Since the announcement of the upcoming Year Vaults v2, Year.Finance has successively announced collaborations with 10 projects including Hegic, Alpha, Pickle, Cream, PowerPool, Cover, Bounce, Akropolis, Sushiswap and Chainlink to improve capital efficiency and share development resources , To jointly build a DeFi ecosystem.
Among the 10 projects involved in collaborative cooperation, some are aimed at on-chain option transactions, some are good at centralized governance, and some involve auctions and oracles. AC almost all “cooperated” on various concepts in the DeFi field.
So can Year further promote the development of Year’s ecology through collaboration with these?
Below we will analyze these 10 projects to analyze Yearn’s layout and planning in the future DeFi field.
1. On-chain options trading platform Hegic
On November 10, Andre posted that Yearn and Hegic collaborated (although Molly, the creator of Hegic, recently tweeted that the two parties did not formally cooperate).
Hegic is an option protocol on the Ethereum chain. The unique feature is that the seller is a large liquidity pool (LP), and users directly “bet” with the liquidity pool. But Hegic’s on-chain options have some limitations:
1. There is no tokenization, not ERC20 tokens, and cannot be sold or transferred;
2. Hegic uses implied volatility for option pricing. Scientists can buy options before the IV fluctuates sharply, causing the seller’s (liquidity provider) equity to be damaged;
3. Two hacker attacks after the code was open sourced;
4. Only supports WBTC and ETH LP pools, etc.
Andre has implemented his own option free trading logic on the underlying technology of Hegic’s on-chain options-“mapped” as the NFT of ERC721. Options can be freely transferred and traded as NFT, and support all Uni trading pairs. The option pricing model was changed from the previous Black Scholes to Realizing Smiles, using actual volatility pricing.
The Yearn Vaults v2 machine gun pool will adopt the Hegic option strategy, using option hedging to reduce the free loss of liquidity providers to improve their capital efficiency.
2. DeFi liquidity mining and lending agreement Alpha Homora
Alpha is a project that focuses on building an ecosystem of cross-chain DeFi products. Its Alpha Homora supports the use of leverage for liquidity mining, and has the functions of minimizing losses and saving gas, optimizing transactions, and automatic reinvestment.
On November 24, Andre initiated and passed a proposal to migrate KP3R’s Uniswap liquidity (approximately 9,500 ETH, more than 11 million US dollars) to Alpha Homora’s proposal to increase the return on funds.
In addition, Alpha Homora v2 will be launched soon, and its flagship LP and revenue tokenization (ERC1155) and Andre’s upcoming Deriswap-option tokenization (ERC721) are similar in the same way.
3. Pickle.Finance, DeFi aggregation revenue protocol
On November 24, Andre stated in an article that Pickle will be brought into Year’s ecosystem, including TVL, strategy, security expertise, and the merger of talents. From a job function perspective, Pickle core developers will focus on strategy, and Year will provide additional security, peer reviews, audits and discussions. Not long ago, Pickle was hacked and lost nearly $20 million in Dai.
If Year is to build a machine gun pool around Curve, then Pickle is to build a machine gun pool around Uniswap. Andre introduced the concept of Reward Gauge (similar to Curve’s Gauge) and launched DILL (vePickle) governance tokens.
Put the shares in the Yearn Vaults v2 machine gun pool into Pickle’s Gauge to get more DILL. Holding DILL can also increase the return rate of Vaults v2 share in the Gauge.
4. DeFi loan agreement Cream.Finance
On November 26, Yearn and Cream developers announced that they would cooperate to launch the Cream v2 version, mainly focusing on lending and leveraged products.
Specifically, Cream v2 allows users to increase the yield through leverage. Among them, Year’s Vaults strategy and its share tokens can be used as collateral for Cream and obtain leverage services. Cream v2 will also become the launchpad of StableCredit (StableCredit is one of Year’s core projects and aims to create a single agreement for decentralized loans, AMM and stablecoins). The synergies of the two development teams include facilitating reserve services between the agreements and urging other agreements such as Aave, Compound, dYdX, Synthetix and Alpha Homora to obtain more capital without limiting their resources.
5. DeFi centralized governance protocol Power Pool
On November 2, Power Pool officially announced that it will integrate PowerIndex with the Yearn governance system by building a two-sided market. PowerIndex is a decentralized DeFi index similar to ETF, consisting of 8 different governance tokens (GT), and Year is one of them. This means that the YFI tokens in the index contract will participate in the voting for the Year proposal based on the decision of the CVP token holders.
On December 7, the YETI proposal for the Yearn Ecosystem Token Index was officially launched, including YFI, SUSHI, CREAM, AKRO, COVER, KP3R, CVP and PICKLE.
6, DeFi Insurance Agreement Cover Protocol
The predecessor of Cover (SAFE) is an insurance-related mining agreement, while Cover is an agreement that allows users to mint, redeem and purchase insurance to prevent smart contract risks. It allows anyone to purchase insurance for anything.
On November 28, just 10 days after the official Cover was launched, the two parties formally announced their collaboration. The merger with Cover allows Yearn to protect the ecosystem for itself, allowing Yearn’s vault to obtain more protection from the rate of return to hedging risks, and without any upfront user costs.
Andre said in his medium article that Year needs a simple, manageable, low-gas-cost underwriting coverage, and Cover is an insurance method that uses money market permanent underwriting. Not only that, he also has his own expectations for Cover v2:
1. Perpetual insurance;
2. Use first and pay later insurance;
3. No restriction on collateral (Agnostic collateral).
7. DeFi auction agreement Bounce.Finance
On November 30, the DeFi auction tool Bounce announced the integration of the NFT grant platform yGift.to launched by Year, and said that the Bounce market for yGift.to will soon be open to users. In addition, YFI will also be added as an auction trading pair. Prior to this, YFI launched the NFT grant platform yGift.to, which allows users to send custom NFT collections to friends, as well as cryptocurrencies as gifts, such as YFI, yUSD, etc.
8. Polkadot DeFi front-end financial service agreement Akropolis
Akropolis aims to build a financial service platform based on blockchain. After the two parties announced their collaboration on November 30, Yearn will continue to develop DeFi agreements such as loan agreements, and Akropolis will become a front-of-house institutional service provider and will also develop customized investment strategies, including: Year Merging development resources with Akropolis, connecting Akropolis to the Year, Pickle and Cream agreements, and Yearn will also access the new investment strategy and business development expert system developed by Akropolis.
9. DeFi AMM protocol Sushiswap
On December 1, Yearn announced a partnership with Sushiswap. Sushi will focus on expanding its AMM ecosystem and, together with Year, will focus on expanding its strategy. While Yearn’s strategy requires more professional and customized AMM experience, Sushi began to push the boundaries of revenue and currency markets. The Sushi team will also contribute strategies to the Year, Keep3r, Cream, Cover and other protocols. In addition, Sushiswap will cooperate with Yearn to launch Deriswap, a decentralized derivatives exchange.
The collaboration between Yearn and Sushiswap is called “more aggressive synergy” by Andre. At the same time that Andre announced the cooperation with Sushi, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams sent a tweet about “urgently recruiting senior front-end engineers”. Does the sudden cooperation make the boss of DEX panic? Uniswap v3, which has been delayed for a long time, may be on the agenda again.
10. DeFi oracle protocol Chainlink
On December 2, Andre announced that it will use the oracle project Chainlink to expand the Keep3r network, which means that Keep3r nodes (external personnel and or teams that perform work, namely Keeper) will be upgraded to Chainlink nodes to improve security performance. After that, Chainlink nodes will also be able to start running more and more Keeper jobs, and finally form a network that achieves high security performance through Keeper, reliability and resistance to Sybil attacks through Chainlink.
From the current point of view, the objects of Yearn collaboration and cooperation are becoming more and more heavyweight, and the cooperation content and complexity are getting higher and higher, including the official announcement of the integration of Keep3r network into Sushiswap and Chainlink.
Andre once said that Keep3r is an independent project, not directly affiliated to Year, but will help Year and the entire DeFi ecosystem. If Year is a revenue aggregator, then Keep3r will be a development talent aggregator.
In addition, three products running on the Keep3r network will also be released in the future:
1. Metawallet: Metawallet that does not require or only a small amount of Gas fees;
2. Unihedge: The oracle price feeding system is composed of two modules, Uniquote and Uniswap v2 Oracle;
3. Deriswap (the name is derived from the two words Derivative-Swap): a decentralized trading platform that integrates currency trading, futures, options and lending, and is currently the most anticipated product by the public, which aims to improve Capital efficiency and hedging free losses.
So we have to think that from the moment Keep3r was released, the “Snake” project with Keep3r as the core component began. The ultimate form is to build a complete DeFi ecosystem.
It is worth mentioning that, except for Chainlink, AC’s collaborative projects are basically DeFi second-line fork projects. Since Yearn.Finance detonated the DeFi concept, various agreements have begun to fork in turn, and products lack innovation and become increasingly homogeneous. Andre uses aggregation and optimization of these second-line fork projects to build its own unique ecosystem, while maintaining a healthy competitive relationship with other leading DeFi agreements, or it will provide more space for more innovative projects in the stock market.
But while Yearn continues to expand its DeFi ecosystem, some community users have expressed concerns about the decentralization of DeFi, accusing Yearn of failing to inform users or vote before announcing the merger. Looking at the details of the collaboration and cooperation disclosed by Year, it does not actually involve any update iterations of the Year protocol, and it is limited to collaboration at the developer level. In fact, there is no need for community voting governance.
As Andre said: I’m actually not sure if these are mergers, acquisitions, partnerships or collaborations. The simple answer is: each method has a point, team merger, agreement and mutual use, the vision is the same, and all team members share success.
On December 6, the Year Vaults v2 contract has been officially deployed. The crazy expansion of the Year ecological universe is bound to accelerate the improvement of capital utilization efficiency, and accelerate the innovation, professionalism and security of DeFi protocols. Then, taking advantage of the bull market opportunity, DeFi’s Will the fire be rekindled by this?
