I’ll start. I came across two Ethereum projects that seem maybe pretty promising. (Not shilling, I don’t own any and don’t plan to, but what do you think of these?
I think $YFI is worthy of it’s status as a Top 30 coin, but could totally see many competitors taking margin share.
imho YFI is a movement…the rest are just companies in different forms 
Harvest is a joke. There is no community, ingenuity/charismatic character like Andre there and the devs are anon.
Now Tokensets could be a competitor if they had an actual token. But without a token they’re at a huge disadvantage to Yearn. Also they’re already at a disadvantage in that they’re very much so centralized and worse they’re at the mercy of the U.S. regulations. Good luck there.
I’ve been thinking about it for awhile and have figured that a true, worthy competitor would look like this:
-well-known dev who’s skilled and has proven it and their code is known to be good…Honestly they’re are probably only a couple dozen of these devs out there.
-truly decentralized…Very hard to do, lest local regulations will destroy the project.
-community-driven from the get-go…Again, besides Bitcoin, Yearn is basically the only other one. You have to reward the early community members with wicked gains and get them deeply passionate about the project so they naturally attract more people and capital to the project.
-product market fit…Basically they have to fit a need as good or better than Yearn. Very hard to do since Andre and company would simply make tweaks to make theirs just as good.
Honestly, these are huge barriers to entry…I think the only way we see another worthy competitor is if one of these devs working with Andre on Yearn goes and starts their own fork. Doing so could create a split in the community while essentially recreating $YFI’s meteoric rise.
To be honest, I don’t think YFI has many “competitors” at the moment. Harvest is not at the same level currently, and YFII is filling a similar role in a market Yearn doesn’t (and realistically won’t) have much of a footprint in– China.
I think more important is to look to all of the protocols that Yearn can work with to make our ecosystem more robust. CREAM offers lending against several yTokens, Aave recently approved YFI as collateral, Maker approved access to their oracle for the Yearn SC, and of course Yearn is very tightly integrated with Curve.
I think a more useful way to spend your time is to not look at competitors, but instead look at other players in the DeFi landscape and try to imagine the best ways for Yearn to interact with/utilize their services.
I think Pickles is trying to do something similar to yearn, currently with the UNI Poools. https://pickle.finance/jars They already have $70Million in their vaults (jar)… that was pretty fast, just took a couple of days
yes pickle seems interesting (even if it uses food name)
they actually have a shot at providing value to the ecosystem (stabilizing stable coins)
I still don’t understand the huge PICKLE/ETH initiative and what is the benefit from it, but i’m staking there, because of the great APY even with the great impermanent loss risk, since the pickle token can fizzle at anytime.
About harvest, they seem to be doing right now what YFI did, but they are doing it for 4 years instead for a week, thus distributing their token to much wider group.
They seems to have more “vaults” as well.
From my short research so far, one huge downside is control is not dencetralised but in the hands of anonymous devs.
I’m yet to check if they can single handedly empty the vaults or the smart contracts don’t allow that.
I checked harvest.finance yesterday and honestly I’m tempted to give them a try. I’m just waiting for their smart contract audits.
I’m using mostly BTC and right now the APY for the sBTC vault is 6-7%, so I’m looking for alternatives. Harvest advertises 9% for renBTC pool + 40% reward in their token, which if sold frequently removes a lot of the risk if it turns out to be shitcoin.
However, they are new, anonymous and unaudited so the risk is very high