YFI, the native governance asset of the yearn.finance decentralized financial ecosystem, has surpassed Bitcoin (BTC) in an instant after an insane 50 percent rally. What is driving it?
Revolution of "yield farmers"
YFI token rallied three days ago, on Aug. 15, from mid-$4,000 levels. At its peak, at about 08.30 AM (UTC) on Aug. 18, its price on Binance exceeded Bitcoin's (BTC) at $12,281.
As a result, in one month since YFI's launch on July 18, its price has gained an enormous 31,572 percent as its launch price was $31.65.
This behavior can be explained by the peculiarities of YFI token. First, this asset has unprecedented scarcity: only 30,000 YFI can exist. It was repeatedly stressed by the yearn.finance team that YFI has no utility and can be used for governance of yearn.finance products only.
That said, the recent upsurge was most likely boosted by the delayed FOMO of retail traders from Binance and UniswapV2. Market manipulations also cannot be ruled out: the combined volume of trading attributed to low-tier platforms (BKex, BiKi, MXC, IDCM, LBank etc.) is equal to the net trading volume registered on Binance, Uniswap and Balancer, according to Etherscan explorer.
King of rallies
Recent technological achievements by yearn.finance instruments can be treated as one more minor price driver: new "yield farming" strategies are being introduced and yCRV vaults started to offer an unbelievable 81 percent APR on locked YFI.
The entire @iearnfinance treasury just went into yCRV Vault and is earning 81% APY. #dogfooding pic.twitter.com/FGujQshinB
— banteg (@bantg) August 15, 2020
YFI is not new to the camp of assets that rallied brilliantly in August 2020. As covered by CryptoComes recently, many analysts admit that YFI's seven-day run from launch should be treated as the fastest 100x in crypto history.
After its first rally, prominent analyst and investor Qiao Wang claimed that the "fair" price of YFI is way more than $10,000. It looks like his guess has come true.
