In brief
- $YFI is to be listed on Coinbase Pro.
- $YFI is an immensely popular governance token that powers yearn.finance.
- It is currently trading at $34,271.
YFI, the governance token that powers yield aggregator platform yearn.finance, will be listed on Coinbase Pro on September 14, the Californian crypto exchange announced today.
Monday’s launch will mark the latest DeFi governance coin Coinbase has added to its exchange. It added Compound’s COMP and Maker’s MKR in June, and Band’s BAND in August.
YFI is one of the success stories of this summer’s DeFi-inspired bull run. It is immensely popular, with a market cap of $1 billion and a daily volume of $546 billion, per data from metrics site CoinMarketCap.
Coinbase adds DeFi token Compound to its Pro exchange
Crypto exchange Coinbase has announced it is bringing the DeFi token Compound to Coinbase Pro, its professional trading exchange, according to a blog post. The exchange will start accepting deposits of the token on June 22 and trading will begin the following day, assuming there's enough liquidity. Compound (COMP) is an Ethereum-based token that's used as a governance token for the Compound protocol. The Compound protocol is a decentalized finance (DeFi) platform for borrowing and lending crypto...
The cost of a single YFI peaked at $39,306 on August 31, four times the price of Bitcoin at the time and double its all-time-high. (Granted, there are just 29,967 YFI in circulation at the time of writing, compared to the 18 million-odd Bitcoin. And Bitcoin’s market cap is almost 200x larger than YFI’s).
YFI’s price then dipped at the beginning of September, along with the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum, before rising once again to its current price, $34,271. Its price has risen by 26% in the past 24 hours alone.
And all this for a token introduced by yearn.finance’s creator, Andre Cronje, as having “0 value.” Cronje wrote upon launching the token: “Don’t buy it. Earn it.”
YFI is earned when people stake cryptocurrency in yearn.finance’s smart contract. Yearn.finance’s main feature is to generate high amounts of interest on crypto deposited in its smart contracts by dispersing this money among different DeFi lending and liquidity protocols.
Since its creation, yearn.finance has expanded into a kind of DeFi super app. Its “vaults” feature maximizes yields on liquidity protocols; its “Earn” section does the same for lending protocols.
At the time of writing, it is the fifth-most popular DeFi protocol, with $804 million locked in its smart contracts. Ahead of it is Uniswap, Curve Finance, Maker, and Aave.
What are DeFi loans?
One of blockchain and cryptocurrency's great promises is to take tools used by the financial industry and make them available to everyone everywhere. The catch-all term for this revolution in how money is made, spent and sent is called DeFi, or decentralized finance. Like traditional banks, crypto-assets offer all of the same products but in a decentralized form. This includes lending, borrowing, spot trading, and margin trading. Through DeFi loans, any individual can quickly and easily take o...
Coinbase Pro is Coinbase’s crypto exchange. Whereas buying Bitcoin from the regular Coinbase app is to buy it directly from Coinbase, Coinbase Pro is the fully-fledged exchange that supports trades between other exchange users.
However, users will have to wait for full trading access until about Tuesday. The first phase, set for Monday, is allowing them to transfer YFI to the exchange.
