Liquidity · Vaults · YFI
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 original DeFi yield-aggregating vaults.
YFI price
$1972.57
+3.2% 24h
Latest data · 15 min delay
The longest-running, most battle-tested vault aggregator; strategies are community-curated and composable across DeFi.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
30,000 YFI (fair-launched July 17, 2020, no pre-mine or founder allocation)
CoinMarketCap Academy — Growth of Yearn.Finance & YFI~$10M+ (reported ~$11.5M) from legacy misconfigured yUSDT; V2/V3 vaults unaffected
Halborn — Explained: The Yearn Finance Hack (April 2023)How Yearn Finance maps onto established TradFi structures, and where it diverges.
Actively-managed mutual fund / fund-of-funds
Yearn Finance
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.
TradFi analogue
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.
Andre Cronje
Founder / original developer Created Yearn and fair-launched YFI in July 2020 with no allocation to himself. He later stepped back from day-to-day development; the protocol is maintained by a distributed set of contributors and yTeams under DAO governance.
Yearn contributors / veYFI DAO
Decentralized development and governance A community of independent contributor teams (yTeams) builds and maintains vaults and strategies, funded and directed through on-chain veYFI governance and the protocol treasury rather than a single company.
Key milestones: launches, upgrades, exploits and governance events.
Fair launch of YFI
ExecutedAndre Cronje distributed 30,000 YFI to early liquidity providers with no pre-mine, no VC round and no founder allocation, establishing Yearn's governance token via a fair launch.
SourceveYFI vote-escrow governance audited
ExecutedyAudit completed a review of the veYFI vote-escrow tokenomics (VotingEscrow and Gauge contracts) over ~20 days, ahead of the on-chain veYFI governance rollout.
SourceyVaults V3 audited by ChainSecurity
ExecutedChainSecurity completed its audit of Yearn Vaults V3 (v3.0.0), the ERC-4626 rewrite enabling single- and multi-strategy vaults, alongside audits from StateMind and yAudit.
SourceyBOLD goes live
ExecutedYearn integrated Liquity V2 and launched yBOLD/st-yBOLD, an auto-compounding stablecoin yield product on Yearn V3.
SourceYearn is a DeFi yield-aggregation protocol that pools user capital into automated vaults which move funds between yield opportunities to maximize returns while minimizing individual user effort. Its V3 yVaults use the ERC-4626 standard and can be single-strategy or multi-strategy allocators.
YFI was fair-launched by Andre Cronje on July 17, 2020 with no pre-mine, no VC round, no private sale and no founder allocation. The initial 30,000 YFI were distributed entirely to users who provided liquidity to Yearn's early pools; Cronje kept zero tokens for himself. The launch became a widely-copied template for 'fair launches' in DeFi.
Governance is conducted on-chain via veYFI (vote-escrowed YFI). Holders lock YFI to receive veYFI and vote on protocol upgrades, gauge weights and treasury allocation; longer locks yield more voting power and larger reward boosts.
Yes. In February 2021 a flash-loan attack drained roughly $11 million from a V1 DAI vault by manipulating a Curve pool exchange rate. In April 2023 a legacy, misconfigured yUSDT contract (pointing at Fulcrum iUSDC instead of iUSDT since deployment) was exploited for roughly $10-11.5 million. Yearn V2/V3 vaults were not affected by the 2023 incident.
Recent additions include V3 yVaults, veYFI governance, yLockers (yCRV, yPRISMA), the yETH LST basket, and yBOLD, an auto-compounding yield-bearing wrapper for Liquity V2's BOLD stablecoin that went live in June 2025.
