Before I begin writing these lines, I want to stress out that DeFi, with everything that’s going on with it, is EXTREMELY risky. Yes, you can make a 10x on your bank in a day, but chances are that you will lose more often than win.
With this said, I want to talk about YAM. I know that a lot of people will probably hate for even bringing up this project, but given the recent events with SUSHI and the lead dev pulling the plug, I feel it’s important to talk about YAM.
What is YAM and Why Does it Matter?
By now, you should have heard about Ampleforth (AMPL) and Yearn Finance (YFI). If you haven’t, I strongly suggest you reconsider your reading sources.
I have a detailed post on YFI that you can check out here:
How to Buy YFI? The First Altcoin to Flip Bitcoin’s Price Convincingly [Post #1 of 90]
Basically, there are two things you need to know about these projects in order to get a grasp on YAM.
- AMPL’s Elastic Supply
AMPL was really the first altcoin to bring up this concept of elastic supply. In Layman’s terms, the overall market cap of AMPL adjusts based on its price. The idea for AMPL is to be somewhat stable at around $1 and if the price is lower or higher than this target, the protocol will either inflate or deflate the market cap by producing or burning existing tokens. Users see an adjusted balance in their wallets every single day.
This created a massive buzz back in late June and almost the entire July, as the coin kept stable between $1.5 and $3.5 for a prolonged time, giving holders an extra 5%-15% of tokens every day, making a lot of people seriously richer.
Unfortunately, there’s a tremendous amount of seed money still in play and VCs are dumping it like crazy, which brings us to our next point.
- YFI’s Fair Distribution
In order to eliminate the worry of investors that VCs and early participants will tank the market as soon as the token hits it, YFI had none of it.
The project had 0 premine and 0 tokens bought by early investors. Instead, it distributed the total supply of 30,000 YFI as a reward for providing liquidity to different pools.
This eliminates the “whale dumping” factor, at least in theory, because everyone got an equal start. Of course, people who have more money would farm more YFI, hence giving merit to the notion “Money attracts money.”
And this is where Yam Finance comes into the picture, combining both concepts into one.
YAM is a fairly distributed elastic supply token, rewarded for providing liquidity on various pools.
According to the official post from back in August, YAM features:
- an elastic supply to seek eventual price stability
- a governable treasury to further support stability
- fully on-chain governance to enable decentralized control and evolution from Day 1
- a fair distribution mechanism that incentivizes key community members to actively take the reins of governance
In order to provide liquidity for the rebase to purchase yCRV for its treasury, however, the team also created a second distribution wave that was incentivized through a YAM/yCRV Uniswap pool.
And this is where things turned to shit.
The code was unaudited, meaning that the team pushed it before a specialized team of experts (an auditing firm) examined it for errors. And, so it happens, there was a critical code error that produced way too many YAM tokens after the first two rebases, flooding the treasury to a point where it was no longer governable, rendering the entire protocol mute.
Naturally, people who bought the top of YAM lost money and blamed the developers for pushing it way too quickly.
There’s a Silver Lining
YAM created a massive community. It was the first liquidity aggregating platform to attract over $500 million in total value locked in less than 48 hours. It was also the first food-based meme token, paving the way for the likes of SUSHI, KIMCHI, PASTA, and all the others that are currently hot.
The developers took the blame for it and apologized. More than that, they created a rescue plan, and the community, in a truly decentralized fashion, turned up for it.
For each decision that YAM Finance is taking there is a vote where token holders get to decide the fate of the protocol, and as of yet, it’s apparent that they want it to succeed.
Here Comes YAMv2
YAM (the original token) was rebasing every 12 hours and, needless to say, those rebases were negative.
To eliminate the diminishing effects of these rebases while they fix the protocol, the developers created a second placeholder token called YAMv2. This is the “migration token” if you will - something that YAMv1 holders can currently sit on while waiting for the official release of the fixed, audited, and fully-functional version of the protocol which will be called, surprise, surprise, YAMv3.
Buying YAMv2 now is possible through a lot of exchanges (links below) and it would provide holders with a 1:1 migration path to YAMv3.
YAMv3: What to Expect?
So, there’s a plan in place and people already work on the protocol, according to the official YAMv3 post.
This time, however, there is an audit going on as I write these lines. The company doing the checkup is one of the most reputable in the space - it’s called Peckshield Inc., and they’ve started the audit in the week of August 31st. It’s expected to be completed in September and the new protocol should be released after that.
There are exciting new features that the team has been working on, including Delegator rewards and the Gitcoin Grant Matching Pool, where 1% of the treasury inflows will go to Gitcoin Grants supporting “public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem.”
Now, as I said in the beginning, I will probably get some hate for sharing a project that some consider to be “rekt.” I personally don’t think that’s the case.
Yes, the developers are to blame for releasing an unaudited code. Yes, they did make a mistake, and yes, this caused people who market bought YAM to lose money. Are they to blame for these people losing money, though? This is debatable. If you bought Ethereum four days ago at $490, you’d be 30% down right now, who do you have to blame?
The team behind YAM put disclosures about the smart contract risks every single step of the way and people went ahead and bought anyway.
However, I personally find it particularly cool that a project of the kind managed to create a huge community and even more so, this community of completely unknown strangers came together when it had to vote and it did so in a matter of hours. This is the spirit of true decentralization and that’s why I’m so excited about crypto in general.
Sure, it’s just a bunch of degens protecting their capital, but still, it’s impressive to see it happening.
Where to Buy YAMv2 Prior to the YAMv3 Release?
Again, I want to point out that this is a very risky buy and you should DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH before investing anything in this token. NEVER INVEST MONEY THAT YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO LOSE.
If you want to buy YAMv2, you can do so on MXC.co and avoid the sky-high swapping fees on Uniswap (at the time of this writing).
The exchange is very liquid and it’s one of the trusted venues according to various resources such as CoinGecko and Coinmarketcap.
To buy YAMv2 using USD and ETH, please click this link or the image below. (Yes, the links are referrals and I will make a small commission on your trading fees. I’m wholeheartedly thankful for each and every one of you who register as it helps me produce more content and keep this up. Also, I’m always giving back as you will see below.)
Thanks for reading, now to the good part:
THIS IS A GIVEAWAY POST. PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT WITH YOUR BTC ADDRESS IF YOU WANT TO BE INCLUDED IN THE FINAL GIVEAWAY ON NOVEMBER 25th.
To learn more about the BTC giveaway and my 90D90P challenge, take a look at:
90-Days 90-Posts Challenge and a Bitcoin Giveaway: Liftoff
Snapshot September 7th:
Giveaway Pool: $94
Participants so far: 21
Disclaimer: None of the above content is financial advice. The information hereby provided is for educational purposes only. Do your own research before investing in cryptocurrency. Trading cryptocurrency, especially with leverage, comes with a serious risk of capital loss. Be careful! Never trade with money that you can’t afford to lose!
