Harvest Finance interview with Josh

Harvest Finance is one of the few people-centric yield farming and optimization DeFi projects on Ethereum.

Some interesting things have been going on around the project recently such as:

• Their decision to have a presence on BSC and other low fee chains in order to make the platform accessible to people who cannot afford to use the expensive Ethereum chain.
• The launch of the new iFarm token, among other things.

So we prepared a couple of questions for the team to help us learn what they’re working on, and their plan for the future.

And their response was highly satisfactory as you’ll find below.

But first!

What is Harvest Finance?

Harvest Finance is an automated yield farming and yield optimization protocol that offers users the opportunity to put their money to work and earn high yields on DeFi platforms.

It is a sort of decentralized cooperative society where members pool their resources together to take advantage of lucrative yield farming opportunities in DeFi across multiple chains.

The project automates the process of searching for lucrative yield farms, farming, harvesting them for their users.

Thus effectively saving each member gas costs and time. And potentially helping them earn better yields compared to if they do it manually by themselves.

All users have to do is deposit supported tokens on the platform and they automatically do the rest to provide you with high yields.

According to the project:

When farmers deposit, Harvest Finance automatically farms the highest yields with these deposits using the latest farming techniques.

• The core development team spend their days as you’d expect – building! Keeping Harvest at the forefront of DeFi innovation is a full-time job for Bread and the gang.
• The mod team will spend their time helping the community with any issues, looking around the DeFi fields for farming opportunities, potential collaborations or partnerships, keeping an eye on the harvesting data, the health of the project’s ecosystem and generally just engaging with the Harvest farmers.

 

Q2.What prompted you to launch Harvest Finance? What was the size of the team when you started and how many are you now? 

• The team has grown from a few at the start to over 12 on the core team now. There is also a large number of collaborators from other projects, that we like to consider part of the Harvest team.
• The reason is simple, and can be found on the Harvest FAQs on the site:
  
  
  

  Why Harvest?

 

• Farming was highly manual and inconvenient for people that had a normal job and didn’t want to keep up with DeFi 24/7. We automate farming by doing regular harvesting of crops on over 30 different farms.

• Manual farming is very expensive because gas prices are really high. We’ve saved over $27m in gas costs for our users via automation.’

 

Q3.What would you say has been the most memorable experiences for the team so far? What’s been your worst and best moments in these past 8 months?

• Memorable? I would say the flash loan exploit from last year. That was a really crazy few weeks, especially the first few days. One might think that it was the worst experience for the team, but it actually did a lot to bring everyone closer, to show the real dedication that every member has towards the success of Harvest. In some ways, that week post-hack was the best and the worst in terms of how impressive the team and community spirit was. 

 

Q4. You recently made public your intention to port to BSC. What motivates that decision and when are you likely to launch there? And do you have plans to make Harvest Finance available on other chains such as Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche as well? 

• We’ve already launched! Harvest decided to bridge (not port) some farms over to BSC as it is incredibly popular, has a large and consistent user base and there are some monster APYs there that are crying out to be harvested by Harvest Finance.
• In the future I believe the intention is to bridge to wherever we can, to continue to provide the easiest farming experience across all viable chains and to bring Bread to the People. 
• P.s. we’ve already bridged to Matic.

 

Q5. Do you have plans to expand into other markets in DeFi outside of yield optimization in the near or distant future? 

• There have been murmurings for a few really interesting, non-yield-farming integrations, but I’m afraid I can’t mention them now.

 

Q6. What’re your criteria for picking assets to list on Harvest Finance? 

• Harvest audits any potential farming contracts in house and thus only farms the safest projects. Other criteria include: Whether they can handle x amount of volume, how much APY they’re giving and the duration of the opportunity.

 

Q7. You recently launched iFarm token. What is it and what are its benefits or use cases? 

• The iFARM token is the interest-bearing variant of FARM. It allows users to retain their FARM token, to benefit from the Profit Sharing APY that increases your FARM holdings but also to have access to the token at the same time. iFARM is given to users when they deposit FARM into the profit-sharing pool. The iFARM will then be worth more FARM upon withdrawal, as it’s gaining the interest that the underlying FARM is receiving. The plan is to utilise iFARM as collateral on lending sites such as AAVE.

 

Q8. When should we expect iFarm to be useable as collateral on crypto lending/borrowing platforms and which platforms are you looking at listing on first? 

• iFARM is currently usable on APWine (https://app.apwine.fi/)
• We expect further utility in the near future.

 

Q9. If I use my iFarm token as collateral on a lending platform and I get hit with liquidation, what happens to my original FARM token staked on Harvest Finance? 

• The iFARM is used as a deposit signifier, in this case. That means that if you lost your iFARM that you would also lose access to your FARM.

 

Q10. What is your opinion on yield farming and optimization? 

• Yield Farming is the engine of DeFi. The massive gains are bringing the smartest minds in the world into space and driving all the niche and nuanced innovation that we are seeing recently. 

 

Q11. With the increasingly competitive yield farming and optimization market, what’s your plan to maintain and grow your market share? What are your plans for the future? 

• Continue to do as we have; provide secure and simple exposure to all the best that DeFi has to offer.

Q12. Is there anything else you’ll like to share with us? Any last word you’ll want the readers to remember?

• Depositing into Harvest will allow you to save time searching and save gas when compounding, leaving you with more time to spend in a community. A real-world community, your family community, or a DeFi Discord community. Let your money work for you and continue to enjoy the social side of life.