This article will give UX Designers an understanding automated yield farming dApps, like the all-popular Yearn Finance. This is part of an overall Web3 Design Bootcamp that teaches UX Designers about Web3 concepts and design patterns so they can land a job in the rapidly merging field.
Yearn Finance was one of the first yield aggregators. On Yearn, DeFi experts propose yield farming strategies and implement them as Yearn vaults that Web3 users can deposit tokens into. Essentially, these vaults aggregate a lot of tokens, and deploy them to various DeFi protocols, sharing the yield with its depositors (i.e. yToken holders).
Yearn vaults generally accept Curve LP tokens, and automate the yield farming process from here, such as moving tokens into different lending protocols in pursuit of the highest interest rate. Or, stake the LP tokens in other protocols, and automatically recycle the rewards back into the vault for a compounding effect.
This brings us to a concept called “token composability”, which is at the heart of yield farming. Essentially, Web3 tokens are interoperable with other protocols. DeFi tokens can be used throughout the DeFi ecosystem in order to stack rewards.
Let’s look at Yearn’s “Curve USDN” vault strategy. Users deposit crvUSDN tokens into this Yearn vault. Yearn then stakes these LP tokens in another DeFi protocol, Convex Finance, to earn CRV and CVX. As the vault earns tokens, Yearn automatically harvests them and converts them into more crvUSDN, which it cycles back into Convex Finance. This automation simplifies yield farming for users, and reduces their network fees. They only need to send two transactions: one to deposit tokens into a vault, and the other to withdraw tokens from the vault.
At this point in the article, we’ve discussed all the major DeFi building blocks: tokens swaps, minting stablecoins, lending/borrowing, staking, and yield farming. This all takes place across different protocols, often requiring the user to visit multiple web apps. This can make the DeFi ecosystem feel scattered. DeFi dashboards bring everything together for a more seamless UX. Let’s look at how dashboards take advantage of the open-source nature of Web3 to stitch DeFi protocols together into one dApp.
If you enjoy videos over reading when it comes to online learning then checkout the course on YouTube. This is part 7 of 10 in the DeFi for UX Designers Course. Also, make sure to stay tuned for future Web3 Design Courses, which will cover emerging Web3 product categories.
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