Why Harvest Finance is Better even though Binance Smart Chain Low Fees

With the release of other smart chains, yield farming becomes more affordable for average users. Although Binance Smart Chain was not the first to follow Ethereum’s path, it was the spark for the new farming craziness because of cheap fees in average ¢10 per transaction. Still, do you know that using Harvest Finance is better than farming directly?

Compounding

While in my first article about Harvest Finance, I wrote the difference between annual per rate (APR) and annual per yield (APY). To review it simply, APR is the interest generated annually while APY includes all the interest generated by investing previously generated interest. In traditional certificate of deposit, we may choose to claim interest montly and in APY we deposit those interest as well to earn more interests. While in my first post about Harvest Finance I covered the concept of APY but did not relate it to decentralized finance (DeFi) technicality yet.

Executing smart contract costs gas fees and the two gas fees that we definitely cannot avoid are approving contract and depositing assets to farms. Other gas fees can actually be avoided by automating the process, in other words include the process in a single smart contract and not separate. Let’s take a look a three scenarios of an example that we want to reinvest our earned interest everyday:

The Legacy Process

1. Harvesting the interest cost $0.1 gas fee.
2. Reinvesting the interest cost $0.1 gas fee.

Everyday costs $0.1 * 2 = $0.2 gas fee to reinvest. In a year, will cost $0.2 * 365 = $73 gas fees.

The Current Process

1. Reinvesting the interest cost $0.1 gas fee.

Today, almost every farming platform have the “compound” button where we no longer need to spend fee to harvest before reinvesting…