Harvest.Finance’s FARM token is on a moon mission, but it’s only just launched.

FARM token has been on a tear recently, rising through the CMC rankings and breaking through the very significant $100M market cap level. So, is it time to sell? Despite FARM’s moon mission, FARM token is still early on in its journey. In this article we’re going to take another look at FARM’s profit sharing model, and discuss why the majority of its market potential remains untapped.

Market Cap vs. Total Value Locked

If you look at DeFi Pulse, Harvest Finance comes in at #14 in the…

What Are Smart Pools and Why Do They Matter?

Introduction

In the first installment of our educational series we provided you with a foundational understanding of Balancer and blockchain in general. We covered topics like decentralization, smart contracts, DeFi, market making, and liquidity pools. Gaining a solid grasp of these concepts is essential before moving on, as we will build on them in the articles to come.

Today’s lesson is going to be on Smart Pools — one of Balancer’s core DeFi innovations.

Review — Smart Contracts

Recall that smart contracts are lines of code stored on the blockchain that…

A Look at Harvest FARM Token.

Harvest Finance is an investment platform designed to help its users maximize their Yield Farming profits. The platform consists of a series of vaults, which are essentially automated strategies that can be changed to optimize returns. Perhaps the most useful aspect of Vaults is that they do not require users to pay gas fees to change strategy, and also automate reinvestment — compounding a user’s potential gains.

As if those benefits were not attractive enough on their own, Harvest provides additional incentive through dispersing its own FARM token to users of its platform. …

Balancer is an investment platform that is destined to shake up the financial realm. By using a series of smart contracts, Balancer has created a powerful combination of financial tools that allow you to manage your investment portfolio, create your own index funds, and earn a passive income. In this series of articles, we’re going to take a deep dive into what makes Balancer work. If terms such as “smart contracts”, “automated market making”, “liquidity providing”,
“decentralization”, etc., are unfamiliar to you, you are in the right place. …

Harvest 101

Yield Farming — Background

The catalyst for the recent DeFi market boom was the invention of Yield Farming — a vernacular term used to describe the ROI that could be obtained by providing liquidity to a liquidity pool or lending service. DeFi applications such as COMP, AAVE, and YFI created decentralized lending platforms that incentivize users to provide loan collateral with an interest rate. Oftentimes these incentives are boosted by rewarding a “yield” of governance tokens to lenders, in addition to the interest already generated. These platforms and applications are created via composable smart contracts — meaning they…

Understanding Flash Loan Attacks, and How They Happen

Earlier this year, DeFi protocol Aave released a new feature called “flash loans” that have taken arbitrage opportunities to the next level. Many in the community were unaware of the power that flash loans have to manipulate markets and were shocked to find out that several “hacks” have occurred, with the perpetrators getting away with millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. Just recently, four flash loan attacks have occurred on various protocols, with attackers taking $25M, $7M, $3.3M, and $2M from Harvest, Value DeFi, CheeseBank, and Akropolis, respectively. So what are flash…

What the DVM is, and How You Can Participate

What are Oracles?

Blockchain oracles are specialized services that provide smart contracts with information outside of the blockchain world. As such, they are the connection point that give blockchains inputs on real world events, non-crypto asset prices, and so on. This type of “off-network” data is crucial for various types of contractual agreements, as these real world events may be the trigger for transactions. Oracles are a crucial part of the blockchain ecosystem, and without them, smart contracts would be limited to the data within their own networks.

There you have…

Understanding the Risks

Regardless of the market, if you have been involved in trading for any amount of time the concept of “liquidation” is certainly a familiar one. However the context that many have heard this term used probably refers to “getting rekt” with leveraged trading on platforms like Bitmex. In those cases, liquidation means that an entire position was lost, resulting in 100% losses that cannot be recovered. Liquidation in DeFi is a completely different beast, and the maths behind it can be confusing. …