Harvest Finance On Base

Harvest Finance is a yield farming protocol that utilizes blockchain smart contract technology to automate the yield farming process. Users can deposit their funds into a Harvest smart contract of their choosing, and the programmed strategy will automatically deposit their funds with a third party protocol to start earning rewards.

Behold the power of auto-compounding! Over time if any rewards are earned, the smart contracts will sell the rewards and add the earnings to the user's balance. This larger balance is then used to continue farming, potentially increasing the users earning power.

I've been using Harvest since the hay days of crypto, and farmed #BreadForThePeople for many years. There are spoilers for Harvest v4, but until then I discovered the best farming pool for stablecoins.

I headed to Base for an insane 81.38% APY with USDC deposited in the Moonwell pool, with rewards shared between auto harvested WELL + USDC and iFARM rewards. Feels silly to say it but maybe some lived under a rock!

Base is a secure and low-cost Ethereum layer-2 solution built to scale the user base on-chain. The chain was incubated within Coinbase and has plans to progressively decentralize in the years ahead.

How you obtain a 81.37% APY on USDC? When a user deposits funds, they are issued a share of the vault, represented by an "fASSET". These user's funds are then made available for the pre-defined "strategy" to deposit at a 3rd party protocol specified by the strategy code published by the Harvest community developers.

The total amount of assets in the Vault is updated, however the number of existing "fASSET" shares does not change, but the value of each share increases with every successful and profitable harvest. When a user withdraw the shares from the vault, the fASSET is burned and the user receives funds proportional to the growth or decline of the asset pool since their deposit.

I bridged USDC with Across, and received USDbC on Base. I had to swap them on BaseSwap before depositing the funds on Harvest Finance. The whole process was quick and fees good to interact with new protocols, or with OG protocols on new chains.

Not sure if Base will ever do a token airdrop, so transactions over longer periods of time are not important. For me is cool to have a place where I can farm degen style with USDC, and continue my humble farmer legacy.

Why I use only Across for bridging? Because Across is the cross-chain ecosystem’s optimal bridge design, as it costs far less than other solutions and because it consumes far less gas than any other cross-chain bridge! The protocol is using canonical asset bridging plus intents as the system is the future of cross-chain interoperability

My Harvest Finance portfolio is also cross-chain, with assets deposited on Base and Arbitrum. The Gnome-ETH DeSci pool is by far one of the best I've seen, maintaining the APY above 100% since the start of 2023!

Worth mentioning that the APR is lower now, compared to the percentage I've got on deposit, but it's still far better than what other single pools are offering on layer2 chains. Are you ready for the DeFi summer?