Today in DeFi - YFII, AMPL, TENDies

DeFi is better than Netflix.

That’s why I’m launching the pilot episode of Today in DeFi, my daily(?) newsletter on what’s going on in Decentralized Finance.

Here’s What Happened Today in DeFi:

• YFII Saga

• Ampleforth Negative Rebase

• Tendies

YFII Saga

Ali Atiia @aliatiia_

#BBQBecky

Seemingly out of nowhere, a fork of popular yield hunting project YFI appeared recently. With the name YFII and a website that immediately got a phishing warning, many thought it was a scam. (Because of the phishing warning, I’m not linking to the site, but you can search for YFII to find it.)

Balancer blacklisted it almost immediately as well, which sparked some controversy within the DeFi community. Later on, they decided to instead allow the pool but have a warning popup window similar to the YFI pool.

But not everything turned out to be as it appears. YFII turned out to be a fork of YFI implementing YIP-8 - Bitcoin emissions. Implemented by Meet.one, a Wallet company and EOS Block producer, the community consensus is that the code seems relatively safe, though the coin may not have value.

weeb @Weeb_Mcgee

Today @FinanceYfii finally revoked their owner access from their contracts, making it safe to farm in the Balancer pool. What are your thoughts on $YFII ? Is it a ponzi scam? or just a poorly executed fork of YFI?

burn.yfii.financeyfii-gov

But the story doesn't end there.

In a M. Night Shyamalan twist, YFI itself is now incorporating YFII in its latest yield hunting strategy.

Olivier Vdb @oli_vdb

$YFI is about to go full industrial farming against $YFII. A new yCRV yVault was deployed to farm YFII, immediately dump it for DAI and compound the harvest by using the DAI to farm more YFII 👀 etherscan.io/address/0x8816…

AmpleForth Negative Rebase

After weeks of positive growth in price and supply, Ampleforth finally dumps significantly below $1. This caused it to experience its first negative rebase in a month.

With massive supply growth in the past month, this dump was not unexpected.

But on-chain data shows that Ecosystem fund sales may also have contributed to the dump.

Shitcoin Minimalist @bccponzi

Looks like the biggest seller of $AMPL tokens the past 2 weeks has been the "Ecosystem fund" They've been selling 15-20m tokens for at least $30m, with the biggest transfer to Kucoin of 5m tokens right at the top >$2,50 each. Great timing 👌

TEND-ies

Just as AMPLs lose their luster, a new (shit)coin appears in the spotlight

$TEND is a deflationary token with a chicken logo, that has built-in ponzi-like "pumpamentals".

Ceteris Paribus @ceterispar1bus

It’s “yeah let’s buy a fucking chicken nugget coin” season.

The Fried Chicken memes are amazing, but TEND is an experimental, unaudited token of unknown provenance and "hyper-deflationary" economics. It may be a Ponzi scheme.

Sketchy tokenomics aside, these types of tokens have previously had severe security issues. A Balancer pool with STA deflationary tokens had $500K drained in June. TEND’s novel staking and gulping mechanisms also seem experimental and untested.

The sketch factor is high on this one - Buyer beware.