At the start of the week, Blockonomi surveyed some of the decentralized finance arena’s top yield aggregator projects, including Yearn and Pickle Finance.
These projects aim to bring DeFi users attractive returns via strategies powered by smart contract-based “vaults.” The idea? You put your crypto in, these vaults automatically generate you profits on your deposits, and then you withdraw as you please.
Alas, what projects like Yearn and Pickle Finance share in common is their mission to make passive DeFi profits easy. Zooming in, though, the two projects are going to start sharing a lot more going forward per a new agreement between the yield aggregators’ respective teams.
Yearn and Pickle Merging
In a first-of-its-kind move in DeFi, the Yearn and Pickle teams have agreed to merge their efforts.
Yearn creator Andre Cronje announced as much this week in a post playfully titled “Pickle and Yearn ferment co-operation dill,” which he began as follows:
“Pickle and Yearn developers have worked out a structure to allow the two projects to work together in symbiosis. This is done to reduce duplicate work, increase specialization, and to leverage shared expertise […] This is an initial minimal release, with further integration planned.”
Specifically, the merger will take place with the arrival of Yearn’s v2 system, of which multiple test vaults are already being trialed. Pickle Finance’s vaults infrastructure, i.e. Pickle Jars as they’re known, will accordingly be melded in with Yearn’s optimized and highly-anticipated v2 yVaults.
Yet it’s not just tech that’s merging, either. The projects will notably combine their total value locked (TVL) sums, i.e. their respective assets under management. Pre-merger and at the time of this post’s writing, Yearn’s TVL was $440 million USD.
The deal will also see Yearn onboarding “Pickle’s developers and strategy creators to work on its product offering and share strategy fees” and a new boosted rewards system based around “reward gauges” that will offer users better returns. In other words, this is meant to be an all around “stronger together” collaboration.
PICKLE, DILL, CORNICHON, Oh My!
Pickle Finance’s native token PICKLE will live on through the merger.
That’s because Yearn users will be able to stake their yVault tokens in PICKLE reward gauges, and these new PICKLE rewards can be boosted by the new DILL token. DILL is earned by locking up your PICKLE, and you earn more the longer you do so (the maximum lock-up period is 4 years).
At this point it’s actually the holders of DILL who steer Pickle’s governance, which centers around collectively determining things like “gauge weights, fee allocations, and other protocol parameters.”
Lastly there’s the CORNICHON token, which is meant to address the recent $20 million hack of Pickle Finance. A snapshot has been taken to award the token to victims, with CORNICHON being used to “track losses.”
Argent Integrates Yearn
Yearn’s also in the news this week because popular Ethereum smart wallet project Argent just integrated Yearn’s yVaults directly into its app.
You asked, we delivered.
Yearn Vaults now only a tap way, in Argent https://t.co/jdaPtGQQMU
— Argent (@argentHQ) November 25, 2020
It’s an interesting development, as the need for improved UX around DeFi has been a big point of discussion over the last two years, and Argent’s integration of yVaults is precisely such a UX advance. Argent makes participating in DeFi easy, and Yearn makes earning in DeFi easy, so their combo can be a powerful one going forward.
Indeed, some folks don’t want to have to dive in and use Yearn on their own without a user-friendly, in-app experience. Argent is the wallet after these peoples’ hearts, then, and that’s good news for the future of DeFi because the ecosystem will only continue to grow as it gets easier and easier to interact with.