Yearn teams up with Akropolis to boost institutional outreach

Yearn Finance announced on Monday yet another merger with Akropolis, a multi-product DeFi protocol featuring yield optimization and under-collateralized loans.

Like the Cream Finance merger announced last week the two ecosystems will remain largely independent in terms of their tokens and overall product lines, a shared announcement clarifies. However, like with Pickle Finance, Akropolis will now integrate Yearn vault technology and will publish its yield farming strategies on its Vault V2 platform.

The two development teams will combine and benefit from each others’ expertise. Akropolis developers will be able to build their strategies using tools from the expanding Yearn ecosystem, including Cream’s lending platform.

For the Yearn protocol, Akropolis will offer its business development expertise and institutional contacts, the announcement says. Akropolis will also deprecate AkropolisOS and Sparta, its two other products unrelated to yield generation. These will be moved into open source development mode. Development will then be concentrated on an institutional front-end that would let professional traders access the combined Yearn-Akropolis ecosystem.

Akropolis will also introduce an IOU token to track losses from its recent hack. Platform profits will be redirected into this token’s fund to eventually repay all those who lost money on the hack. The team said it will streamline integration with insurance protocols to let more users benefit from coverage in the future. The Yearn ecosystem now also includes Cover protocol, a DeFi insurance provider.

Akropolis said that calling it a merger “is a bit of a misnomer,” despite using the same word to describe the cooperation in its announcement. Many of the integrations rely on the permissionless nature of DeFi, meaning that Akropolis could have unilaterally decided to integrate itself in the Yearn ecosystem at any previous point.

However, the cooperation between development teams is expected to be very tight and seems to be relying on very specific strengths of each team — Akropolis would seemingly make use of Yearn’s development experience in exchange for facilitating institutional contacts.