Learn about yield farming by building a farm in a hands-on manner.
Our purpose is to provide the best open source materials to learn Ethereum development in-depth.
A special thanks to ConsenSys Developer Portal and Dapp University.
👨🌾 Yield Farming is ….
Yield can be defined as …
It is also known as “liquidity mining”.
Liquidity is defined as …
Staking is defined as …
Yield farming and staking are two sides of the same coin
Yield Farming was first created by Synthetix, a derivatives liquidity protocol. It was later popularized by Compound Finance, a lending desk protocol and Balancer, a protocol for programmable liquidity.
Yield Farming is a way to direct capital to active network members who are building the protocol, instead of relying on mere airdrops.
It can be considered a growth hack as it is designed to incentivize liquidity on a protocol. This brings in suppliers and users.
To gain a yield one has to stake.
Want a quick setup? Go click on Quick Start Setup
NodeJS is the preferred runtime environment to create develop DApps.
It comes with npm, node’s package manager. With npm, we can install all sort of programs and code snippets developed by the community to make our lives easier.
Make sure you have NodeJS installed.
The follow command checks for NodeJS on your system.
node -v
$ node -v
v10.17.0
Any version above v10.0 will do
If you don’t see Node on your system:
Create a folder for your project and enter the folder.
$ mkdir yield-farm
$ cd yield-farm
To install Truffle and any project dependencies, we first have to intialize a package.json file.
package.json stores your dependencies in the /node modules directory.
Check that you are in the project folder.
pwd means print working directory, the root directory your terminal is in.
$ pwd
$ pwd
/YOUR/ABSOLUTE/PATH/VARIES/yield-farm
In the root of your folder, initialize npm and create a package.json file.
The
-yflag allows the quick setup of a default package.json without all the usual setup questions.
You can go back and fill in the fields if you’d like.
$ npm init -y
$ npm init -y
Wrote to /YOUR/ABSOLUTE/PATH/VARIES/yield-farm/package.json:
{
"name": "yield-farm",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "",
"main": "index.js",
"scripts": {
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},
"keywords": [],
"author": "",
"license": "ISC"
}
Truffle is an environment that to develop DApps and smart contracts on Ethereum.
Or as the website states, its a “world class development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for blockchains using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), aiming to make life as a developer easier”.
We will be installing all of our /node modules into the local project. It is recommended to install locally instead of globally, because tools in the Ethereum ecosysetm change quickly.
To install Truffle run the following command
$ npm install truffle@5.1.59 --save-dev
–save-dev installs truffle as a dev dependencies
truffle@5.1.59 installs that specific package version
Having the same version reduces the chance that a truffle update
creates a breaking change that may cause issues
$ npm install truffle@5.1.59 --save-dev
> truffle@5.1.59 postinstall /YOUR/ABSOLUTE/PATH/VARIES/yield-farm/node_modules/truffle
> node ./scripts/postinstall.js
- Fetching solc version list from solc-bin. Attempt #1
npm notice created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file.
npm WARN yield-farm@1.0.0 No description
npm WARN yield-farm@1.0.0 No repository field.
+ truffle@5.1.59
added 144 packages from 66 contributors and audited 144 packages in 31.025s
37 packages are looking for funding
run `npm fund` for details
found 0 vulnerabilities
Next we install Ganache, a tool to test our project on a local Ethereum blockchain.
Ganache comes in two flavors:
For this project will be using the Ganache-cli. If you’d like, you can install both.
Again we will install the tool locally as a dev dependency as opposed to global.
A
dev dependencyis a module of code that is not used in the app directly, but used to support development.
To install Ganache-cli we run:
$ npm install ganache-cli@6.12.1 --save-dev
$ npm install ganache-cli@6.12.1 --save-dev
> keccak@3.0.1 install /Users/anthonyalbertorio/Code/ethDev/yield-farm/node_modules/ganache-cli/node_modules/keccak
> node-gyp-build || exit 0
> secp256k1@4.0.2 install /Users/anthonyalbertorio/Code/ethDev/yield-farm/node_modules/ganache-cli/node_modules/secp256k1
> node-gyp-build || exit 0
npm WARN yield-farm@1.0.0 No description
npm WARN yield-farm@1.0.0 No repository field.
+ ganache-cli@6.12.1
added 101 packages from 182 contributors and audited 245 packages in 5.82s
37 packages are looking for funding
run `npm fund` for details
found 0 vulnerabilities
To Install Ganache GUI, go to their website and follow the instructions. The GUI will allow you to have an interactive desktop app that runs your local Ethereum blockchain.
To initialize a Truffle project run the following command
$ truffle init
Truffle initsets up the project structure for your project
$ truffle init
Starting init...
================
> Copying project files to /YOUR/ABSOLUTE/PATH/VARIES/yield-farm
Init successful, sweet!
Success! We have Installed all our initial dependenices and setup the project!
If you want to quickly set up a project, folow the instructions below.
$ mkdir yield-farm
$ cd yield-farm
$ npm init - y
$ npm install truffle@5.1.59 --save-dev
$ npm install ganache-cli@6.12.1 --save-dev
$ truffle init
$ touch .gitignore
We now have the basic ingredients for a Truffle Project.
We will explain the following parts:
package.jsonpackage-lock.json/node_modulestruffle.config.js and configuration/contracts and Migrations.sol Contract/migrations and migration scripts/tests and testingDon’t be intimidated. The files have very simple functions. 😃
Thanks to running truffle init command, we created the scaffolding to build our project.
This is the basics to get started. Below is a description of each part and what it does.
├──contracts
│ └──Migrations.sol
├──migrations
│ └──1_initial_migration.js
├──node_modules
│ └──VARIOUS SUB-FOLDERS
├──test
├──package-lock.json
├──package.json
├──.gitignore
└──truffle-config.js
package.json is the file that lists our dependencies for our project.
It is also used for defining project properties, description, author & license information, scripts, etc.
Whenever we install something using npm, it is listed here. That way other devs can download our project and run npm i and install the same modules. We do not need to commit our ./node_modules folder
to our github repos.
See the package.json npm documentation for more information.
package-lock.json is solely used to lock dependencies to a specific version number. Since dependencies can have version updates. If included in a project, package-lock.json get the exact version during installation.
It is automatically generated for any operations where npm modifies either the node_modules tree, or package.json.
See the package-lock.json npm documentation for more information.
./node_modules is the directory where all our dependencies go when we install them via npm.
The main important thing to know is: NEVER MODIFY ANY FILES OR FOLDERS INSIDE OF NODE MODULES
Why? Its a poor practice. Your ./node_modules files will be different than what others download via npm. It will inevitably cause bugs and issues. This is a general rule that applies to any projects using NodeJS or npm.