Yearn Finance (YFI) price dives 45% in hours– what happened?

Yearn Finance (YFI) price fell more than 45% to below $9k on November 18.
The decline occurred amid market manipulation claims, including from the dYdX team.
YFI price was around $9,260 on Sunday morning.

Yearn Finance (YFI) is changing hands just above $9,260 on Sunday morning, November 19.

The YFI token’s 45% slump from highs of $15,548 to lows of $8,918 on Saturday wiped out all of last week’s gains. YFI/USD had climbed by over 170% over the past month.

YFI price nosedives – what happened?

Yearn Finance’s steep price decline came as negative sentiment hit the market amid allegations of potential market population. 

Amid this, YFI saw huge deposits to exchanges and on-chain data shared by market platform Lookonchain shows one whale selling as prices plummeted.  

Why did $YFI suddenly plummet more than 40%?

Wallet “0x48f9” transferred 446 $YFI($5.8M) out, most of which was deposited to exchanges.https://t.co/Scw2wsE7lK pic.twitter.com/mrikh2dviO

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) November 18, 2023

Alleged market manipulation was pointed out by the dYdX team, which revealed it had used $9 million from its v3 insurance fund to plug liquidation gaps in the YFI market.

“This was pretty clearly a targeted attack against dYdX, including market manipulation of the entire $YFI market,” dYdX founder Antonio Juliano stated in a post on X.

This was pretty clearly a targeted attack against dYdX, including market manipulation of the entire $YFI market

We are investigating alongside several partners and will be transparent with what we discover https://t.co/djWHaaPIua

— Antonio | dYdX (@AntonioMJuliano) November 18, 2023

The FUD surrounding YFI price on November 18 saw an increase in liquidations. Data from Coinglass shows a total of $4.55 million liquidated in 24 hours, with longs accounting for over $3.07 million.

What is Yearn Finance?

YFI is the governance token of Yearn Finance, one of the leading yield farming protocols in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. 

The platform’s suite of products that include lending aggregation, yield generation, and insurance are integrated by some of the top DeFi players, including Aave, dYdX and Compound.

The price of its token had seen a significant spike in recent weeks amid a resurgence across the crypto market. In reaching highs of $15,548, YFI was trading at a peak last seen in May 2022. Profit deals are therefore likely to have been a possible factor.

As  of writing, YFI has cut weekly gains to just over 2% and 30-day performance is down to +85%.