YFI Breaks Past $20,000, Surpassing Bitcoin's All-time High

By Decrypt Staff

YFI, the governance token that powers decentralized finance protocol yEarn, or yearn.finance, today leapt past $20,000, surpassing Bitcoin's all-time high.

The cost of a single YFI token is $22,686, as of press time. It has increased by 25% in the past 24 hours, according to data from metrics site CoinMarketCap.

YFI is a governance token, meaning that holders can pledge it to cast their vote on policy proposals that influence the future of the yEarn network. But YFI is also held as a speculative asset, central to something known as "yield farming," where DeFi lending protocols offer governance tokens as incentives for using them.

All this despite YFI token creator Andre Cronje describing YFI in mid-July as “a completely valueless 0 supply token.” He told yEarn users: "Don’t buy it. Earn it."

yEarn is a DeFi platform that lets users compare yields between different DeFi lending protocols and earn extra yields by placing their crypto in "vaults" with other users.

Bitcoin is currently worth about $11,500. That means that the price of a single YFI token is almost double the price of a single Bitcoin. And it's even higher than Bitcoin's all-time high: about $20,000 in December 2017.

One of the reasons that YFI is valued so highly is that its supply is very low. Just 29,962 YFI tokens exist, small potatoes compared to the 18 million Bitcoin in circulation.

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