Yearn Finance announced partnerships, so-called mergers, with three DeFi protocols this week. Without ever mentioning it or revealing their plans, the team began a successive streak of integrations. In practice, they aimed to foster a higher rate of cooperation between compatible teams. Can we expect Yearn Finance to mirror Chainlink’s network growth with the new mergers with everything in mind?
The first merger began with Pickle Finance, a yield farming platform hacked on November 23. After losing $19 million in DAI and having no way to cover user funds, the Pickle team figured out a different plan.
By merging with Yearn Finance, they saved their reputation by becoming a part of a larger project. Moreover, they were able to create a plan to restore the funds of affected users.
Only a couple of days later, Yearn Finance already announced its second merger. In a new announcement, Andre Cronje revealed that his team partnered with the Cream Finance team to work on Cream V2. In this case, the partnership would lead to a synergy between the two teams.
While Cream had the chance to upgrade its new protocol with leveraged yields, Yearn would receive access to the other platform’s vaults and input their own products.
In both cases, the opposing project went through a severe change. According to the announcements, Yearn Finance would only benefit from Cream’s and Pickle’s upgrades while at the same time merging with their vaults. On the other hand, the other protocol’s tokens, vaults, and features would go through a radical overhaul.
Yearn Finance to improve network growth as projects ‘become eager’ to partner
We also see that while the YFI community welcomed Cream’s entrance into ‘the family,’ most members were not happy with having Pickle Finance on the team.
Due to their terrible reputation as a result of the hack, most were unwilling to subscribe to the idea that YFI holders can benefit from the merger. But nevertheless, the core developer team assured that the community had no say in the matter either way.
According to one consultant and DeFi investor, Yearn Finance finally became a project worth partnering with. Per his words, Yearn is now so much of an important project in this niche market that other platforms are looking to merge with it.
Comparing the situation to Chainlink’s very own history of network growth through partnerships and integration, the investor believes that the same may be going on for Yearn Finance.
In a new blog post published by Andre Cronje today, the developer explained the team’s position on the mergers. Cronje specified that these mergers represented partnerships, combining teams together to form a cohesive union.
He states that no recent merger means that Yearn is acquiring another protocol. Instead, Yearn facilitates the mergers to form symbiotic relationships between multiple talented developer teams.
In this context, we may truly believe that Yearn Finance is on the road to drastically improving its network growth. It is possible to see growth similar to Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network which massively increased in size over the years. If Chainlink became the central solution for all oracle needs, Yearn Finance may achieve the same but for DeFi.