Harvest Finance review

Still covering what others skip

Harvest vaults reach long-tail farms that larger aggregators do not bother to integrate, at fees below the category average, with strategies that name their underlying farm and are verifiable on-chain. For a specific pool on a specific chain, it is sometimes the only automated option.

October 2020

A flash-loan exploit took roughly $24m; the attacker returned $2.5m, and the team published a post-mortem and a compensation programme. It was one of the defining incidents of that year's DeFi summer and it belongs on any honest assessment of the protocol, alongside the fact that it kept operating and did not walk away.

Read the yield source

A large share of quoted returns on long-tail pools is emission-funded rather than paid by users. On thin farms, the emissions are also the reason the pool exists, so the durability question is not academic.

Where it stands

Development pace has slowed considerably. For mainstream pools there are better-maintained options; for the specific long-tail vault you cannot find elsewhere, this is the answer.

Who it is for

Farmers in specific long-tail pools with no better-maintained alternative, who have read where the yield comes from and are sizing accordingly.

What to weigh

A five-year-old exploit against a repayment programme and continued operation, then the slower development pace against the coverage nobody else offers.