First of all, before you send the police to my doorstep demanding I refund your money, please do not consider this financial advice, mkay? Everything I say here is purely my experience, mkay? We good? Then let's have some fun while I share with you my opinion on Harvest Finance.
In this article, I'll be comparing what's like to be a professional programmer vs being a Chad and plowing the fields of liberty. Now, I know what you're thinking. How could you compare a stable job with being a degen that gambles his money on crypto corn? I hear you, I hear you! But think about this! Which is sweeter? Corn or Code? Yeah, I thought so...
My job
"My FARM cost a late night fee
My job abused the H1B
My FARM plays on the double feature screen
My job went straight to DVD"
My job is a big part of my programming career and it's important to underline a couple of differences between my job and my sweet crypto corn. The first thing that's different between my job and my FARM is feeling welcomed in the community. While I've got no idea who am I talking to on the Harvest Discord, I'm going to say that most people there are very fine people. The rest are banned! When it comes to my job, sure they are good people, we're a small company so everybody knows each other, but like any workplace, there are small grievances here and there.
Another aspect that frustrates me a lot is that I can't always be excited about my job, while Harvest always likes to keep things fresh and interesting for its community. I'm a software engineer that's always looking to use the newest technologies, but as it turns out, the company doesn't start with me so I have to maintain older projects with old libraries, and from one thing to another, suddenly, I have to decode some files using Pascal on a Windows 98 machine. It might come as a shock for the veterans in this field, but I always thought Pascal was this ancient runic language that people used in the stone age of coding aka. the '70s. Even if I successfully decoded this Pascal language, why I'm using it remains a mystery to this day.
What I like about the Harvest is that it's full of contests and some of them are programming related, which is great because I am not very creative so I have better chances at winning the lottery than the creativity contest because at least I participate in the lottery. A few weeks ago they held the web design contest which I took part in and got the honorable... last place ??. Now, the Harvest Gods have blessed us, nerds, with a programming contest in which you have to prove that you're a true 01110000 01100001 01100100 01100001 01110111 01100001 01101110.
Stability vs. Bleeding Edge
If you haven't unfollowed me after I announced that I'm moving away from Linux for a while due to my job and my hardware not being enough for dual boot or VMs, then you might remember that I liked to work with distributions that are more on the bleeding edge of software releases. I used things like Arch, Manjaro(which, yeah I know, it's just Arch ??), or Fedora.
Maybe that's how my brain is wired, but when it comes to computer stuff I don't want stable and boring. I want new, shiny, risky. When it comes to real life though, I'm a bit more conservative, but I still like taking chances on things that are very promising and are high risk, high reward.
Back to my highly scientific study that compares my job to Harvest Finance, we can clearly see that the job represents stability. At the end of the month, even if I performed amazingly, I'm going to get the same amount of money as any other month. Harvest on the other hand has the potential to get me a much better deal for my investment. Sure, in my job I'm investing time, and in Harvest, I'm investing money, but as a junior developer, your time is vastly undervalued because you lack experience. You have to work a couple of years in order to get paid more for the same 8 hours.
With Harvest, on the other hand, it could go either way, you can wake up one day and suddenly the $100 you invested are now worth $100,000 or they could be worth $0.0001. Both of these values are obviously exaggerations, but the truth is that the project is very unique and it seems as though its true potential and therefore the value of FARM are highly underestimated at the moment.
Personal projects
If I can't work with the latest and greatest at my job you might wonder why I don't do that in my free time and the truth is that I do. Sure, lately, my personal projects and the Harvest contests kind of merged, and I think that's somehow for the better. If you've spent some time in the coding world you might have encountered the term competitive programming, which in my opinion is just a way to feel productive and smart without doing anything. Don't get me wrong, I like competitions and programming, but finding weird mathematical patterns in some array is not exactly my idea of competition that involves programming.
The Harvest contests on the other hand are a different kind of competitive programming, the kind that gives you a nice degree of freedom to deliver an actually usable end-product but other people than geeks spending hours to optimize their C program so that instead of 500ms it will now run in 486ms. I also think and always thought that the financial incentives are nice and Harvest hits all the sweet spots with their approach.
My FARM
"My FARM is super-size,
Pascal looks like two fries"
I think it's time to talk numbers finally. How much is my FARM worth? Right now I've got 8.1 FARM which more or less equals $1100??. However, $450 comes from the web design contest. If you've been paying attention in math class you might arrive at the logical conclusion that I have invested $650 in Harvest, but you'd be wrong to think that. I don't have this kind of money ??, I can't use Linux and Windows together remember?
So the sum I invested is closer to $500. "But then, where does the $150 extra come from?"
You see, Harvest is not just a place where you can stake you LP tokens, no no no. One of the best thins about Harvest in my opinion is their FARM staking program:
- ? Huge APY? Check!
- ? Auto compounding? Check!
- ?? Bread for the people? Double Check!
In just one month, since I started investing in Farm my staking rewards reached $40 which is huge, but a lot of the extra value comes from being able to grab a couple of FARM at a very low price two weeks ago. As the detective that you are, you're now wondering, "hmmm why did the price dropped?". Well, now we're getting into the risky parts of Harvest Finance.
High risk, high reward
It's no secret that Harvest offers some of the best APYs you can find in the DeFi space, but like anything in this world, the high rewards are often associated with taking higher risks. No matter who is behind a DeFi project and no matter how many audits they have this thing is very new and susceptible to bugs.
Two weeks ago, a couple of Harvest pools have been attacked, though to be fair this attack was not related to a bug, but rather to a behavior that was not anticipated by the devs, and $33M have been stolen. Now the devs being anonymous they could have decided to pull the plug on this thing and take the remaining $67M and run away.
Instead, what I saw in the weeks following the attack was a dedicated team and a warm community gathered around them. The team made impressive efforts to remediate the problem, save other pools from being drained, and even came up with a strategy to return, over time, all the stolen funds. Remember though, nothing is 100% safe in DeFi so do your research and be prepared to take the risks.
How do you get some FARM?
Since I've basically told you that Harvest is better than programming how about I show you the road to the FARM, huh? So you have to go down Google lane and when you see the PUBLISH0X headquarters you take a left turn down Crypto avenue. A couple of blocks down the road and you should arrive at the Uniswap exchange.
If you click on the "Select a token" button you'll see that you won't see any FARM there. But here is the catch, Harvest is actually a secret society, so you have to ask for the Lizard if you want to buy some FARM.
After clicking on "Select a token" at the bottom of the list choose "Change" where it says "Uniswap default list". You can then click on the CoinGecko list. Now with the new list, you'll be able to find FARM among the available tokens you can swap for.
After the swipe is done you've got some FARM, but it's idle. You must put it at work, make it harvest that sweet crypto corn, and to do that you need a tractor. Now, where could you get a tractor from? You can call a friend, ask the audience, or do a 50/50. Your possible answers are:
A. From your uncle Greg that lives in the country
B. From a tractor dealership
C. From Harvest Finance
D. From Jesus, because Jesus is always the answer
You have 60 seconds to decide...
If you answered C... then you're wrong. The right choice was Jesus, it even says that in the answer itself??.
Sure, Jesus might be busy with some other stuff and then, but only then, it's appropriate to go to Harvest Finance.
In the "Stake" tab you need to click on that Profit Sharing APY which will take you to a world full of wonders, candy, and rainbows ??. Or maybe just the staking panel, it's a 50/50 chance.
Here you can stake your FARM in order to be rewarded that big fat juicy APY. As a last tip, if you want to stake FARM, I'd do that at the weekends since that's when the gas prices are lower.
Ending thoughts
"It's time that we let the world know,
Dude, you gotta let your fears go
Harvest is the best in the business
P.S. We got FARM like Jesus"
While this article was meant to be funny some of the things here are only half-jokes. Harvest Finance is a promising project and I think that FARM will go up in value as time passes. Before the attack, it was at $300 so I wouldn't exclude the possibility that we're going to see it at $300 to $500 in the next months. If you're looking to get into DeFi, I'd say that Harvest is one of the best projects to try, and even if you don't want to invest in their platform, you can just come and hang out in their Discord Channel, see what we're all about.
Regarding the fight between my job and Harvest, I declare unanimously that this is a tie. Sure if Harvest goes back to its launching price of $5000 then I'm going to resign and go live on a tropical island, and from under the palm trees, I'll declare Harvest the absolute winner. Until then, Windows98 here I come...
