It all started with a tweet.... lol. Like so many things in crypto.
Somewhere, somehow i picked up a retweet of someone mentioning a new Defi governance token being launched soon called "BADGER" and a airdrop that was happening. I didnt qualify for the airdrop but i still wanted to give Defi a shot.
I had a 1000 USD on the side for some fun that i decided to put to work.
At this point i didnt know anything about yield farms so i was ready to lose that money if it turned out a scam. It didnt, or rather, so far it doesnt seem to be.lol
How it works seems straightforward enough. They have a product they call "sett vaults". How it works is that you provide liquidity to the WBTC-BADGER uniswap pair or stake the Badger token by itself and stake the newly minted "bWbtcbadger" token on their site that represents your part of the supply. For that you earn (or rather earned) Badger daily. The high APY drives demand and the liquidity provided to the pair attracts investors. They started out with 1000%+ APY for the 8 week farming period and that attracted a fair amount of investors. Currently the TVL is over 800 million USD. I was lucky to get in on day 3 for cheap.
Soon after launch another product was announced. DIGG, a rebasing token pegging to BTC. (Similar to AMPL).
That token was again airdropped, this time to those that staked Badger the longest and will be farmed for the next 8 weeks. After that theyre launching a stable coin called CLAW they will airdrop the same way. etc...
And thats the wonderful thing about all this. All these products mostly exist to be farmed and the utility of the platform isnt in providing some kind of service like with dapps on HIVE. Its main utility is in continuously providing investors new products to farm. :D
First it was Badger, then DIGG, after that CLAW will follow, after that who knows... As long as there is continuous development in this direction and holding the prior tokens offers a benefit in farming the next one, this can go on for a very long time.
Regardless of how absurd that might sound to you, if you really think about it, this is still in some way "innovation". BTC was a peer to peer currency. These Defi tokens are almost exactly the same in base utility + all this "other utility" i mentioned. lol
I 8x my 1000 USD in 50 days. I took out my initial investment and reinvested the rest in DIGG. Ill farm till the next airdrop and another few "x", because why not...
Is the smart person the one telling everyone how stupid their token is or is the smart person the one keeping quiet while number go up?
In the end after all the craze is over id say the biggest innovation this last Defi wave brought is yield farming as a means of distribution. Its superior in effect in every way to all other distribution forms.
Its time to retire mining from crypto as a distribution method for new tokens.
Disclaimer... i do not encourage anyone to buy this token. Do so at your own risk. Gains are massive but risk is insanely high. The gas fees suck too.