YFI, the governance token for decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol yearn.finance, last night peaked at $38,682. That is almost quadruple Bitcoin's price of $11,596 and almost twice Bitcoin's all-time high of $20,000.
yearn.finance aggregates all the different yields of different DeFi protocols in one neat website. It also lets users invest in 'vaults', where people earn yields together. A yield refers to the interest earned by lending out your coins on various lending protocols. In addition to earning interest on your crypto, you can earn so-called governance tokens, like YFI—a kind of loyalty program for DeFi.
Though their creators intended for governance tokens to empower holders to vote on proposals to update the network, in reality they're held as speculative assets. YFI is among the most popular. It has increased by 66% in the past 24 hours, according to data from metrics site CoinMarketCap.
The growth is crazy: on Friday morning, it was worth just $14,300. Trading of the token has boomed, too. On Friday, the daily trading volume of the coin was $68 million. Now, it's $879 million.
YFI token spinoff YFII has joined along for the ride. On Friday morning, it was worth $935. It has since increased by more than 5x, to $5,075 as of this writing.
One of the reasons why both of the tokens are worth so much is because of their scarce supply. YFI has a total supply of 30,000, and YFII has a total supply of 38,750. Bitcoin, by comparison, has a token supply of 18 million.
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