DeFi yield farming aggregator APY.Finance raises $3.6 million

APY.Finance, which is building a decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator for yield farming, has raised $3.6 million in new funding.

The round saw participation from Alameda Research, Arrington XRP Capital, Coingecko, and Parafi Capital partner Santiago Roel Santos, among others.

APY claims to be building the "Wealthfront for yield farming," or a robo-advisor that helps optimize token lending for risk-adjusted gains. With the fresh capital in place, APY plans to speed up its platform development and launch it in mid-October.

Currently, Yearn.Finance is the major yield farming aggregator in the DeFi space. When asked what APY's competitive advantage is, COO Delos Chang told The Block that the protocol wouldn't just offer "simple wrapped strategies."

"Yearn currently is running wrappers around farming strategies like CRV farming (via vaults that realize yield by selling automatically), whereas APY would route and diversify between strategies based on applied risk perceptions," Chang told The Block. "So ultimately, the Yearn vaults could be one of the strategies that APY uses but not vice versa."

From a user's perspective, APY is a dashboard with a single place to deposit stablecoins, CEO Will Shahda told The Block, adding that it would help users run "many strategies and optimizing allocation between them."

"If for example, one strategy in the portfolio is a Curve pool: they can see how much is in it, which Curve pool it is, how much CRV it generates, how much transaction fees it generates, and how often the CRV is swapped to compound yield," said Shahda.

APY will also launch its native governance token called APY and kick off a liquidity mining program in the coming weeks.