Introduction
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has taken off in the past couple years, making a global impact on how we treat financial services. From DeFi wallets, to decentralized exchanges (DEXs), to money market style platforms, doing finance on a personal level has become a reality. As DeFi has grown, chains like Binance Smart Chain have become more popular as well.
Yield farming is among these DeFi features and has been growing at record pace. The main reason: most people don’t like to trade but are happy to earn passive rewards or income just for holding their tokens. So if you don’t want to stare at your screen all day, yield farming is the strategy for you.
It doesn’t end there. Yield farming also provides enormous rewards potential on new projects. This is because new projects issue a large portion of their rewards early in their evolution, usually the first few months or quarters. And those who can locate and enter these farms quickly stand to gain the most.
There are many yield farming options out there and yield aggregators (which is a one-stop location containing these options) are also plentiful.
It’s important to find a good one. More important is to find one that’s easy to use. That’s because it is very time consuming and complex to farm. So where do you look? What are the features that define a good yield aggregator?
Here’s a look at the top 5 yield aggregators on the Binance Smart Chain.
Beefy Finance allows users to earn compound interest in many different ways, including liquidity pools, automatic market marking, and other yield farming options. In addition to these features, Beefy Finance offers their own token called $BIFI, which gives options for “dividend-eligible” shares in the platform.
Beefy Finance offers a wide variety of muli-chain support and offers a great selection. Although there are some limitations and confusion to the UI, there is a new version of the platform coming that should create an overhaul on these features.
Beefy is one of the more mature projects in the field. Token holders receive a portion of the platform’s revenues and all of the tokens in the protocol have been minted.
This is one of the newest yield aggregators that is actually not just an aggregator. SimpleDEFI has launched a yield aggregation solution, called SimpleYIELD. True to its name, SimpleYIELD is making it simple for people to farm and do it anywhere on-chain.
They are building a multi-chain, multi-dex platform that lets users see all of DeFi on a single user interface. Users can join a farm in seconds. They can even join multiple farms in less time than it takes to join one farm on most other platforms. Easier and faster yield farming, plus rewards for the user are stacked because they don’t compete with DEXs. Therefore, SimpleYIELD users earn the rewards from the farms (for example SUSHI on SushiSwap or CAKE on PancakeSwap), plus rewards in SimpleDEFI’s native token ($EASY).
SimpleYIELD is just the first service in SimpleDEFI’s Ecosystem. This project is taking passive income to another level, by building out services for Exchanges, Wallets, and Institutional Clients. Each service is designed to help their clients and users earn more passive income in DeFi, but they also built a unique tokenomics model for the $EASY token that rewards all $EASY holders with a percentage of the fees generated off all the services the team builds.
SimpleDEFI is a new project with an innovative model. These innovations should get people’s attention, especially those looking for rewards systems that can generate real utility and sustainable rewards for holding their $EASY token. Time will tell how successful they will be.
Harvest Finance has been around for a long time and is one of the earliest projects developed. Part of the benefits of Harvest Finance include not just the support of the BNB chain but also from the Ethereum and Polygon chains. Additionally, there are options to boost the amount of farming you can do with bFARM tokens, in addition to a dashboard to see others using the platform.
Despite the features of Harvent Finance, there are some limitations and drawbacks that placed this toward the end of the list. Although Harvest Finance has a good amount of support for farming, it has very limited support for the BNB chain, which creates limitations with flexibility. Additionally, Harvest Finance also has a list of restricted counties and therefore not everyone is capable of using the platform. The naming conventions and the overall placement of the UI and organization is confusing for newer and less tech savvy people.
One of the more complex aggregators on this list is Autofarm. Offering some of the highest amounts of multi-chain support from any yield aggregator, Autofarm supports 14 different chains across even the newest chains such as Chronos and Harmony.
With Autofarm, its biggest strength can also be its biggest weakness. It can be fairly confusing to use the interface on the site without knowing precisely what you want to accomplish, being one of the most challenging sites to navigate on this list. Additionally, many of the pools have an extremely low amount of TVL and it’s easy to be hesitant on many of the uncommon choices.
One of the few options that are exclusive to Binance Chain, Alpaca Finance is a yield optimizer that’s focused completely on yield farming and lending for BNB coins, with some minor support on the Fantom network. One of the most unique features of Alpaca Finance is the concept of leverage farming, which gives users the ability to multiply their APR, making it much more than most farm aggregators out there.
Alpaca Finance offers some interesting and robust features, but can come with some drawbacks as a result. One of the most underlooked features is the large percentage of fees as they are one of the highest in the yield farming space, making it difficult to consider some options on the platform. Additionally, although the lending is fluid and functional, the rates are much lower than lending on other platforms.
