Am a little confused on how yearn operates and appreciate some info. I didn’t find it by searching this forum or the docs, but maybe there is another place.
Is there a yearn company or is this completely decentralised?
If completely decentralised, then can the YFI token holders decide what to do with the Treasury, including distributing a portion of it to themselves?
Can anyone be a strategist and are they the creators of each vault (ie strategy)? If so, are the funds that are allocated to the strategists individually coming from the vault that each one is managing, or are the strategist funds pooled somehow? If it is individually allocated, then the first person to come up with each strategy would have some sort of monopoly?
Yearn is completely decentralized and people from all over the world contribute both full-time and part-time to build, maintain, and improve Yearn and its products. Yes, YFI holders can decide what to do with the treasury and funds the protocol holds. Recently, they voted on YIP 56: Buyback and Build. This uses excess revenue to buy back YFI from the market which is used to hold, farm with, and pay contributors.
Yes anyone can be a Strategist. Strategists create strategies while protocol devs create and manage the vaults along with our Keep3r bots. We are working on better onboarding for strategists, but for now, this repository is a good place to start. The strategist multisig/group is responsible for maintaining, peer-reviewing & overseeing strategy creation, and monitoring production strategies. Strategies that strategists develop can go into production vaults if they pass tests/peer reviews. If a strategist has a strategy on a production vault then, yes, they earn the 10% strategist fee from the revenue that specific strategy manages, but currently, it is split amongst strategists in a fair way they have decided on. If a strategy is successful and well tested then it can be generalized to other vaults.
Continuous buybacks do not make sense. The value of a buyback depends on the price, so if the price is too high, buybacks actually reduce the overall value. I’m surprised something like this could have gotten through. There are many better ways that a buyback could be orchestrated. I suppose it’s a lack of traditional finance knowledge/understanding of the ppl in this space that will hopefully be ameliorated, but it’s hard to see how in a decentralized way very specific/obscure knowledge/expertise would become understood by the majority of stakeholders.