Yearn Finance formalizes operations budget as YFI rallies

After a three-day voting period, this morning members of Yearn Finance's decentralized governance approved Yearn Improvement Proposal 54, formalizing an ongoing budget for operational expenses.

YIP-54 aims to improve on previous proposals, including YIP-36 and YIP-41, which allowed for expenditures relating to hackathons, grants, security audits, bug bounties, and operations employee salaries.

In the past 4 months, Yearn vaults earned ~$3.4M in fees.

Other recent proposals have also been focused on bolstering the Yearn ecosystem and incentivizing broader participation from community members.

YIP-52 significantly increased rewards for strategists - the smart contract engineers who develop yield-bearing strategies for Yearn vaults.

The latest proposal's success comes amid a strong run for Yearn's YFI token - even by its own wildly volatile standards.

Since an early November low of $7,700, the YFI has rallied to a high of nearly $19,000, climbing over 200% as one of the top performers across the decentralized finance space.

The total value locked in Yearn's yield-bearing vaults has begun to creep back up from an October low of $330 million to over $360 million today.

According to sentiment data provided by TheTie, social media sentiment for the asset has also been ticking upwards in recent weeks, even as total Tweet volume fluctuates, indicating that investors are increasingly bullish on YFI regardless of temporary hype.

These metrics likely don't interest the YFI team.