assets in a DeFi protocol to earn more cryptocurrency. The more assets users lock in a platform, the more tokens they are awarded by the protocols.