The Full Story: Yam Finance’s Rise & Fall & Rise Again

From $160 to $0.7. How did the governance token of a brand new DeFi protocol explode in value before completely collapsing just 2 days later? A bug in one line of code in a smart contract settled the fate of the launch of Yam Finance. Let’s start at the beginning.

Setting Up The Stage

Yam Finance is a decentralized finance (DeFi) project that combined different features from other DeFi projects, including an elastic supply inspired by Ampleforth, a distribution system similar to Yearn Finance, and a Compound Finance-based governance protocol. Essentially, Yam Finance is a protocol where people can lend and borrow crypto assets without the need of going through a middleman.

The attractiveness of DeFi projects resides mainly in what has now become popular as yield farming. Getting 2% interest on your USDC deposits is lucrative enough on its own, but adding what is essentially free money to each transaction makes DeFi irresistible. This free money comes in the form of governance tokens i.e. tokens used to steer the project through voting. The more popular a DeFi project is, the more the value of its governance tokens grows, especially when they are scarce in circulation. And that is what yield farming is – traders earning on interest rates and governance tokens by utilizing their digital asset holdings. That is passive income at its finest. But, and this is a big but, DeFi is quite risky.

Now, in the case of Yam Finance, the governance token was appropriately named YAM. With a total supply set at 5 million tokens, scheduled to be released in two waves, and no percentage pre-mined, the yield farming potential of the protocol was understandably FOMO-inducing. In less than 24 hours after launch, the protocol was already managing close to $600 million in assets. But it didn’t last long.

A 48-Hour DeFi Frenzy

A New Hope

As Yam Finance collapsed unto itself, it became apparent that there was something special about the project. People were still working, trying to figure out a way to save it from its impending demise as YAM headed for the zero mark. A plan was presented to the community, where the migration to the new version would happen in two consecutive steps, this time with audited code:

• Phase 1 – YAM holders burn their tokens via a smart contract and receive YAMv2 tokens in return. The contract used for this process was audited by Peckshield Inc.. At this point, the protocol will not have on-chain governance. Instead, off-chain signature voting will be used.
• Phase 2 – YAMv3 is deployed, allowing YAMv2 holders to swap their deprecated tokens for the new YAMv3 tokens via a new contract, which will again be audited. On-chain governance is restored.

Close to $115,000 were gathered from 28 contributors on Gitcoin Grants, resulting in a substantial budget set for auditing. At 4:20 PM UTC on 19 August, Phase 1 of the migration plan was executed. The old YAM token became useless, while the new YAMv2 token regained a lot of value – currently trading at around $17.

At this point, the plan is to wait until Phase 2 of the migration plan is fully audited and move on with deployment afterwards. No date has yet been set for the launch of YAMv3, but judging by the short history of the project, it probably won’t take long.