The Yam Protocol Will Migrate Old Tokens to an Audited Contract

After the original Yam Finance protocol collapsed due to a single line of code, its developers are planning to relaunch the project on new, audited smart contracts.

In a blog post published on Friday, the developers outlined a migration plan that will see the already existing tokens get transferred on a new smart contract with a properly functioning rebase.

The relaunch was announced shortly after it became clear that a last-ditch effort to save the protocol failed on Thursday. 

Now, details on the upcoming transition have emerged. The migration will happen in two stages, and includes an initial Yam V2 contract that will store information on previous balances. Users will need to burn their V1 tokens and mint new tokens before an unspecified deadline. This transition contract will not be taking rebases into account, so the amount minted will depend on the underlying share of total supply of the tokens.

The transition contract will not have governance features, but will instead use off-chain signature-based voting to let the community express its desired path forward.

The most likely path is the deployment of fully audited V3 contracts, which will be the actual relaunch of Yam. No timelines were given on this yet, though the team said that specific information on audits will be provided in the coming days.

Once the contracts are deployed, the team will “strongly advocate” for rewarding all token holders who “acted to save the system.” It will be up to the community, however, to decide if the plan is worth pursuing and submit the appropriate governance proposal.

This could result in an interesting political conundrum for the nascent community, depending on what percentage of holders delegated their tokens to save the protocol. If they are a majority, they could force the decision through at the expense of the non-participating holders. If they are a minority, this decision would require altruism from the remaining holders.