This guide is for people looking to buy YAM token from YAM Finance. YAM Finance dubs itself as “An Experiment in Fair Farming, Governance, and Elasticity” in their introductory post.
As you can imagine, it combines a bunch of new DeFi protocols and also adopts many best practices from the space. For instance, YAM token will launch with full on-chain governance, similar to Compound. It has elastic supply, so has many properties similar to AMPL. The treasury (similar to AMPL) is held in yCRV – the stablecoin pool on Curve that has yTokens from YFI.
Another big selling point for YAM is that it is taking a leaf out of the YFI playbook, i.e. no premine, no founder allocation, no VC allocation.
YAM is going to be distributed in 2 phases:
- Phase-1: 8 staking pools of COMP, LEND, LINK, MKR, SNX, WETH, YFI, ETH/AMPL.
- Phase-2: YAM/yCRV Uniswap pool
The above is very similar to what YFI did with its initial Curve pools and then Balancer pool for YFI. The interesting thing is the Uniswap pool would be 50/50 for YAM/yCRV whereas the YFI Balancer pool was 98/2 DAI/YFI.
Update: After the original YAM fiasco, the project is surprisingly still very much alive. In fact, it is adopting a lot of the DeFi stack and building new financial products like insurance. Also, the rebasing part has now been voted out and removed from YAM, so it behaves more like a regular token. To that end, YAM seems like a younger cousin to YFI.
How to Buy YAM
YAM liquidity is spread across multiple exchanges currently. The best way to buy YAM is therefore via 1inch which will aggregate all the different exchanges and also private market makers (e.g. those that connect DeFi and Binance). An additional advantage is that you can convert from any token to YAM, not just ETH.
Simply connect your MetaMask or another Web3 wallet to 1inch and convert from ETH or another ERC20 to YAM in a single transaction. If you don’t have ETH, you can buy from Binance or Coinbase. As you can see below, 1inch does smart order routing via the best exchanges for you.
Edit: 1inch has natively listed YAM! Just enter the tokens you have and the conversion to YAM and you should be good to go. For example, here is how they route the order to exchange a few BAL from Balancer to YAM. This is an older example from the older UI that I’ve retained to show a sample exchange.
Staking YAM
Update: Farming for YAM has now ended.
Instead of buying YAM, you could also stake your crypto to earn YAM based on the phase-1 distribution mentioned above. To stake, go to yam.finance and then stake your tokens. Be aware though that YAM smart contracts are not audited and it has a much higher smart contract risk than some other projects.
Also see how to buy YFI if you’re interested in projects like YAM.