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FARM, the native token of the yield farming protocol Harvest Finance, was trending in the U.S. as it was exchanging hands at $88, up 80% in the past day.At the time of writing, FARM had a 24-hour trading volume of $218 million, which was up by a massive 19000%. The recent price action left the token’s market cap at $60 million.
FARM 24-hour price chart | Source: CoinMarketCap Harvest Finance is a yield farming protocol that shifts user funds across multiple defi platforms to generate returns. It is native to the Ethereum blockchain and can also be traded as a BEP-20 token on the BNB Smart Chain.
FARM reached an all-time high on its first day of trading on Sep. 2, 2020, most likely because it began with a circulating quantity of 0 tokens and the few coins that entered circulation shortly after rocketed to high values. Crypto price aggregator CoinMarketCap records FARM’s all-time high as $2,236.
While data providers dispute the all-time high, all aggregators agree that FARM’s price dropped to around $78 a few weeks after its debut, just as the “defi summer” of 2020 was coming to an end.
During the second wave of the 2021 crypto bubble, FARM reached highs of approximately $303. However, as the second wave subsided around the end of the year, FARM tanked. Things became worse when an October 2020 hack took $24 million from Harvest Finance, causing FARM to drop by 65% in just one hour. The spiral lasted through 2022. By May 2022, FARM had reached a low of $33.35.
The protocol hard-coded a maximum supply of 5 million coins. In the fifth week following its launch, investors voted to limit the supply to 690,420 by reducing the number of tokens generated by 4.45% each week until the end of August 2024.
Even so, according to crypto price tracker Messari, the supply of FARM is growing quickly, going from roughly 250,000 in October 2020 to about 456,000 in January 2021. As a result, the project’s market capitalization reached its peak much later than the cost of any one FARM token, peaking at $194 million in February 2021.
A capped maximum supply is consistent with scarcity concepts, potentially increasing FARM’s value as demand develops.
Harvest Finance issues new tokens on a weekly basis. From this issuance, 70% is allocated to liquidity providers and individuals contributing capital to the platform’s asset management strategies.
A further 10% is directed towards ongoing protocol development, while the remaining 20% is placed into a development fund. The fund is periodically utilized to remunerate the developers responsible for building the protocol.