Yield Yak AMA Recap
Date: 23 July 2021
Guest: Yield Yak | Yak Man, founder (@yieldyak_)
Host: LtStakePlissken (@Ltsnakeplissken)
Venue: Elk Discord
Format: Text
This recap is a lightly edited transcript of the AMA with introductions and banter removed for length.
LtSnakePlissken (Elk): Hi everyone! I’d like to welcome @Yak Man from Yield Yak! Thanks for joining us!!
Yak Man (Yield Yak): Hi! It’s great to be here — thanks for having me!
LtSnake (Elk): Great to have you! We’ll be getting started with some Twitter questions for you.
The first question is from @xxxxxxx:
“To a person who is new to the crypto environment, how will you explain the services you provide?”
Yak Man (YY): Yield Yak helps defi users. Our main product (autocompounder) helps yield farmers earn more yield and save time. For anyone who doesn’t know what yield farming is, it means you make a deposit which earns a return paid in tokens. If you want to compound your earnings manually, it is a multi-step process that takes time and costs money due to transaction fees. For most people, it’s impossible to optimize returns due to the time and money expense. YY depositors get close to optimal compounding without any time commitment in exchange for a fee.
Our second product is newer. YY Swap is a DEX aggregator which helps DEX traders find the best prices. YY Swap (in alpha) executes trades by routing them between the many different dexes of Avalanche, which often gives better results than trading at a single DEX. ELK is supported today. We have docs available that go into details, https://docs.yieldyak.com/
LtSnake (Elk): Awesome! Sounds like it takes some work out of regularly compounding. The DEX aggregator sounds pretty neat. The second question is from @xxxxxxx:
“What is the schedule of the buying and selling and compounding back to LPs, how often does the process itself take on Yield Yak?”
Yak Man (YY): Great questions. The innovation of Yield Yak is that the compounding happens by the community. Our team has nothing to do with it, so the compounding can happen in perpetuity with or without us. To accomplish that we use cryptoeconomic incentives (in other words, we pay a bounty from smart contracts) to whoever pays the gas to compound everyones’ rewards. What this means for us is that we can offer a huge array of farms. We have deployed nearly 200 different contracts with ~100 currently live. We get a very long tail of yield farms. That is very powerful compared to teams who take this cost on themselves and have to offer smaller numbers of farms. This turned into a really competitive game. Right now, the big farms compound every 10 minutes and we optimize the bounty to optimize compounding.
LtSnake (Elk): 100 live farms? Wow! A lot to maintain I’m sure. That’s awesome.
Question number three is from @xxxxxxxxx:
“What is the importance of community to the yieldyak? and What is your community-building strategy? Do you agree that the power of the community will propel your project to global success?”
Yak Man (YY): You can see the community literally runs the platform. It’s easy to maintain 100 farms because we have 20+ contributors helping us. Our contributors handle smart contract development, UI/UX, translations, data analysis, and more.
And for those who are not contributors, especially the very early members of our community were using an unknown, untested product and giving us non-stop advice on how to improve. We took all of the feedback and turned it into what Yield Yak is today.
LtSnake (Elk): Yes, community feedback is at the core of DeFi projects, and it is always great to see projects listening to the community. The next is from @xxxxxxx:
“With the ongoing craze for $YAK , how do u think people can have maximum utility out of it? What uses will there be for $YAK when it launches?”
Yak Man (YY): Good question. $YAK is going to be out soon. Our community and users have been instrumental for the platform’s success, so it’s natural we put the platform fully in their hands with a token. $YAK will have a fixed supply of 10,000 YAK. There are two main utilities for staking $YAK:
1. You will receive a voice in governance
2. You will receive farming rewards (paid in AVAX), which are funded with revenue from the platform
We have chosen a token economy that is very sustainable and allows us to reach ambitious growth. We’re lucky to have revenue from day 0, and plenty to build a great platform and attract good talent.
LtSnake (Elk): Wow! 10,000 is certainly small. Bound to be an interesting investment! The next question is from @xxxxxxx:
“How can YieldYak holders participate in the ecosystem governance of the standard protocol? Whereas ecosystem governance is extremely complicated. or do you have a simple method for managing a standard protocol?”
Yak Man (YY): So right that governance is hard. Basically, if we put every decision in the DAOs hands, it can be slow or inefficient or infeasible to do things. Right now, we have a few groups who manage things:
- Yak Board of Friends — The planned set of multisig operators, selected from community founders and leaders (Ava Labs, Avalaunch, Markr, etc.)
- Yak Guides — community managers (and much more)
- Yak Treasury — community treasury management
- Yak Quants — community data analysis team
- Yak Devs — community development team
Our job as the original team is to ensure the platform is managed for success with support of the community. If at some point, any of these groups are failing, we would suggest the DAO to put forward a course of actions to correct it. So bottom line — we put community groups together to make decisions. If they make poor decisions, they should be changed. We welcome new contributors in any area.
LtSnake (Elk): It sounds like you have a thoroughly defined structure for your teams and contributors. That organization is integral for success. Nex question is from @xxxxxxx:
“Yield Yak is a platform that runs on the blockchain Avalanche. Does this mean that any avalanche-based project can be listed in Yield Yak? What kind of diligence do you take to prevent scam projects from being listed?”
Yak Man (YY): We list a lot of farms. We are not an audit service.
We do review the contracts we are working on. In some cases, we have reported issues or delayed listings due to our findings. You should always DYOR. We are not an audit service and you could lose money.
LtSnake (Elk): Yes, the skill of carefully doing your own research is definitely worth developing. The final Twitter question is from @xxxxxx:
“Cross-chain is not just a buzzword, but a real necessity for farmers who want to multiply their earnings. Does Yield Yak have any initiatives to implement cross-chain optimized/auto-compounding yield farming?”
Yak Man (YY): Yes. Watching Elk go cross-chain from Avalanche is very inspiring.
We want to support Avalanche-native projects first (our home), but we have been actively exploring the path to go cross-chain with community developers.
It is a natural fit for YY to support projects that start on the same chain (like Elk) when we get there.
LtSnake (Elk): Keeping our origin chain bond is certainly important, we’re all a community after all. For the final 30 minutes of the AMA, we will pick some questions posted live from our Discord channel. First question:
“Is YY considering a feature that allows you to deposit to the pool only with a single asset and automatically converting it to LP token?”
Yak Man (YY): We’ve had “zaps” ready for some time and created the dex aggregator to ensure better prices for users who zap (and when we swap assets in compounding activities). We have not released these yet.
LtSnake (Elk): From @xxxxxxxx:
“First of all congratulations. Every project has weaknesses as well as strengths. What are the weaknesses of YY and what are your plans to overcome those in future?”
Yak Man (YY): We had so much fun in the early days of the platform, at first we weren’t as serious. At some point we got significant TVL and started to smarten up, including the rebrand to Yield Yak. At this point, we’re building the community up, but maybe we wasted some opportunities early on by being more experimental than serious
LtSnake (Elk): Good to take some risks too! Sometimes that’s the benefit of having fun in a project. From another user:
“Would still love to see the option to get reinvest rewards claimable as (deposited) pool token (rather than farmed token). Is that on the planning at all?”
Yak Man (YY): I like that approach also. We did not know if we would pick up the reinvestors, so kept it simple for them. Maybe we will change to an approach like that in the future
LtSnake (Elk): @xxxxxxx asks:
“Why was Avalanche chosen as the platform to build on as opposed to other options like Solana and Ethereum?”
Yak Man (YY): Transaction speed without sacrificing decentralization. Etheruem feels slow now! And Solana Summer hadn’t really started back then.
LtSnake (Elk): @xxxxx ponders:
“Can you imagine some more sophisticated data-aggregation with e.g. machine learning predictions, routing algorithms (may be cross-chain) etc. for maximum yield strategies? What would be the best place to start to contribute for someone with a background in scientific computing who wants to contribute to the yield-yak ecosystem?”
Yak Man (YY): Yeah, so we have a lot of contributors. The best ones just go take on a challenge — we have not turned down any contributors with clear scope/goal/budget. Feel free to get in touch!
LtSnake (Elk): Awesome! Crypto is full of opportunities if you’re driven. Lots to learn, always! @xxxxx asks:
“What is the end game here? Is there a plan to expand to other chains? And are your contracts audited?
Yak Man (YY): We have not had an audit yet. You can read more about our security roadmap on our blog: https://yieldyak.medium.com/yield-yak-security-roadmap-73503bc68dd7
The end game is to build useful products for defi users (i.e. ourselves and you).
LtSnake (Elk): Utility is king. @xxxxxxx asks:
After aggregators release their own tokens, most of the time these tokens face value depreciation bcuz of lack of effective usage and inflationary tokenomics. How will yieldyak behave to protect $YAK investors and increase its both value and usage?
Yak Man (YY): There will only ever be 10,000 YAK. We have designed our token to be scarce and valuable from the beginning.
LtSnake (Elk): Hard to have inflation when you only have 10,000 $YAK. @xxxxxx asks:
“Soon lending platforms will be deployed on Avalanche, could you tell us how you plan to take full advantage of that?”
Yak Man (YY): Yeah, I love what’s about to happen to Avalanche defi. We’re going to build the best strategies out there, among a new “set and forget” product called Vaults for the more casual farmer. We have had these developed since a few weeks after launch but it was not the right moment to launch them. We’ve been working with community UI/UX designer on the frontend for those and it’s better than I could have imagined
LtSnake (Elk): I love vaults too! So this will be our last question for the AMA. @xxxxx asks:
“Which area does YAK focus on at the moment and which improvements does YAK planning to implement on?”
Yak Man (YY): So, we’ve covered some of our planning here: token, staking for AVAX, cross-chain, Vaults are the big ones. We have a few more tricks that are being worked on as well.
LtSnake (Elk): A big thanks to Yak Man for joining us, and for all of you for participating! We’re looking forward to seeing what’s in store for Yield Yak in the future!
Yak Man (YY): Thank you! For anyone who hasn’t figured out:
- YY website: https://yieldyak.com/
YY Telegram: https://t.me/yieldyak
