(Old) Farm with USDC

It is an old tutorial

Welcome 🌽

Welcome city boy! You aren't from around here, are ya? That's alright. We can use more hands on our farm. And soon you will be a seasoned farmer, just like the rest of us…with strong callused hands.

Before we get started with this tutorial, take a look at this article describing how we FARM! Then make sure you understand the basics and the risks of FARMing.

All done? Alright! Let's get farming!

What We're Gonna Do 🍅

  • To help reduce the risk of impermanent loss (you read the risks, right?), we'll start with a stablecoin, USDC.

  • We will buy USDC on an exchange, such as Coinbase or Binance

  • Transfer the USDC to our browser wallet, such as MetaMask

  • Connect wallet to Harvest.finance

  • Deposit USDC, receive fUSDC token, earn interest

  • Stake fUSDC token, earn FARM

Get Some Coinage 🥒

Buy Some USDC

  • First you need to get yourself some of that fresh USDC coinage. The easiest way is to probably exchange your local currency for it in an exchange. Exchanges, such as Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Binance, let you deposit currency via ACH, Wire Transfer, and even Debit Card. If you do ACH, your funds may be locked for a few days while waiting for the transfer to clear. I know, the FOMO is going to hurt!

  • Once your funds are available, buy some USDC. You probably won't have to pay a fee for this exchange.

  • Hooray, you now have some USDC to play with!

Move USDC into Your Wallet

  • To move crypto into Harvest.finance via the browser interface, you will need a browser Etherium wallet. MetaMask is one of the most popular ones out there.

  • Go ahead and install the MetaMask extension on your Brave browser. You're using Brave, right? I thought you said you were into this whole blockchain thing!

  • If you are using Brave, go into Brave Settings → Extensions → Web3 provider for using Dapps. Then select MetaMask (or whatever wallet you installed) from the dropdown.

  • Follow instructions on your exchange and your wallet to transfer USDC from the exchange to the wallet. The flow would be something like this:

  • On your Exchange, follow instructions to Send USDC

  • For the recipient address, copy your Wallet's public address, and paste it into the recipient address on the Exchange Send page

  • Click confirm…

HOLD UP! Many exchanges will charge you Gas to Send crypto. We aren't going to go into the details here, but if they charge gas, you need to watch gas prices so you don't get hit with expensive transaction fees.

  • Now wait patiently for your USDC to arrive in your wallet.

Deposit USDC into the Farm to Earn More Coin! 🥕

  • Now the fun begins! Navigate to harvest.finance with a Desktop browser (doesn't work with mobile, sorry, not sorry).

  • Click Connect Wallet.

  • Your Wallet should ask you to approve connecting to harvest.finance. (yes, click Approve)

  • Now you can send money into the harvest!

  • Find USDC on the page. Here we can see the APY we'll earn on our deposit. Note: APY is not the same as APR. There are several articles on the interwebs covering this 😄

  • Either enter an amount or click Max. Then click deposit.

  • Your Wallet should open up and ask for Approval of the transaction

  • Upon Approval, your transaction will start to go through. You can monitor it via your wallet or Ethersacn (should have a link to the transaction in your wallet)

HOLD UP! Watch out for gas prices! Remember our little chat about gas prices earlier. Well, here they are again. Pay attention!

  • After the transaction completed, you have now deposited USDC and receive an equivalent value of Farm tokenized USDC as fUSDC. Want to learn more about fUSDC and other f<Assets>? Check the FAQ!

  • You can watch your balance [mostly] grow (remember the risk of Impermanent Loss?). You can see your balance to the right of the coin on the main page. Hopefully yours isn't blurred out like mine 😆.

Stake Your Tokens to Earn FARM

  • At the bottom of the page, you'll see a notice that you have unstaked fUSDC. Let's put that unstaked fUSDC to good use!

  • Click Earn at the top of the page

  • Select Stake (the yellow one)

  • Enter how much you want to Stake (or click Max)

  • Then click Stake at the bottom (the whitee one) to confirm

  • Your wallet should open up to Approve the transaction

HOLD UP! (what? again? YUP!) Watch out for gas prices! If you just did the previous transaction step and were happy with the price, keep going.

Watch Your Bounty Grow 🍞

  • Now just sit back and relax. It was good honest work for the day. You deserve a break, and just watch fruits (or bread) of your labor!

Harvest Finance Dashboard

  • Click on Dashboard at the top of the page

  • You can also navigate directly to the page here: https://harvestfi.github.io/dashboard/

  • Your wallet address: That's right city slicker! That's your wallet address. Click on it to see it in Etherscan

  • Pool: Which liquidity pool (LP) you are in. Since we used USDC in this example, that's what we see here

  • Earning: This better say “true”. When would this say false?

  • Staked Balance: How much fUSDC you staked. This matches the "Your Staked fUSDC" on the Earn Page of Harvest.finance

  • Earned Rewards: How much FARM you earned. This matches the “Total FARM Earned” on the Earn page

  • % of Pool: The percentage of the USDC Farm pool that is your stake

  • USD Value: This is the total value of your fUSDC and FARM combined

  • Unstaked Balance: If you have any fUSDC that is not staked, you'll see it here.

  • Your staked assets and earned rewards are worth about: If you are staked in multiple Farms, this is the total of the “USD Values” for each Pool.

  • Underlying Balance: If you were to Unstake your fUSDC, then Withdraw, this is how much USDC you would get for your fUSDC.

  • Please consider donating: Farming is good honest work. So is building apps to support it. Toss a coin to your developer.

Greenhorn Q&A ❓

Under construction! Q: Where does all this great APY come from? Whose money was it?

  • A: Long story short, it comes from the collected transaction fees from the swaps generated in the underlying pools.

Q: Why does my balance sometimes go down on the main page?

  • A: This is called slippage and can be caused (over a short deposit period) by several factors, most notably:

    • your displayed balance may drop on initial deposit due to market impact on entry into the AMM LP position (such as fUSDC pool)

    • your displayed balance may drop due to fluctuations in the prices of the assets in the pool

    • your displayed balance may drop when market impact on exit of the AMM LP position is factored in

  • Consider when using a system like Curve there is slippage when withdrawing to a singular asset, as well as a withdraw fee. When a user exits Harvest, those fees are currently socialized across the fAsset pools, but in the near future will be directly charged to the user triggering the slippage/fee. This means the pool value of fAssets will no longer be impacted by these events.

Q: Why does the APY go up and down?

  • A: The APY is highly correlated to the token farmed, swings in price of the farmed token or changs in the emission dynamics and incentives can cause swings in the APY

Q: Everyone keeps talking about “Whales” in the Discord. What are they, and how do they impact FARMing?

  • A: Whales are entities with very high capital, referred to as such because they are "bigger" than the average investor. Their large-volume transactions often have observable effects on the market because their market impact is large. For example, sufficiently large purchases of $FARM will cause the price of $FARM to increase, while large selloffs will cause the price to fall. Additionally, because FARM stakedrops are finite and defined at the beginning of each week, large investments/withdraws have the potential to significantly change the APY associated with the stakedrop reward. (Stakedrops are the incentives added to each pool, displayed on the front page as +[🚜 APY%].)

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