Cao Yin
I am the Managing Director of Digital Renaissance Foundation OU, a lecturer of National Accounting Academy and one of the earliest DeFi investors in China working with DeFi teams since 2017.
In YFII, I am one of the volunteers for DFI.Money as well as a member of the YFII Treasury Committee. The committee comprises of 7 members which are elected by YFII Holders and we meet every Sunday night to discuss the current situation, to-dos for the following week and to also vote for or against grant proposals.
Before I joined crypto full time in 2016, I was an analyst for one of the biggest financial asset management companies in China. In 2014, this is where I began my Crypto investing and organized a crypto fan club. I love cryptocurrency, because the blockchain technology gave me a light on how finance can be totally different and really amazing.
Minako Kojima
Former Google employee, community core developer for YFII, writing several proposals including YSD for YFII. I like Anime and Crypto. You can follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/MinakoOikawa.
I first joined crypto full time in 2014 in college with a mining pool side project called gpool.net. At that time we were mining XPM, a BTC altcoin. In 2016 I joined the Google Ads team and in 2017 transferred to the internal blockchain team. The diversity and richness of the crypto world interests me, especially the technical details of different blockchain environments.
The crypto world is evolving fast and it’s easy to fall behind if you don’t learn to keep up.
Can you explain what YFII and DFI.money are? What is the background of the project? When did you decide to realize this project?
Cao
YFII is a community owned yield aggregator that automates yield earnings for users.
Users can deposit funds into YFII vaults and earn yield from automated rebalancing between different DeFi yield protocols such as Aave, Compound, dYdX, and Curve and other lots of new DeFi protocols on ETH, HECO, BSC, as well as Near and Polkadot in the future.
YFII was created as a result of a community fork from the original Yearn Finance (YFI) project created by Andre Cronje over the community proposed Yearn Improvement Proposal YIP-8. YIP-8 suggested a weekly halving model for continuous yield farming. The proposal however did not pass due to the lack of quorum.
During the launch of YFII, the developers resorted to burning the admin key to make it impossible to infinitely mint more tokens that it should. The control of the protocol is now in the hands of multi-sig signers and the community.
YFII belongs to the community. No pre-mining. No ICO. No dev team rewards. The only way to get YFII was to provide liquidity to the pools. YFII is the token for community governance and the key to farming yields of various DeFi platforms. It is used for revenue allocation and voting in the YFII DAO.
We released the YFII just 7 days after the debut of Yearn.finance. Time of the YFII Genesis: UTC 16:00 July 27, 2020. Now YFII has become a highly diversified, open and 100% community driven DeFi gateway and connector with its own ecosystem projects surrounding it.
Minako
I joined YFII as a community developer right after it was released. YFII has a very good community base. Our tokens are listed on many mainstream exchanges and being able to contribute code to the YFII community has had a great impact.
I’ve been involved in schemes such as the LP mining inherited from Uniswap, the migration to BSC and Heco, and the design of YSD (Yield Stable Dollar), etc. I suppose YFII’s best feature is that it is community driven, this is fundamentally different from a VC-driven project.
Please explain to us the YFII ecosystem with a few sentences. Can you say it acts like a well-oiled machine yet?
Cao
During the community work, some great devs from YFII community decided to make their own defi projects and these new projects can work with YFII’s aggregator products.
YFII works as a gateway and connector for these projects and in return, these projects will provide YFII vaults and YFII holders with farming pools. Now the YFII ecosystem is made of the following projects: Wepiggy, S.finance, Sakeswap, FNX, Grap.finance, Qian.finance, fortube and a few others.
Can you briefly talk about the roadmap? Do you have any further partnership deals to be made in the future?
Minako
We’re currently working on YFII Project Apollo. The strategies of existing yield aggregation projects such as YFI, YFII as well as Harvest are conservative and lag behind the market, resulting in APY Yield not being comparable when yield booming. Traditional DeFi aggregators are not able to meet the needs of miners in the new DeFi mining cycle, limited by the following pain points stated in this article: YFII Project Apollo. Pain Points of Existing DeFi Yield… | by Dfi.Money | Jan, 2021 | Medium.
Briefly speaking, Apollo is a new kind of aggregator to help you get higher APY with less gas in the crypto world, especially to yield those algorithmic stable coins.
The road map of Apollo contains 4 parts:
- Gas-optimization, quick vault switching, and DeFi composability. This has been delivered, you can now use it on both BSC and Heco.
- Auto harvest support.
- Multi strategy.
- Hybrid Strategy.
All these features are scheduled to be released in Q1 of 2021.
Cao
In the long run, we are going to make YFII (DFI.Money) a vibrant and open DeFi gateway and connector for users and developers. This community driven project is really the first of its kind. Everyone working here is a volunteer, pro bono, including Minako Kojima, AnaMaSu and myself.
I must say, we are doing a great job. We are building YFII into a decentralized corporation. Meaning people working inside can have reasonable financial returns. Meanwhile the whole project will be co-governed by people working for YFII as well as YFII holders.
What is the total supply of YFII, Is it for sure a limited supply? Will there be a burn program in the future?
Cao
The total supply of YFII is 40,000. Two pools generated 20,000 tokens each to yield farmers, started at 10,000 in the first week and halved every 7 days.
Many people worry that developers may issue a number of new tokens after a max supply was already set, like what AC is trying to do with YFI now by minting more tokens. As for YFII, the answer to mint more tokens is simple: Impossible and never.
Minting keys have already been burned by transferring the admin role to the blackhole address (0x00). Therefore, no one has the privilege of minting new YFII tokens. You can take a look at the burned txns below which are also documented at a specific page.
YFII Token Governance Key — https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd491dd5d190c6856f12cd88a8d318e71c5317371286379053a77040d09d27839
What advantages does staking bring to you in your project or to the investors in general?
Cao
We are a defi aggregator which means that we shall combine those complicated defi protocols into a single smart contract. People can directly deposit their assets into the contract and earn interest or other liquidity rewards. This is called the “Vault”.
You see, most of the crypto users have no idea which defi protocols are legit or not and how they can combine defi Lego into one useful function. So we, YFII, are actually working as a community based added valued integrator. We scout and audit these protocols from hundreds of peers and make those selected protocols more user friendly by combining them into one. This makes it easier for people to easily deposit money into our vault. All they’ll have to do is sit back and earn money!
YFII is the only aggregator that has never been “rekt” as they say. It’s never 100% safe, take a look at pickle.finance, harvest.finance, value.finance, and others. Most of them have been “rekt” at least once!
What makes YFII stand out from its competitors?
Minako
Simply put, it’s security! YFII (DFI.Money) is the only mainstream DeFi aggregator which doesn’t get “rekt”. We are also working on strong partnerships and developing new proposals to enhance our products. There is still a lot of work to be done.
Can you briefly talk about these partnerships?
Minako
YFII are working with several DeFi projects to connect the liquidity into a liquidity alliance. Since we are at the entrance to the liquidity traffic, YFII sits as a central role in this alliance.
Let’s come to the exciting question that everyone has been waiting for. What is YSD and when will it be launched?
Minako
YSD was inspired by Andre Cronje’s ‘Yield stablecoins’ series of articles. We presented an experimental fair-initiated stablecoin project; A semi-mortgage, semi-algorithmic form of stable currency alternatives — The Yield Stable Dollar (YSD) inherits part of Basis’s model features using a mechanism designed to anchor to the target price, as well as the Maker DAO mechanism, using other stablecoins as collateral assets to reduce price volatility.
Unlike MakerDAO, collateral in YSD is realized by providing liquidity between YDD and other stablecoins in the AMM (Automated Market Maker) But without liquidation risk. The most important characteristic between YSD and other existing algorithmic stablecoins is: YSD is a Medium of exchange.
By establishing virtual liquidity in Unisave, the exchange rate between YSD and other mainstream stable currencies will be stable to a certain value. At the same time, YSD and other stablecoin trading pairs will only charge 0.1% commission, allowing any two stablecoin transactions to be completed through YSD twice. Unisave has Curve-like characteristics, while holding YSD can be directly converted into any mainstream stable currency through a one-step transaction, making YSD has the characteristics of foreign exchange reserve currency.
YSD is going to be released early next month, stay tuned.
Introduction to Yield Stable Dollar | by Dfi.Money | Jan, 2021 | Medium
One last question People in general think because of the name YFII, the project will always be outshadowed by YFI. Do you have any plans like increasing communication with investors directly or may be even changing the name?
Cao
We discussed this concern before, so we have the project name DFI.Money. YFII is just the name of the token. As far as I know, people tend to just look at the token when they want to invest.
Yes, however it is very hard to change token tickers, since the token has been listed on almost all mainstream exchanges. To make a new symbol, it needs to coordinate with all of them. This is not the worst issue, there is also a possibility of a hack during the process and this is why we decided to keep our current ticker.
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