Yearn Finance

Yearn pioneered the yield-vault model: users deposit assets and Yearn vaults (yVaults) route them into the best available strategies — including Curve LP + Convex farming — auto-harvesting and recompounding rewards.

The longest-running, most battle-tested vault aggregator; strategies are community-curated and composable across DeFi.

- yVaults (V3): Automated yield-generating vaults built on the ERC-4626 standard. V3 vaults can be a single strategy or a multi-strategy allocator that balances deposited funds across strategies, giving users a range of risk appetites. Multi-strategy vault tokens are prefixed with 'yv' and appended with a category (e.g. yvUSDC-1). Extensible periphery contracts (4626 Router, Registry, Debt Allocator) sit alongside the core logic. - veYFI (vote-escrowed YFI): On-chain vote-escrow governance system: YFI holders lock tokens for veYFI to direct protocol upgrades, gauge weights and treasury allocation. Longer locks grant more voting power and larger boosts, including a discount on the contributor YFI buy program tied to lock duration. - yCRV / yLockers: Liquid-locker products that wrap governance tokens (yCRV for Curve, yPRISMA for Prisma). yCRV lets users capture Curve boosting/veCRV benefits without locking CRV themselves; yUSD is an ERC-20 representing shares of the popular yCRV/crvUSD vault, auto-compounding yield into yvcrvUSD. - yETH: A basket LST (liquid staking token) product aggregating multiple Ethereum liquid-staking tokens into a single diversified, yield-bearing ETH position, with its own periphery and governance contracts. - yBOLD: Auto-compounding, yield-bearing version of Liquity V2's BOLD stablecoin, built on Yearn V3. It routes BOLD across Liquity V2 Stability Pools, re-evaluating allocation roughly every 30 minutes; permissionless, oracle-less, with no entry/withdraw fee. Users can stake yBOLD to receive st-yBOLD. Live as of June 2, 2025.

- yearn.finance (YFI) — Token, Governance token (veYFI vote-escrow) - yvUSDC, yvETH (yVaults) (yvUSDC) — Receipt, Yearn vault shares

- Smart Contract: Vault and strategy contracts are complex and have been exploited historically (Feb 2021 V1 DAI vault ~$11M via flash loan; April 2023 legacy yUSDT misconfiguration ~$10M+). A copy-paste/config error persisting for years shows how latent bugs in legacy code can be catastrophic. - Systemic: Yearn strategies deposit into and depend on underlying protocols such as Curve, Convex, Aave, Compound and Liquity. A failure, exploit, depeg or economic attack on any of those base protocols (e.g. the Curve 3CRV pool manipulation used in 2021) can propagate losses into Yearn vaults. - Oracle: Some strategies rely on price/exchange-rate assumptions and pool ratios; the 2021 exploit manipulated a Curve pool exchange rate and the 2023 exploit manipulated share-price/pool-ratio calculation, both effectively pricing/oracle-adjacent manipulation vectors. - Governance: Protocol direction, gauge weights, strategy approvals and treasury allocation are controlled through veYFI vote-escrow governance; concentration of locked YFI or governance capture could steer risk parameters or strategy whitelisting against depositor interests. - Collateral: Newer products wrap third-party assets whose stability Yearn does not control — e.g. yBOLD's exposure to Liquity V2 BOLD and its Stability Pools, and yCRV/yETH exposure to CRV and staked-ETH LSTs — so depeg or underperformance of the wrapped collateral flows through to holders.

- Actively-managed mutual fund / fund-of-funds: similar — Like an actively-managed fund, a yVault pools depositors' capital and delegates allocation decisions to strategies that seek the best available returns; multi-strategy V3 vaults resemble a fund-of-funds that spreads capital across sub-strategies.; differs — Yearn is non-custodial and permissionless with on-chain, auditable strategies and no fund manager gatekeeping; returns come from DeFi yield (lending, LP fees, staking) rather than securities, and smart-contract risk replaces traditional custody/counterparty structures.