Introduction to Beefy
Last Update: August 2023
What is Beefy?
Beefy is a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Yield Optimizer project, that helps users to earn more of the cryptoassets that they love through the magic of autocompounding.
Open-source DeFi applications aim to be permissionless and trustless, meaning that anyone can interact directly without the need for a trusted middlemen. By keeping all code public and verifiable on the blockchain, anyone is able to verify how DeFi works and bypass the need to trust that a service is safe. Beefy leverages these characteristics to deliver hundreds of yield opportunities from across the ecosystem to users in a safe and decentralized manner, through one simple-yet-beautiful interface.
Through its battle-tested vault and strategy contracts, the Beefy Protocol maximizes the rewards available to users from liquidity pools (LPs), automated market makers (AMMs), and other yield farming opportunities. It does this by automatically claiming, swapping and redepositing rewards, unlocking exponential returns through autocompounding. By automating the process, Beefy saves time, increases efficiency and circumvents the user risks in manual yield farming, to offer a substantially better experience. In sharing gas fees and aggregating volume, Beefy's contracts are able to compound (or harvest) rewards far more frequently than users can, meaning much beefier yields. Overall, Beefy offers a huge advantage to users when compared with farming manually yourself. It's a simple win-win formula.
The Beefy Protocol is governed by its decentralized autonomous organisation (the Beefy DAO). The DAO is constituted by hundreds of community members from all across the world, who have a shared appreciation for the magic of autocompounding and a passion for the Beefy project. The DAO is operated using our $BIFI governance token, which is used for voting on governance proposals.
Beefy's History
Beefy was born in September 2020, when a team of 4 founders came together to bring the power of autocompounding technology from DeFi projects on Ethereum over to lower costs chains. The first set of vaults went live on 8 October 2020 on BNB Chain, making Beefy the first yield optimizer on the chain.
In less than a year, Beefy was managing over $800 million of total value locked, and had reached a $100 million market capitalisation. Many new contributors and community members arrived, and gradually the founding team stepped back as a new generation of core contributors took over the reigns. By the end of 2022, Beefy was live on 10 different blockchains. A year later, it was 18.
By 2023, Beefy is widely known as one of the OG cross-chain DeFi protocols, with a reputation for indiscriminately building on top of hundreds of protocols. Beefy's contributor team are professionals at scoping out new opportunities, carrying out proper due diligence, and safely and quickly deploying onto the newest and hottest chains and protocols.
What Makes Beefy Unique?
Beefy differs from other DeFi yield optimizers and aggregators in a few key ways:
Beefy's vaults are primarily "single strategy", meaning optimizing just one yield farming opportunity, rather than diluting yield across multiple opportunities;
Safety is Beefy's number one priority. All of our products are run through rigorous safety standards through our SAFU Standards;
Beefy prides itself on indiscriminately, quickly and flexibly deploying on top of an enormous range of protocols and blockchains;
The Beefy Protocol directly distributes platform revenue back to users who stake $BIFI in our governance pools;
Beefy offers unique strategies that can't be found elsewhere, and is often the first to market with new and exciting yield farming opportunities; and
Beefy maintains an enormous network of recognized partners, and has a stellar reputation in the community for its safety and professionalism.
Autocompounding On Other Chains
Beefy was created with the aim of disseminating the potential of automated yield farming to different blockchains, in order to take advantage of higher transaction speeds and lower gas costs than can be found on Ethereum.
Autocompounding on alternative chains presents a different set of opportunities and challenges: where on Ethereum the timing of events is vital to ensuring profitability, other chains the frequency of low-cost compounding has an enormous impact on the yield. Likewise, low-cost chains encourage farmers to move between different opportunities to maintain high average APY across their portfolio, where moves on chains like Ethereum are expensive and must be carefully considered. This opens the door to more sophisticated and complex strategies on other chains.
Because Beefy's vault offer a fully decentralized and automated solution, they allow users to all sizes and persuasions to access the benefits of DeFi with minimal effort.. We see this as a vital step in levelling the financial playing field, allowing small users to have access to the same opportunities that only the wealthy, professionals and businesses could access elsewhere.
Beefy's goal is to help projects in DeFi grow together, and to spread the potential of decentralized financial technologies across the world. By pursuing this with a complete open-source mentality, a firm commitment to decentralization, and by placing governance openly in the hands of tokenholders, we hope to deliver an unbeatable experience for accessing yield in DeFi.
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