Yearn Finance announces another ‘merger’ with the Cream lending protocol

Two days after Yearn Finance (YFI) and Pickle Finance joined forces in DeFi’s first effective merger, Yearn founder Andre Cronje published details of another upcoming integration with Cream, a lending protocol similar to Compound and Aave.

The blog post, published on Thursday, outlines how the two protocols will cooperate for the launch of Cream V2. As part of the partnership, the teams will merge development resources and introduce several symbiotic interactions between the two protocols.

Yearn users will be able to put their vault tokens — their share in a yield farming strategy fund — as collateral to borrow on Cream. Furthermore, the farming strategies will be able to access leverage on the platform, potentially increasing their yield.

The cooperation will continue with future releases, with Cream specializing in lending products. Stable Credit, an upcoming lending platform built by Yearn, will be launched through Cream. A zero-collateral protocol that would allow more flexibility in lending was also teased as a future development.

Unlike with Pickle Finance though, the governance and token economics of Cream will remain unchanged. The two protocols will remain largely separate, with synergies more resemblant of a very close partnership, rather than an outright merger.

The community had raised concerns about not being consulted before the Pickle Finance merger, suggesting that the matter should have been put up for a vote. A team member later clarified that it technically did not require approval since most of the integrations were on Pickle’s side.

Chris Blec, a DeFi researcher who often takes an adversarial view of events, believes that these decisions highlight that governance tokens offer less control than people expect.

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, he clarified that these types of decisions would likely fall under the umbrella of “facilitating business development and integrations,” one of the decision-making powers that YFI holders granted to the core team in August.

The Yearn community has so far reacted positively to the Cream integration, but most have yet to process the announcement.

While the core team seems to be within their rights to approve partnerships and mergers, these actions may trigger further discussion of the role of the YFI token holders in the Yearn ecosystem.