Built In-House, Open by Default: How Yearn Actually Manages Risk

I can't believe it took the US so long to understand that like you want to own distribution of stable coins. Like why would you not want to own distribution of stable coins? This is mind-blowing. It bought like a position in some like outrageous claim, like some moonshot. And Vitalik saw it and he deposited into it.

And he was like, you got to make more of these strategies. Like I guess you could call what our system is an agent >> [music] >> that we started 2 years ago. They're going to be like North Korea. Do you want to be part of an open borderless economy that spreads across the entire world, or do you want to be like in your own silo? This is where it all starts.

Like >> [music] >> the great yearn comeback. You just have to be there. >> There are currently about 38 million different cryptocurrency tokens in the industry. And conservatively speaking, about 10,000 different protocols themselves. I personally remember the days where I could list and be familiar with just about every single project and token that existed.

But today, that is no longer possible. And only a few notable projects truly receive household name status in crypto. Yearn Finance is certainly one of them. Yearn is DeFi's original vault platform, founded in 2020 and now fully DAO governed by YFI token holders. With over 250 strategies deployed and over 100 vaults on Ethereum alone, Yearn is arguably DeFi's most battle-tested protocol.

I'm Dylan Hanson from DIA. And today, we're talking with Corn from Yearn Finance. Corn, welcome to Beyond Yield. Corn, thank you for joining the show today. Uh before we kick it off, how's everything going?

How's your day been? >> Really good. I love Wednesdays. They're my favorite day of the week. >> Love that.

Likewise, I'm actually more of like a maybe like a Thursday kind of guy. Um but I love that to each their own. And and let's just before we actually go into the Yearn side of the conversation here, love to always get some background on who we're hearing from, who we're speaking with. For me, super interesting to learn the evolution of your journey, right? Like how, you know, how you got how you you know, initially started at Yearn.

And kind of what about more about your role at Yearn, what you're focused on these days. >> Yeah, so before this, I worked for the US's largest Cisco Networks partner for 10 years. I was basically building networks and data centers for hospitals in New York and Boston. And that was a great role. I was a technical seller there.

And I learned a lot about selling. And I had a bunch of mentors who I am still in touch with today. And um toward the end of that 10 years, because I was in health care, the primary medical record medical records company in the US, Epic, they became a web app. And for that reason, hospitals were buying less data center equipment. Some of them were actually getting rid of their data centers entirely and just standing up co-locations for the hardware that they did need to maintain.

And customers were buying less. So, at that same time, I had been interested actually in securities tokenization at the time. And I had been um like in a few group chats with people about the subject. And one of those people actually went on to work at Yearn. And when I left that role in that like career that I had before Yearn, uh it was basically the near the end of 2021 at the top of the top.

Like Yearn had $7 billion of deposits. We were a top 10 D5 project and when you thought about like who was involved back then, it was like Maker DAO, Aave, Compound, Uniswap, Yearn. Like there were others of course that I'm not mentioning right now, but um that's how my journey started. Yearn was looking for a technical seller and uh I filled that role. So, it's been almost 5 years now.

Seems like a lifetime, but uh I have zero regrets about making that hop. >> Yeah, and as you mentioned, Yearn is really one of the household names in this space, so to say, you know, like you there's an it's an industry now with thousands of projects, you know, millions of tokens and Yearn has really sustained its competitive positioning. Um within the D5 space. >> We did a lot to help grow and make crypto safe. So, back then, there were no audit companies, there was no Seal 911.

So, what happened when you were about to be exploited or something was going to happen, you contacted Yearn and Yearn came to like save you. And back then, we also started this program called Y Academy. Y Academy was the first audit education program. So, quarterly, we onboarded a bunch of people through this really difficult test. Whoever did well in that test, we brought them in house to do like a 1-month audit education program with us and these were all seasoned engineers.

These were This was not like a an entry-level thing. And since then, uh back then, we were sending all these people to go work at other audit companies and work on other projects. And when I got to yearn, I started Y audit because selling security services is somewhat like adjacent to the role that I had previously in the IT world and starting a services based business was just something I saw immediately. So that's Y audit now and we're still billing a few million dollars a year and we have tons of great customers. We do like ZK and solidity and viper smart contract auditing.

So yearn has done a lot for the space and it started like way back. >> Yeah. [snorts] And the space is so competitive. It's so fast-paced, right? So you see that you know, the flash the the blue chips that you mentioned just now earlier these core five projects.

They still exist, but many of those, you know, we've seen a lot of churn from these early stage D5 summer, you know, the initial days of D5 projects. Yearn is not one of those which has churned, right? This is a team which has continued to build out products and evolve in order to sustain a competitive positioning. So could you take us through a bit about this, you know, how has yearn itself evolved over the years from where you guys were in 2020 into kind of the you know, the comprehensive suite of products and solutions today? >> It So back then when I joined yearn, there were like over a hundred contributors.

It was crazy. It was an extremely open system where people would just come in and like start doing things and a consequence of that is that they were also getting paid and we had tons of burn. We were burning like over three million dollars a month in salary. And fortunately yearn did make over a hundred million dollars in profit like in 2021 and 2022. So that sustained that team for a period of time, but like there was a moment in 2022 when D5 supply side lending rates went under 1%.

Like they were close to zero and at the same time US Treasury rates were like 5 and 1/2%. And back then, we didn't have easy exposure to that Treasury rate on chain. So, there was no way for us to get that yield. Now, we can just uh reallocate from like whatever we were doing in Morpho or Aave or Fluid or Compound into USDS and it's extremely liquid. We can move 100 million dollars into USDS with no price impact, like no slippage at all for the users.

So, if oh if only we had that back then, I think Yearn would have like a few billion dollars more TVL today. But, that was an unfortunate headwind at the time and post that happening, um Yearn still kept this mantra of being extremely safe. And we weren't willing to be experimental with any of the yields in our core vaults. So, we went to market with vault products that were a cash equivalent vault. They were always liquid all the time.

The yield is like slightly less than what you would get from allocating like directly to Aave or directly somewhere else. But, you're always liquid. And when the rates change, we reallocate automatically. Um Yearn does take a fee, of course. So, that's another reason why the yields are like slightly less when you go through Yearn, but you do get also exposure to all of our alerting uh and like safety mechanisms that we've stood up over time.

Uh which is a another conversation that I should have about Yearn curation at some point in the future. But, from there Yearn made all of our LP vaults. And then, like that was the Curve Wars era, which was like a year or two of people uh you know, playing around with a V curve locking mechanism and we had like yCRV uh which is a product that a lot of people understood as having like a kind of like a hard peg being able to exit those positions at all time, but the peg is it's a relative term, you know, and the Curve Wars ended up being I don't know. Something that is not focused on today. So, it definitely like lost some steam with us and like with the greater crypto community.

So, today Yearn has we're still going to always have those cash equivalent yield products. Like yvUSDC-1 is the most risk-off product that we have. We're also introducing um more high-yield vaults because that's what the market has been asking for so long. Um truth be told, we have been experimenting with these models for a long time. Like test in prod style.

We just haven't brought them to like be pushed to accept user deposits because we wanted to figure out our own system uh and like have some confidence in the product ourselves before we bring it to a greater market. >> [snorts] >> And meanwhile, other competitors of Yearn came to market with these high-yield vaults that are you know, they contain a lot of illiquid positions most of the time and that's where the higher yields come from. Um they came to market with a vault that was a more uh non-programmatic, not verifiable, controlled by a multi-sig style vault, but it enabled them to be to react quicker to market changes and to like reallocate funds across chains and to like uh to strategies where they didn't have to figure out how to operate it programmatically. So, it gave them some flexibility that we necessarily didn't have access to at the time where we had to like think through our own approach. How are we going to have access to these same yields in a programmatic way?

How are we going to like build our systems and make frameworks where we can continue to tap into these like maybe even not 4626 compliant vaults. So, um Yearn definitely like lost some steam being really safe. And I don't necessarily have regrets about that, but I think that we could have taken a path of like doing two things at once. Maybe we should have done that back then. But, um today like Yearn is coming to market with all these new strategies and products.

And I'm I've honestly never been so excited as I am right now. >> [clears throat] >> I love it. I want to go deep into that and um I think maybe helps for to set the stage on the different categories of infrastructure that Yearn has and then go deep into like what's coming. Um I I'm excited to see like how you're looking at these higher yielding assets, which of them are enticing, which ones you know, you find that there's borrower demand for. But, let's let kind of set the stage a little bit with the overview here.

Um Yearn is, you know, reputable for having multi infrastructure, a suite of multi infrastructure products, right? From being the platform itself, a strategy manager as you just discussed a bit, risk curation. So, we'll get into like deeper on on vaults and whatnot. Um yield strategist, liquidity provider. There's a whole um There's a whole broad scope of of products within this suite of what yearn is providing.

Um, and from your side, you know, how do you envision these? Do you Do you look at these kind of separately? Do these exist as unique separate products within themselves? Or is there an advantage that yearn has, you know, achieved in providing all of these different products? Is there essentially um Do these Do the combinations of these products allow and create opportunities that don't otherwise exist without such interconnection?

>> It took us a long time to figure out how to organize ourselves. Um, we are 17 full-time people today and a few uh like part-time contractors also in there. We have the vaults and strategy team, and then we have the security and curation team. Then we have uh another team that focuses on the LP vaults and like all of our liquid locker products and like the curve war stuff still. Because that is also honestly, it's still like a huge profit center for us.

So, being involved in that, we're one of the top curve token holders. So, the way that it works today is it starts with a curation and security team. So, I think we are uniquely positioned to have our own security team. They are real smart contract auditors from Y Audit and Sherlock. So, they are literally auditors, which is amazing for us.

Um, yearn curation, how it works right now, we want to give people access to the best yields in all of crypto. Not necessarily like just what's going on in Morpho. So, what we do is we have this parent uh level vault, like YV USDC-1. It will reallocate to wherever the best yield is on Morfo. So, it could allocate to Morfo for Gauntlet, Morfo Steakhouse, Morfo Yearn.

Um because Morfo because uh Yearn also is a curator on Morfo because why not? They have great distribution. So, we're not going to not be part of that. Um we That vault will be able to allocate if like Aave has better rates or if like Fluid has better rates or if USDCS has better rates, it will automatically reallocate every hour. We've been using that system, which is, you know, powered by AI, for over 2 years now.

So, it's pretty much bulletproof at this point. One of the most proven uh like reallocation systems in the market for sure. So, if we come across an asset that someone wants to like use as a strategy or use as collateral, um we stick it up on the strategy board, and someone from the Yearn security or curation team will go in there, and they'll start writing a report about this asset. Like, is there on-chain liquidity for it? If there is on-chain liquidity for it, is some of it owned by the protocol, or is it just there right now because there are tons of incentives?

And if we start accepting that asset as collateral one day, is that liquidity going to shrink, and we're going to be stuck? So, these are like all the things that we need to consider when looking at these assets and evaluating them. And from there, uh should we want to accept that as collateral or build a strategy for it also, we'll go ahead and do that. Those are like different processes right now because we're only doing curation for lending markets like on Morfo. Yearn does have our own standalone programmatic lending product coming out really soon called Flex.

Um but it's test in prod also right now. It's going to be new obviously new to the market uh when it comes out and needs a little bit of time to be proven. But that is a very exciting product and one day yearn will definitely be allocating to that also. So those are like the three groups like the three teams that we have today um aside from that there's also the BD team uh which is my focus um it's me and a few other people we're focused on building the yearn partner program again and we're building like also tooling to help us explain the like strategic advantages of working with yearn better to our customers because some of these things are not they're not simple to explain especially because like the audience of people that I've been working with like when I go to New York and meet with institutions I'm having to explain all of D5 to people in a single meeting and it's better if I have tools and like I'm very prepared to visually show them what it's like to work with yearn versus what it's like to work with um other vault infra providers so we're vaults we're security and curation and then we're lockers and then BD. That's yearn today.

>> Yeah excellent thank you. That's a super comprehensive overview. Um a lot to go into from there from that point. Um >> I know. >> One of the one of the things I'm curious about is and this is also just from my focus from the kind of the BD side as well right and the Oracle side as an infrastructure provider.

Curious within the yearn let's say like curation and strategy side, to what extent of the due diligence and intelligence and real-time monitoring for different positions is done in-house? You mentioned you guys have in-house auditors. You mentioned you guys leveraging AI. Um is this is the whole comprehensive overview done in-house or are you also using like external third parties for real-time analytics or tracking yield? I really interesting to see how this all comes together.

>> So, back when we started doing this, there was no Blockade, there was no Hypernative. So, guess what we did? We built our own alerting and reporting stack. It's built on Tenderly. All of our scripts are all open source right now.

You can like literally go through the yearn docs and find all of them. You can find all of our We have an entire structure to the alerting and reporting and like market exit mechanisms, all the automation that we have, it's all public. Like you can literally go and we have instructions about how to use it yourself if you want to. So, yeah, we had to build all that stuff ourselves and like that's our approach pretty much with everything. Like do we want to be a consumer of other products or do we want to build it and uh you know, see if we can do it better and maybe even productize it one day.

>> So, that's the fundamental um kind of in-house due diligence process and and kind of backing towards decision-making. I don't want to go too off-topic here, but can we dive a little bit more into the AI aspect? You mentioned AI, we we jumped over it. How are you guys leveraging AI to make these decisions on a real-time basis? >> So, the thing the the reallocation mechanism that we have is off-chain AI.

It does all these computations and then all the movements and all of the guardrails for safety that we have are all on chain and you can like read what they are right now. Like are we going to take out a huge loan? Are we going to like accept a bunch of debt? Like there are limits to that in these strategies. So um all of that we started thinking about two years ago and it's been in production ever since then with minimal changes.

Uh in the future we're actively thinking about >> [snorts] >> Oh man, I don't even know if I want to talk about this right now. So I we're well I want to maintain our strategic advantages of yearn. >> Feel free to at your discretion, of course. >> I will just tell you. We're thinking of ways to enable users to interact with our the AI system that we built two years ago on their own.

Think about it like this. We have a website right now that shows you all of the flows of yearn. It shows you like this vault reallocated to this position at this time with this much for this reason and these are the new rates. What if a user could ask the AI, "Why did you do that versus like this other thing? Why What is your next move going to be?

Like what are you monitoring?" >> Yeah. >> That's what we're doing next. >> Interesting. Yeah. >> I think that users interacting with the system it's not always going to be humans.

There are going to be agents interacting with the system also. And >> Yeah. >> I don't know that anyone else is building something like this right now. >> I love that point because in these discussions I'm often asking, you know, are you guys targeting retail? Are you targeting institutions?

Is it collective? Really interested also hear your perspective like the institutional focus is a big push right now as well. But the undiscussed topic is also like what are you doing for agents, you know, Brian Armstrong two weeks ago and the tweet went pretty viral and suggesting that like majority maybe 90% of on-chain transactions will be done by agents within probably a year or less. Um so the positioning towards that is extremely important. Um so yeah, sorry if you have anything on that.

>> I guess you could call what our system is an agent that we started two years ago. Yeah, that's pretty much what it is. >> And in terms of and again going a little bit deeper here but like in terms of AI agents making um decisions on chain, doing transactions, depositing into vaults, what do you think are the core changes that need to be made in order to actually support these standards, like these infrastructure interface requirements for agents to use this information? >> Well, those systems need guardrails. There was another AI project that was depositing into vaults that I came across like a year ago and I used it and the first transaction that I did had so much slippage that I needed to be in that vault for a year to get my money back.

>> Yeah. >> Like that's the first thing that happened. So uh I was a little skeptical about using agents like freely. >> Sure. >> They need to make sure that there are safety mechanisms attached to those.

>> Absolutely. There was a very famous popular slippage instance last week that went viral. >> like man, that this is this stuff is going to happen over and over. Like the agents are agents like oh, did you blanket approve this agent to do all this other stuff? Like, it's just going to start doing its own thing.

>> 100%. So, I completely agree. I think guardrails are the most important kind of infrastructure that you can implement while adapting to the agentic economy on chain. Let's Maybe I can zoom back into the Yearn discussion more directly. Let's go into the strategies that are existing on Yearn as an infrastructure provider.

Um there's over 250 strategies in production. Correct me if I'm wrong. Anybody can come and create a strategy. Anybody can build one. But, there's a pretty rigorous vetting process behind the decision-making here for a strategy to get deployed.

Can you share the kind of what the process for this entails for a user or somebody looking to build a strategy? >> Yeah, so anyone can build a Yearn strategy or use the Yearn Vault V3 stack like staked Curve USD is a Yearn Vault. It uses the deposit function to like recognize yield. Uh Superforms V1 is all Yearn V3. Cap is all Yearn V3.

Um Term Finance fixed vaults, that's all Yearn V3. Uh You can build a Yearn strategy. Those are using the Yearn V3 stack. But, not necessarily using Yearn operated strategies. Um running Yearn strategies, there's no UI for it.

Uh so, you have to be a good engineer at the code level to be able to operate it. Um it has been a barrier to entry for us in the past. And uh I think that Yearn 3 years ago making the change from being such an open organization where anyone could make strategies and like we'd put them on the website. It wasn't necessarily the safest thing to do because a lot of these were not sound strategies. Like they were had vulnerabilities in them.

Uh right now everything on the site is made by the Yearn team. It's probably going to stay that way for a long time. We've thought about spinning up like a partners.yearn.fi site for people who make their own Yearn strategies, but I don't know. That's not what the market has wanted. It just hasn't happened that way for us.

>> And what you referenced earlier, I want to come back to this. You referenced that what the market does want are more high-risk assets that they can, you know, deposit or high-risk vaults with underlying high-risk assets they can deposit into it and borrow against. >> The market is interested in these like asymmetric wins. They want like to not have a lot of risk, but they want to have like a bonus, like some win for that at the end. And for that reason we came up with a few products that kind of split yield off from a safe asset, so um you can take your yield from like USDC and you can take that yield and put it into something that may have like a little boost for you or like some asymmetric return, something that's more risk-on.

Um a couple months ago we were doing an internal hackathon and we made this strategy that took yield from USDC and put it into a uh permissionless prediction market called Trulio. It was called True Markets at the time. And it bought like a position in some like outrageous claim, like some moon shot. And Vitalik saw it and he deposited into it. And he was like, "You got to make more of these strategies.

Like, that is clearly what the market wants. It's even what Vitalik wants. So, we're going to keep making interesting things like yield splitter. >> Yeah, that's >> cool products. >> Totally cool.

So, basically you're earning safe yield on your USDC, but the yield from that is used for asymmetric wins, like you said. I love this. >> Protected capital at all times, also. >> Yeah. And a asymmetric returns are like [laughter] very high level here, but I think that this is the value add of crypto within itself.

I think this is why most people get into crypto or aside from the ethos, of course. It's like from an investment perspective, the asymmetry of opportunity here. So, if you can approach that with risk-adjusted returns, I think it's with a risk-adjusted approach, it's pretty exciting. >> I think that this is one of those examples that really demonstrates the value of building blocks of DeFi, which is a concept that is a little bit lost on people who come from the traditional finance world, because there's no concept of a receipt token, you know? So, we have a very clear thing in crypto.

You make a deposit, you get a receipt token. That receipt token could be fungible in other products. Thus begins the like chain of yield farming in crypto, but it is easier to do here than anywhere else. >> Yeah. And this is the a big thesis in behind real-world assets, as well.

In that people are finally connecting the pieces, I think, on an institutional level that having real-world assets on chain enables looping, it enables collateralizing and gaining liquidity amongst these assets that's otherwise not accessible in traditional finance. I mean, curious how you guys are looking at, you know, now we have different types of tokens, right? You have Yeah. You have native tokens, you have real-world assets, you have teams that are ushering vaults on maybe like private and credit for from institutions. Are you looking at the whole landscape?

Are you guys also going into real world assets or um focused on these other types of asymmetric bets on chain that you just mentioned? >> We do have an announcement coming uh maybe next week at DAS about Yearn partnering with a firm who will be bringing securities to market. And as they bring those securities to market, Yearn will be collateralizing them to be useful, to be fungible in DeFi. Um so, that's our approach right now. We've been able to hook up with like a service provider in New York who has our own who aligns really well with the Yearn culture and like understands that there are certain things that Yearn cares about more than anyone else, like security.

And for that reason, like they chose to work with us even though uh Yearn is sometimes just a bunch of cartoon characters on the screen, you know, or a bunch of anons. So, people have different values and I think uh my own experiences just like connecting with institutions and telling them the whole DeFi story has really started to resonate and that's why I'm going to be in New York a lot now and through September. Uh >> Yeah. >> I I'm inspired to do it and I'm happy to do it and I feel like this is where it all starts, like the great Yearn comeback. You just have to be there.

>> I love it. And, you know, looking at institutions, you being in the room for kind [snorts] of forward-facing these types of institutions, why now? Why is now the beginning? What has been the unlock here? Is it Vaults as the D5 flagship or as the flagship D5 product?

Um and I kind of a second to that, a follow-up to that. Um sorry, I don't like the two uh way to questions here, but >> Yeah. >> Like are there still blockers in these conversations? Um do you mentioned education. I think education is a huge part of this, but um you know, are there still security concerns?

Are there um Do you think that the floodgates are open when you're having these conversations now or that there's still kind of some high-level blockers? >> So, the first one, did Vaults open up that interest? I think stablecoins did. And stablecoins in D5 are they are fungible and have a receipt token and they demonstrate like the building blocks of D5. And I think that led to the usage of stablecoins led to the interest in Vaults.

And to be honest, I couldn't believe that institutions like didn't have a similar Vault product already. It's very hard for me to believe that. Um I was really surprised that they were so interested in Vaults, like a category that's been around for 6 years now. So, I think the the real interest from institutions has been around stablecoins and now bringing securities on chain and making them uh composable with D5. Like Vaults are the enabler of that.

They're the tooling that allows that stuff to be interesting and consumable uh by like retail and by other institutions. So, the blockers that Yearn still has, I would say, are like being so aligned to what is Cypherpunk and like being aligned to borderless No, borderless permissionless DeFi. I mean, that is not That's not what they do. Like that's not their business. If they start working with Yearn, are they going to disrupt their core business, you know?

So, We've need to We've had to explain all of this to this audience this like new au- this audience of people who are new to DeFi. And some of them get it and they love it and they're all in. Like the service provider that we're going to start working with in New York, some of them don't get it and some of them are going to take a long time to like get to market still. And that's okay. That's totally okay.

>> Yeah, and I think that these first movers, once uh the the result shows an advantage of taking this first move, that'll also open the floodgates. If as long once the other institutions start realizing that they're kind of losing a competitive opportunity here. Um >> They they're going to open their eyes one day and they're going to be isolated. They're going to be like North Korea. Do you want to be part of an open borderless economy that spreads across the entire world or do you want to be like in your own silo?

Well, we had this experiment back in like the late '70s with the internet and people chose to be part of this open internet structure and the same thing is going to happen with finance. Like it is literally inevitable. So, it's just Yearn's focus is just going to be borderless and permissionless and we're never going to move away from that. >> I love it. And as you know, one of the earliest established household names in in Web3, it's very in my opinion important and refreshing not refreshing but like it's just great to see that that ethos that you guys still hold and that you can actually achieve this without sacrificing the ethos that we all have come here for.

So, um I love >> It's going to take some time. >> Yeah, for sure. And it already has and I think that the momentum is picking up which is exciting. I also like the connection that you drew towards stablecoins. I think that stablecoins were so uh commonly discussed a year ago and people have already accepted it in mind that stablecoins are the adoption tool, right?

That they that they are um the use case that makes the most immediate sense to governments, institutions and whatnot. So, >> I can't believe it took the US so long to understand that like you want to own distribution of stablecoins. Like why would you not want to own distribution of stablecoins? This is mind-blowing. >> Yeah, exactly.

[snorts] Um Completely agree. And that yeah, and an effective way that boosts the economy as well cuz stablecoins can be backed on um T-bills, bonds, other kind of government-backed uh loans for example. So, that said Corn, um I can I think we I feel like we could go on all day here a lot deeper. I want to I want to thank you for joining so much. This was a great conversation.

It really excited to hear how you guys are looking towards the future. You shared a lot of alpha. Um so I'm excited to stay in the loop after this. For for people who are listening in, I mean obviously know how to find Yearn. Um it's actually funny.

I was kind of checking it out last night. You you type in Yearn Finance and of course it's like the first thing that pops up on Google. But SEO amongst crypto projects is uh not usually the first one. So again, gets back to this household name. Um so yeah.

>> Oh yeah. But anything else does. >> Anything else you want to just share here before we jump that we missed or where you'd like to direct people to stay up-to-date with what's coming? >> Uh the two things I want to mention, I mean, you can go to Yearn or like follow me on Twitter and you'll get all the updates. Put me on alerts, too.

But >> What's your Show your Twitter >> I'm OMG Corn everywhere and I even have a LinkedIn now because a bunch of people at institutions I spending so much time in New York now, everyone told me to get a LinkedIn. So like I had LinkedIn for 10 years, I just haven't used it, so I started using it again and I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty happy about the engagement on there. Like it's not bad. So >> Be the alpha. >> Yeah, the two things I want to mention are that Yearn just redid our tokenomics again.

So now when you stake YFI token, you get not we're sending 90% of our revenue through staked YFI token now. So Yearn made five and a half million dollars last year. We're sending all of that through staked YFI token. There's no more four-year lockup. It's a 14-day linear cool down period.

That's it. So YFI is really simple now and uh the other thing is keep an eye out for our new lending product coming to market called Flex. It is a fixed rate model where there is always liquidity all the time. We can run these markets at 100% utilization because it has a redemption model and not a liquidation model. So it's very close to the liquidity bold interest rate model where if you have a stack of interest rates, the one on the bottom can always be redeemed.

So that product is going to be out really soon. We think it's pretty close as close as you can get to like a Uniswap like primitive. And we think that there are other primitives out there like that. So we're going to keep looking for them. >> That's huge.

Super exciting. I mean, even there you touched on two things I could we could go deeper into about revenue being now a huge part of the kind of modeling of of what's valuable in the space. And then also redeemability of these assets as we're looking at private credit RWAs, what is the redeemability? Not just a lot of these assets are have thin or no liquidity on chain. So, um >> Yeah.

>> two super exciting things to stay alert of and happy to see that you are confident and excited about primitives still moving still growing and and new primitives in the space. I think that's really an exciting optimistic kind of note to close on. >> Yeah, those are the products that institutions are the most interested in. If you've been paying attention like Uniswap, Morpho, like those are primitives. There's more out there.

>> [snorts] >> Absolutely. Excellent. Well, Corn, thank you again for joining Beyond Yield. It's been an absolute pleasure. >> Yeah, really nice to have to like to be here and talk to you.

Thank you. >> Yeah, hope to catch up with you in New York next week. >> Yeah, I'll be there. >> All right. Cheers.

And thank you everybody for tuning in. We'll see you on the next one.