Yield farming has experienced a Cambrian explosion of sorts over the last few months, thanks in part to the emergence of various decentralized finance protocols. In its most basic sense, yield farming can be thought of as a process where users provide liquidity to DeFi protocols and are rewarded with a yield/return, usually in the form of the platform’s native token offering.
The concept was first made popular by Compound, which gave COMP tokens to users who supplied and borrowed tokens on the platform. The yield offered is usually high and serves as an incentive for users to provide liquidity to bootstrap the financial resources of a new DeFi protocol.