This is a guide on how to buy YFV, a clone of the popular YFI project from Andre. YFV, also called YFValue, is a suite of DeFi financial products, very similar to YFI. The main appeal of YFV is that it is still farmable, unlike YFI, and that it is considered a “cheaper” version of YFI given its lower valuation.
Whether that ends up being the right investment decision against the backdrop of YFI of course remains to be seen. However, as of now, YFV is mostly a YFI clone but may chart its own path in the future in terms of the products it offers.
One big difference currently with YFV vs. YFI is that YFV is still farmable. However, the farming pairs all have YFV as well, so it is risky. There are some Balancer pools, however, that only have 2% of YFV so the impermanent loss risk is much lower than 50% in Uniswap pools but you are still buying YFV to farm YFV.
At the end of this post, we’ll discuss how to farm YFV as well.
How to Buy YFV
YFV currently has liquidity in a number of decentralized exchanges (or DEXes as they are called). This means you need to make sure you are going to the right exchange to buy YFV in order to get the best price execution. This is doubly important for YFV because there are many YFV pairs against other DeFi tokens not just ETH.
For example, there are Balancer pools of BAT and YFV. Sometimes, the execution is better if you are able to convert your ETH to BAT, then use that BAT to buy YFV. This gets complicated to do yourself.
Luckily you can simply use the aggregator 1inch. This will do all the calculation for you and present you a price that finds the best execution in a single transaction. Best of all, it is able to split your order up between the different exchanges.
In the example above, we are trying to buy YFV from YFI (i.e. trying to get as much YFV by selling YFI). You can see that on Uniswap you get 1473.7 YFV and on Balancer you get 1492.1. However, if you use 1inch, it will split the order up for you so you get 1528.6 YFV instead, higher than any individual exchange.
We therefore suggest going through 1inch to buy YFV instead of directly buying on Uniswap or Balancer.
If you are starting from BTC or other non-ETH tokens, you cannot use 1inch directly. In that case, convert your other tokens into ETH or another ERC20 on Binance and then use 1inch. If you are starting from fiat, you can buy ETH on Coinbase. We generally suggest using DEXes so you don’t need to go through account creation and KYC.
How to Farm YFV
If you want to farm YFV, you will first need to buy YFV as described above. Then, go to Balancer and add liquidity to one of the supported pools. You will get “BPT” tokens that you can stake to earn YFV.
As of this writing, the active pools are seed pool (USDC, DAI, USDT, TUSD) and BAL, YFI, BAT, REN, KNC, WETH, and LINK. You can find the full list on the YFV site. Remember impermanent loss if you want to farm YFV, or any other token for that matter.