How to Buy YFII Token (DFI.Money or China’s YFI)

This is a guide on how to buy YFII token, a fork of the original YFI DeFi Token. If you are looking to buy YFI instead, check out this guide or our guide on how to buy DeFi tokens without KYC.

YFII is a fork of the original YFI project from Andre Cronje by a community within the original YFI community. The split occurred mostly over the proposal “YIP-8” in the original YFI community. The YFII community adopted this proposal whereas the original YFI community rejected it (it did not reach the required quorum). The proposal essentially continues yield farming rewards on a weekly halving schedule (10,000 YFII in week 1, 5,000 YFII in week 2 and so on)

So why care about YFII? In many ways, YFII has retained the original ethos of the YFI project namely there is no developer pre-mine (i.e. no YFII is allocated to the dev team – they need to farm or buy it like everyone else), there are no VCs or advisors or any other sort of entities that want to dump on the community.

The biggest contention about YFII in the original YFI community seems to be around not forking the holders of YFI, i.e. YFII is starting the community from scratch instead of starting from a point where holders of YFI also hold YFII. Depending on your point of view, this may be good or bad – good because the project can develop without the baggage of YFI holders and bad because the original YFI community has no stake in YFII.

Also, please do your own research into YFII and smart contract safety – several prominent “western” crypto companies like etherscan, metamask, and even Balancer have put phishing warnings against YFII – something the emergent YFII community (a lot in China) is vehemently opposed to. Balancer in fact completely removed the YFII pool from their frontend (without any input from BAL “governance token” holders), a controversial decision to say the least.

Update: After some Twitter wars and lots of back and forth, all of them have partially relented – for example Etherscan simply lists YFII as “high risk” and Balancer has brought back the YFII pool on the frontend with a warning instead of outright censorship.

How to Farm YFII

Before we discuss buying options for YFII, it would be better to mention the ways you can farm YFII (again, please do your own due diligence around smart contract safety).

As of this writing, there are two ways you can farm YFII:

• Staking yCRV (yTokens in the Curve y pool) via the staking contract at yfii.finance (note that at the time of this writing, MetaMask still shows a phishing error and doesn’t even let you access the site).

• Add liquidity to DAI/YFII pair on Balancer, and stake the BPT from the pool in YFII contracts (yfii.finance again).

If you don’t want to farm or limit your risk exposure to YFII via farming, you can of course just buy the token. There is a community-written guide that has more information on farming YFII.

How to Buy YFII

There are a few options available to buy YFII right now:

• 1inch for best price aggregation (especially useful if you are going from a token into YFII instead of ETH)
• Uniswap (YFII/ETH pool and YFII/USDT pool)
• Balancer (YFII/DAI pool)

Update: 1inch has natively integrated YFII so you’ll get the best price and execution there. Sometimes you get better price on Uniswap and sometimes on Balancer depending on the order size and pair. For example, here is a trade going from 10,000 RLC to YFII on 1inch

Keep an eye out on YFII – the farming yield APY is over 1000% in the second pool right now, and trade volume is $1.5 Million on Uniswap YFII/ETH pool so far just in the last 24 hours.

With the recent price increase in YFI, YFII seems to be having a resurgence as well. See our post on the bull case for YFI if you want to learn more about this model.

Important Resources

Since there seems to be a lot of censorship going on, here are the major details about YFII (again – do you own research and due diligence)

• Etherscan contract for YFII
• Uniswap Token contract for YFII/ETH pool
• Uniswap YFII/ETH pool
• Etherscan contract for Balancer BPT for YFII to stake
• Community (we haven’t verified WeChat): Twitter, Telegram, Discord, WeChat – Add user myGrassU and you should be invited to the group