Download or read book Decentralized Finance Investment and Yield Farming Explained written by IntroBooks Team and published by IntroBooks. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yield farming is regarded as the process of locking up or staking cryptocurrencies in exchange for incentives. Although investment yield expectations are nothing unique, the all-inclusive definition of yield farming has emerged from the decentralized finance market segment. The general concept is that people can receive tokens for participating in DeFi applications. Yield farming is also known as liquidity mining. Because of the laws of supply and demand, the success of yield farming has become a self-contentment prophecy, similar to the initial coin offering boom of 2017. Users have flocked to it as each new project that appears brings new tokens or possibilities to earn rewards with the hope of getting a share in the yield on offer. In turn, this realization triggers a demand that keeps pushing up the value invested in the project and the corresponding tokens. The precise dynamics of yield farming are dependent on the individual DeFi application's terms and conditions. The practice began by offering users a tiny fraction of transaction fees, like Uniswap or Balancer, to bring liquidity to a specific application. However, using a DeFi application and earning the project token in exchange is the most standard yield farming technique. This practice became widely known in the early summer of 2020 when Compound revealed that it would start supplying its COMP governance token to borrowers and lenders, using the Compound application's features. It was an instant success, and Compound was pushed to the top of the DeFi rankings. Since then, other projects have followed in developing DeFi applications with native tokens or compatible governance and gratifying users with their tokens. It has repeated the popularity of COMP, such as the BAL token of Balancer's, which instantly gained a 230% hike after its initial launch. Every new project's steady growth sparks further creativity, as projects compete intensely on users' behalf. The most efficient yield farmers optimize their returns by deploying more complex investment strategies. These techniques typically entail staking tokens in a series of protocols to achieve the full yield. Yield farmers usually exchange stable coins, such as Tether (USDT), Dai, or USD Coin (USDC), as they provide a convenient solution to manipulate gains and losses. However, it is also common to use cryptocurrencies such as ETH (Ether) regarding farm yield.