Yield aggregator

The typical architecture follows the Yearn model and has three pieces. Vaults hold the user's funds and issue a share token. Strategies are the concrete logic for deploying capital, whether lending, liquidity provision or farming. And controllers route capital between strategies based on market opportunities. The protocol harvests rewards, auto-compounds them and charges management or performance fees.

There is no EIP for the concept itself, but modern vaults usually follow the ERC-4626 standard (Tokenized Vault Standard) to interoperate with the rest of the ecosystem. Yearn's timeline is verified: it began as iEarn, a lending-focused aggregator, in early 2020 under Andre Cronje, and was renamed Yearn Finance in July 2020 with the YFI token through a fair launch with no founder or venture allocation. Its yVaults are the core product.

It turns manual, gas-heavy yield farming into a passive, composable product and opens up strategies that would otherwise demand constant monitoring. It is a piece of DeFi ecosystem infrastructure. More reference examples: Beefy Finance, a multichain auto-compounding aggregator, and Convex Finance, which aggregates and optimizes yield on the Curve ecosystem.