Vitalik Buterin said he was not personally involved in a yield farm for tokens on decentralized finances.
In a tweetje published on Friday, co-founder Ethereum stated that its only major interaction with revenue-bearing DeFi protocols “was a few coins in Uniswap a long time ago”. Buterin said he earned “a few percent on fees” before taking the money at one point or another.
This goes against the grain of the wider Ethereum community, where many prominent members showed excitement at some of the ‘yield farm experiments’. Funny, he acknowledged this release:
I know that does not make me very “Chad” or what the cool kid lingo is, but I think the real Chad are the friends you make along the way.
– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 14, 2020
Among members of Ethereum Foundation and core developers, Buterin is perhaps most closely associated with the DApp builders community. His posts have often inspired builders like 1inch.exchange to adopt certain solutions written by him first. He first also suggested the general idea for Automated Market Maker exchange, and immediately supported the birth of Uniswap.
There’s a general rift in the Ethereum community between core protocol developers and DApp developers. A clear example of this could be seen in the ProgPow debates, where core developers were largely sympathetic to the proposal, while DApp and DeFi builders were vehemently opposed.
The collapse of Yam may have been a contributing factor to why Buterin decided to tweet this now.
Other developers and core members like Peter Szilagyi and Vlad Zamfir came out strong against the general idea of hyping an untest and unaudited project. Many in the DeFi community were excited about the project as a new experiment in DeFi management, and probably contributed to the revenue mania.
Even after the collapse of Yam due to one missing division, some supporters remained positive about the event as an interesting experiment. Szilagyi criticized this approach of ignoring the negatives, in particular the loss of $ 750,000 in Curve interest-bearing tokens – in addition to the almost complete loss of YAM value.
In a related Twitter thread, Buterin warned against blindly following hyped up trends.
Remember: you do NOT have to participate in “the latest hot defi-ding” to be in ethereum. In fact, unless you * really * understand what’s going on, it’s probably best to sit out or participate with only small amounts.
There are many other types of ETH dapps, explore them!
– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 14, 2020
It is worth noting that the risk in yield farming is generally much higher for those who buy the tokens, not the “farmers.” Even Yam used pre-existing strike code from Synthetix, which was audited in both its original form and its Yam iteration – though only after launch. In addition to targeting bugs on the token contracts themselves, there is a significant risk of dilution and price falls.
One possible interpretation of Buterin’s tweets is that he is now trying to purge some of the excesses of the yield-farming trend.
