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It's the latest twist in a crazy day: YFII, the spinoff of—and stick with us here—YFI, has risen 222% in the past day, from $1,154 to its current price, $3,781. YFII's big day coincides with a record-breaking one for YFI, which recently surpassed $26,000, far more than Bitcoin's all-time high, and more than double its current price of $11,507.
Confused? A primer: YFI is a governance token of yEarn, or yearn.finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) app that aggregates the yields of various DeFi lending protocols. A governance token lets you vote on network proposals. The more tokens you hold, the more influence.
All of the major DeFi tokens have these governance tokens, which in July and August have become speculative assets. Aave's LEND token, Curve's CRV and Compound's COMP, are all pretty successful, but YFI's raised a few eyebrows given its high price, which is now far higher than Bitcoin's all-time high, $20,000, which it hit in 2017. In part that's because there are only about 30,000 YFI tokens in exist, to Bitcoin's 18 million.
YFI became so successful that it spawned a series of copycats, among them YFII, YFIII, YFIE and WAIFU. YFII, officially called DFI.Money, has piggy-backed of YFI's fame and today rose by 200%.