Glossary
Yearn
The original DeFi yield aggregator — auto-routes user deposits across lending, AMMs, and yield-farming opportunities; pioneered the modern "vault" pattern.
Yearn (originally iearn, 2020) was the first DeFi vault aggregator at scale. A user deposits a single asset; the vault autonomously allocates it across the highest-yielding strategies — lending into Compound, providing liquidity on Curve, harvesting CRV emissions, re-depositing — and compounds the returns.
Yearn v3, released in 2023, generalizes vaults into composable "allocator" + "strategy" pairs, with most vaults now implementing ERC-4626. The YFI governance token is famous for its fully community-distributed launch with no team allocation.