Harvest 3: The New Beginning

Published in

Harvest Finance

7 min readMay 17, 2022

Introducing: Arbitrum & Leveraged Vaults ft. Dolomite, Managed Uniswap 3 Strategies, New Dapp & Frontpage, DAO Insights ft. Llama & Ops Automation ft. Gelato

TL;DR

Revamped Website with an end to end Dapp redesign
Dolomite x Harvest = Acres of Arbitrum with leveraged vaults
Degen Delights — Managed Uniswap V3 Strategies
Strategic DAO Insights ft. Llama
Operation Automation of Harvest’s core functionalities ft. Gelato

Launched in August 2020, the fertile fields of Harvest Finance were sown during the height of DeFi Summer, promising to deliver #BreadForThePeople.

Since then, the farmlands have transitioned into a Co-Op where the community helps manage the protocol's day-to-day operations. At the same time, the core developers develop new ways to expand Harvest’s yield opportunities.

Over the past two years, yield aggregators have become a key money lego upon which new derivatives are developed; yield tokenisation, insurance, and tranches — to name a few.

We’ve kept pursuing the hottest and latest degen trends, pushing our tractors and farmlands to the limit.

Crypto and yield farming are appearing in mainstream media, attracting everyday users. It’s due time we roll out significant upgrades to help the incoming defi users who aren’t necessarily up to speed with the latest iBT_fCvxFRAX3CRV-f token.

The New Beginning

Today, we introduce Harvest 3, the third evolution and maturation of our core products here at Harvest Finance.

It’s a rollout throughout 2022 that involves multiple updates, so let’s dig into it!

This year our focus will be on delivering a simple, user-friendly platform that allows anyone with a crypto wallet to plant some liquidity with Harvest and begin yield farming.

We want to eliminate the need for creating obscure LP tokens so that you can start up your high yield tractor.

By simplifying and automating this process, we eliminate the guesswork and increased risk exposure the inexperienced user might face and optimise how information is presented to our users.

The Harvest Community DAO teamed up with the best farmhands in this space (previously designed for Ethereum Foundation/Polkadot to name a few) to tailor the new dapp and meet our objective of #breadforthepeople not just for users but for developers too.

As you will soon see, our partners are critical to the growth of the farmlands and key collaborations will have their own dedicated space to highlight their integrated tools & vaults, showing off how community-powered Harvest really is.

With this update, the Harvest dapp will remind everyday defi users of traditional apps with which they are familiar — a clean, intuitive interface that builds the legitimacy to trust Harvest with their precious crypto assets.

*The new dapp is still in the works! Polished down to every detail for the best UX experience.*

What’s more — Harvest never had a front-page that would explain in simple terms what our platform is really about, yet managed to gather over $2B in staked assets throughout its existence. Isn’t it crazy that till now, Harvest has only been used by a handful of degens?

Check it out, it’s now live at harvest.finance

Having a proper front page in place will finally let us send the message to the broader audience of what our platform has to offer. We believe this implementation will positively impact the way Web3 users perceive Harvest.

Discover the new front page today at harvest.finance

Harvest x Dolomite = Acres of Arbitrum

We are beyond excited about this one.

Our friends & long-term community members at Dolomite received a grant this year from Harvest to develop yield farming opportunities on Arbitrum.

Arbitrum is the largest Ethereum Layer 2 in TVL terms, so it’s reasonable for Harvest to broaden its farms there. What’s more, Arbitrum fees are similar to the ones we see on Polygon and we think this is where the market interest will continue to shift.

During the first stage of our collaboration, Dolomite will host a handful of farming strategies on their end (a dolomite.io subdomain) to battle-test them. Harvest will take 60% of all fees generated by this development and point them at $iFARM stakers.

The second phase of this development is even more exciting, as Dolomite will use the power of its engine that allows for leveraged farms.

Once the new Harvest dapp is deployed, the last step will be integrating the features Dolomite has developed over to the native UI of Harvest. This collaboration unleashes yield farming on steroids and we can’t wait to bring it to fruition in Q2 2022!

Managed Uniswap 3 Vaults

Harvest was the first yield aggregator that befriended a unicorn and managed to deploy complex Uniswap v3 vaults in June 2021. One of the most successful vaults built atop Uniswap V3 is in collaboration with Stakewise, a popular and reliable Eth2 staking provider.

The Uniswap V3:ETH-sETH2 vault allows farmers to put their idle $ETH & sETH2 to work at Harvest without worrying about impermanent loss whilst reaping the benefits of auto compounding.

In Harvest 3, we are taking Uniswap V3 vaults to another level by introducing a new section called: Managed Uniswap V3 Vaults.

For the first time, Harvest will introduce managed vaults, increasing farmers' yield potential. Increased returns are thanks to strategic range readjustments combined with a time-lock on withdrawals, which will ensure earnings optimisation while mitigating the risk to users.

Implementing the time-lock mechanism on specific vaults allows us to build and collaborate with protocols that we could not before like Bancor or CompliFi.

Managed Uniswap V3 Vaults vaults will first appear in the existing Harvest dapp in the upcoming weeks. Expect a more sophisticated experience in the new dapp that’s currently in the works.

Improving Transparency with Llama

Today, only people with technical skills can read Harvest like an open book. Harvest decided to change this and take a step towards improved transparency of our organisation.

Harvest DAO partnered with Llama to deliver a highly detailed Dune dashboard that outlines the inflows & outflows of our commune. What’s more, you are now able to preview the weekly income & profit of each deployed vault.

It is promising to see Harvest creating a positive flywheel to the $FARM token, earning $2.9m for depositors since the start of 2022. 30% of that being reinvested and used for $FARM buybacks ~ Elliott , Llama

An in-depth and transparent dashboard will be the critical go-to tool for farmers to check on the health of our farmlands & for investors to make smarter decisions — whether deciding on an investment into a particular strategy or our leading $FARM profit-sharing vault.

Decentralising the Invisible

This new epoch also contains improvements under the Harvest’s hood.

One of the core functions of Harvest, called doHardWork, has been running on centralised servers until now.

In short, this script is what allows our platform to serve its primary purpose: claiming harvested rewards and reinvesting them to auto compound.

To align with decentralisation ethos and remove single points of failure, we moved this critical part on-chain with the help of one of the biggest names in DeFi.

Hilmar Orth, Legendary Member of Gelato Network says,

Automating smart contract functions is still a major pain point for most applications in DeFi, NFT and gaming which leads to projects becoming the central point of failure. Utilizing Gelato as the decentralized automation network to conduct these operations makes dApps such as Harvest Finance significantly more robust and reliable. By using Gelato Harvest can automate the compounding of their generated income at certain intervals to make sure yields are always optimized, ensuring the highest possible APYs.

Full details behind this milestone soon to be announced!

Exciting Times Ahead

They say 3 years in tradfi are 3 weeks in DeFi. Given the pace of developments and new opportunities in the Web3 space, it’s unreasonable to commit to specific dates and tight roadmaps.

The features & collabs outlined in this article are pillars of Harvest 3 which will be rolled out throughout 2022 in no particular order. We reserve the right to surprise you with all these cool things!

Welcome to Harvest, a place where constant innovation happens!