Yearn has been onchain since 2020. In that time we’ve made deliberate choices to keep the protocol safe, simple, and fully transparent. Now we're sharing these key choices in a series of threads. Catch them all here

One thing I’ve noticed about this cycle is that everyone wants yield but very few people want to become yield farmers. Which honestly makes sense. Most people don’t want to wake up every day comparing rates across 15 protocols, moving funds around, worrying about smart contract risk & asking themselves if an extra 2% APY is worth the headache. They just want the yield. That’s why I still find Yearn interesting. While total DeFi TVL dropped ~7% this week, Yearn’s TVL actually increased. Not by much admittedly. But in a market where capital is leaving the table, seeing assets remain relatively sticky arguably says something about user behavior. Because if we zoom out:- What @yearnfi really sells isn’t yield. Yield is the product. Convenience is the business. To understand this you have to understand something simple: There are generally two ways to earn yield in DeFi. ◈ Manually ◈ Automatically Manual means you’re the strategist. ➜ You monitor rates. ➜ You move funds. ➜ You compound rewards. ➜ You chase opportunities. Automatic means someone or something does all that for you. Yearn’s vaults essentially exist for the second category. Deposit asset in. Vault figures out the rest. Sounds simple but the interesting part is that simplicity is usually built on top of a ridiculous amount of complexity. The best technology often hides complexity instead of showing it off. Same thing here. Most users don’t care which liquidity pool generated the yield. They care that the yield showed up. Which is probably why products like Yearn have managed to survive multiple market cycles whilst hundreds of “next generation DeFi protocols” disappeared. Because eventually people stop asking: “What’s the highest APY?” And start asking: “What’s the easiest way to get reasonable yield without thinking too much?” That’s a very different question. And honestly? I think the protocols that answer that question well over the next few years will quietly outperform expectations.

some people would rather keep this quiet but yvUSD looping on Flex is still offering frontier APYs fixed rates, infinite term, instant liquidity available liquidity: - ~380k USDC for >23% APY - ~800k USDC for >15% APY 🏜️🏜️🏜️

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yAudit has a secret weapon. 🤫 Earlier this year, we developed yAgent, our in-house AI auditor. We've run it on every review since March, and it's really changed the way we work and raised the bar on our security reviews. Our researchers can go deeper on the code, move faster, and explore more ideas as they go. yAgent handles the groundwork so the team can spend its time on the hard problems. The tool was built on top of the award winning vulnerabilitiy detection engine developed by @zerocool_ai. We added our own workflows, knowledge bases, and custom skills to replicate the expertise and approaches we've developed over the years through auditing DeFi's biggest protocols like Yearn, Euler, and many more. We'll be sharing more details soon, including case studies, experiences, and tips for those trying to implement AI into their security process.

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how Flex maximizes borrower fun and lender protection 1. partial liquidations 2. dynamic liquidation fees 3. atomic bad debt resolution (1) Trove goes above max LTV (eg 90%) --> it can only be liquidated back to the safe LTV (e.g. 80%) (2) liquidation fees scale with how unhealthy a Trove is --> (a) borrowers don't overpay for liquidation services and (b) riskier Troves get cleared first (3) bad debt is socialized atomically --> no bank-run dynamic where faster lenders exit first and leave larger bag for everyone else know your protection