Yearn Finance Set to Gobble Up SushiSwap

Yearn Finance is eyeing yet another merger with yet another food-themed DeFi project – only this time, the candidate has a larger market size than Yearn itself.

Per a blog post authored by Yearn Finance creator Andre Cronje, the so-called decentralized finance protocol may fuse with SushiSwap, another automated market maker (AMM) that forked from UniSwap. 

In addition to combining technical features for market infrastructure, the merger would, among other things, combine both markets’ total value locked (TLV, a measure of the total assets deposited in these lending markets) into a single lending pool. Both protocols would also share developer resources and hold each other’s tokens in their treasuries, per the agreement. 

Yearn has already absorbed four other DeFi protocols: Akropolis, Cover, Cream and Pickle. SushiSwap, however, would be Yearn’s largest merger yet and is the first time Yearn would be joining hands with a lending market larger than its own. (Per DeFi Pulse data at the time of writing, SushiSwap’s TVL is $732 million while Yearn’s is $440 million).

Cronje has spoken with SushiSwap’s de facto leader, a pseudonymous programmer named 0xMaki, about the merger, but Yearn and Sushi token holders from both communities will have to vote on the proposal to make it official.

In his post, Cronje called the move one of Yearn’s “more aggressive synergies.”

“As Sushi focused on expanding their AMM ecosystem, and as Yearn focused on expanding their strategies, more and more overlap became apparent. Yearn needed custom AMM experiences for their strategies, and Sushi started pushing the boundaries of yield and money markets,” Cronje writes in the post.

“With these overlaps, more and more work started to become mutualistic, and at this point it takes the relationship to the next level.”

On SushiSwap’s Discord channel, the news was mostly well received by the protocol’s users. In the chatroom, SushiSwap contributor ctrl reassured SushiSwap token users that “SushiSwap will of course keep evolving too, independently,” continuing that the team envisions a “sibling platform aimed more at pro traders.” This sibling platform is built on Deriswap, a DeFi financial product platform conceptualized by Cronje that SushiSwap’s team will help Yearn build.