Balancer Blacklisted The Confusing YFII Token: Report

The asset management protocol Balancer blacklisted the confusing fork of yEarn’s governance token YFI sparking the censorship DeFi talk as we are reading more in the upcoming altcoin news today.

The automated asset management protocol Balancer blacklisted YFII which is a fork of the yEarn governance token YFI and the confusing fork was announced earlier this week. YFII was the recipient of the vast community contention which critics cited unaudited smart contracts and safety risks as well as centralized control as the main reasons why yield farmers should avoid the project. YFII continues to move forward as it recently burned its owner key in order to mitigate the risks of infinite inflation. While the project seems to be making some safety movements, the Defi players Balancer and MetaMask think otherwise.

So @BalancerLabs just blacklisted a pool and removed it from their frontend… a pool with **$20 million** of funds in it.

They did this without any community governance at all. pic.twitter.com/bKq9Qt8rRv

— ⟠ toast.eth 🦄 (@intocryptoast) July 29, 2020

This morning, Balancer blacklisted $20 million worth of YFII pools on their UI in an attempt to protect its users. The move spurred backlash as the community members said Balancer should have used the BAL-based governance system to make the decisions while others think otherwise saying Balancer has the right to decide what projects can be listed on its platform. YFII responded by forking Balancer but was met with a blatant scam warning by MetaMask.

1) Some thoughts on @FinanceYfii and @iearnfinance . There are very different mindsets between the east and the west, looking how this event unfolded from two-sided is quite interesting. First of all, salute to @AndreCronjeTech for creating the @iearnfinance protocol.

— Minion@TokenInsight (@minionabct) July 29, 2020

YFII’s forked balancer pool is live yet and Balancer has since relisted the original pool on the front and to allow LPs to remove all liquidity. If nothing else, this is the case of “is this a scam” which won’t be the last one in DeFi and raises many questions about the perceived permission less nature of the key protocols and whether everything will be decentralized soon.

As previously reported, Yearn.Finance YFI, the Ethereum-based DeFi token increased by 100,000% in over a week after the parabolic DeFi market experienced a huge blow-off top over the previous week. With the recent price action, the DeFi bubble popped and this could seem to be the case only on the surface. But then if you look hard enough, at certain token valuations it is clear that this is not the case. The Ethereum DeFi investors are moving on from the investments of LINK and SNX and are mostly focused on their efforts on the players that are only now joining the market.