Today in DeFi - YAM Drops, YAM Stops(?), 300 Gwei
Yam.Finance Launches
YAM: An Experiment in Fair Farming, Governance, and Elasticity, launched yesterday, with far-reaching effects on the DeFi Market.
Similar to YFI, YAM allows users to stake existing tokens to earn YAM Governance tokens. However in the case of YAM, those tokens are:
MKR
COMP
SNX
LEND
LINK
WETH
AMPL_ETH_UNI_LP (pool token for AMPL/ETH Uniswap LPs)
YAMโs initial yield was quite high and farmers quickly rushed in. This ended up pushing the respective farming tokens up in price as well.
Besides pushing these tokens up, yields on other farms are also being pushed up.
YAM is an elastic supply coin which uses a fork of Ampleforthโs code. If the price is >$1 each YAM splits into additional YAM, while a price <$1 results in the opposite effect.
The first rebase at 8pm UTC went fine:
For an elastic supply coin like YAM - the market cap chart is more important than the price chart. Itโs hard to see the rebase on this chart(Whereas on the price chart it shows up clearly) because it went fine.
YAM Stops(?)
HOWEVER, all was not well in YAM world.
A bug in the rebasing contract means that the current implementation of YAM will print much more YAM on the second rebase than intended.
YAM rebasing is currently implemented on Uniswap with a 10% slippage limit. Excess YAM goes to governance-controlled reserves. However since the governance process requires a 4% quorum, governance would end up breaking. Too much YAM would lie inaccessible, and quorum would never be able to be reached.
The YAM community is pulling together to fix this issue with emergency governance measures. If you want to help, you can delegate your YAMs at yam.finance. Because of the wide-reaching effects of YAM we mentioned, we highly recommend you do so. Bonus - YAM governance has promised to make sure YAM delegators are well-compensated for opportunity cost.
300 Gwei
As mentioned, YAM has had far-reaching effects on the market. For better or worse, one of those is gas fees. Gas fees yesterday surpassed 300 and are currently steadily above 300. Based on the fact new farms are inevitable to pop up, these prices(or similar) may be with us for a while.