Inside Vesper: Vesper Earn and Programmable Yield

Ethereum enables programmable money. Why not programmable yield?

Looking beyond the February 17 launch, we are hard at work developing a new product called “Vesper Earn,” which, simply put, allows users to deposit one asset, earn yield on it, and use those proceeds to acquire a different asset. We think of this new DeFi primitive as “programmable yield.”

A New DeFi Primitive

Vesper Earn Pools are an enhanced offspring of Vesper’s Grow Pools (first introduced as “holding pools.”) Both pool user assets to passively and efficiently generate yield off of deposited assets. The difference with Earn Pools is that the yield accrued is allocated to a different purpose, rather than simply accumulating more of the deposit asset.

In other words:

• Vesper Grow == “Deposit Coin X, Earn Coin X”
• Vesper Earn == “Deposit Coin X, Earn Coin Y”

To accomplish this, Vesper Earn pools have an additional strategy for how yield is handled. This could be a stablecoin to represent a daily passive income, or another ERC-20 token that users can deposit assets towards earning rather than swapping outright.

A strategy using the hypothetical “COOL” token would work like this:

Note that Vesper Earn pools “program” the yield only. Your ETH or other deposit assets are retained as those assets.

Multiple Applications for Vesper Earn

Essentially, Vesper Earn delivers greater flexibility in what happens with the earnings. Beyond buying other tokens, Earn Pools can be leveraged to direct yield to a cause, game, organization, or any other purpose or entity.

For example, Vesper Earn can emerge as a method to coordinate developer funding and charitable giving. In this scenario, earned assets can be directed towards charities, nonprofits and even Gitcoin grants. (Vesper Co-founder Jordan Kruger explained this at the BitGive De-Phi conference last fall.) Vesper Earn could also enable the idea of truly passive, daily income — “deposit [TOKEN], earn [STABLECOIN].”

We are excited to share more details about Vesper Earn with the community post-launch. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Discord, and/or Telegram.