Deposits in ‘Monetary Experiment’ Meme Token YAM Break $460M

YAM, decentralized finance’s (DeFi) latest farm-fresh product, has never had a code audit. Yet, that’s not holding back traders from pumping the token’s price from zero to $138 in the 20 or so hours since it launched. The token now is trading hands at $126, according to YAMalytics.

YAM by Yam Finance is a mishmash of DeFi products packaged in one humble tuber, generally meant to track the U.S. dollar. Or, as the founding team put it, YAM is a “minimally viable monetary experiment.” 

Which can be translated to say the project has no real purpose – it’s just for fun.

That hasn’t stopped DeFi traders from piling in. YAM’s market capitalization sits at $13.5 million with some $29,361,386 in 24-hour trade volume, according to CoinGecko. 

The experiment joins a cornucopia of other DeFi summer “meme” coins such as Tendies and YFI.

Its codebase pulls from multiple other DeFi projects including Compound’s on-chain governance, Curv’s governed treasury and Uniswap’s pools for token distribution (not to mention a few others). 

Uniswap is where the magic is happening right now. Called yield farming, Uniswap gives token market liquidity providers a proportional amount of the platform’s native token, YAM, back for their trouble. Place a token pair like ETH/COMP in a pool and get YAMs in return, the logic runs.

Farming has dragged these other tokens up alongside YAM. Six of the eight coins available for yield farming posted positive gains in 24 hours, with Compound’s COMP token up 49%, according to Messari (over a $300 million increase in market capitalization).

YAM most notably borrows from Ampleforth’s elastic supply schedule. Called a “rebase,” the project’s code will sprout new tokens at set intervals to push or pull YAM’s price back towards one dollar. Trader’s are rushing in to scoop up price gains before the rebase occurs.

According to the blog, founders Brock Elmore, Trent Elmore, Clinton Bembry, Dan Elitzer and Will Price conducted no pre-mine, garnered no VC interest and took no founders’ share. The team could not be reached by press time.

The reckless speed at which the project has grown is not lost on the team – particularly because YAM has never passed a food inspection, so to speak.

The code base has never been audited, a fact the founders are quite upfront about.

“Nothing approaching the rigor of a formal audit has been conducted at this time,” the Medium article reads. “This was a 10-day project from start to launch.”