Deposits in 'Monetary Experiment' Meme Token YAM Break $460M

The token now is trading hands at $126, according to YAMalytics.

YAM by Yam Finance is a mishmash of DeFi products packaged in one humble tuber, generally meant to track the U.S. dollar.

Or, as the founding team put it, YAM is a "Minimally viable monetary experiment."

YAM's market capitalization sits at $13.5 million with some $29,361,386 in 24-hour trade volume, according to CoinGecko.

The experiment joins a cornucopia of other DeFi summer "Meme" coins such as Tendies and YFI.Its codebase pulls from multiple other DeFi projects including Compound's on-chain governance, Curv's governed treasury and Uniswap's pools for token distribution.

Called yield farming, Uniswap gives token market liquidity providers a proportional amount of the platform's native token, YAM, back for their trouble.

Place a token pair like ETH/COMP in a pool and get YAMs in return, the logic runs.

Farming has dragged these other tokens up alongside YAM. Six of the eight coins available for yield farming posted positive gains in 24 hours, with Compound's COMP token up 49%, according to Messari.

Called a "Rebase," the project's code will sprout new tokens at set intervals to push or pull YAM's price back towards one dollar.

The reckless speed at which the project has grown is not lost on the team - particularly because YAM has never passed a food inspection, so to speak.