SMS Budget Request 3

[dudesahn]

Scope

This proposal requests funding for the Strategist (SMS) team to continue accelerating strategy development and vault innovation within the Yearn ecosystem. The V3 vault core codebase has stabilized, opening the door for new strategies and products to be built on top.

The team’s primary objective is for Yearn V3 vaults to be the default vehicle through which people deploy their capital in DeFi.

Plan

• Design and deploy new strategies
  • Continue rolling out Lender/Borrowers for everything (e.g. Liquity, Morpho, Fluid)
  • Further investigate LST and PT leverage loops, including ways to mitigate transient or longer-term depegs
  • Cross-chain strategies (including LP positions)
  • Single-sided LPs on v3 (Curve, Balancer, Aero/Velo V2)
• New products leveraging V3 architecture
  • Yearn Yield Splitter vaults to go live this quarter on Katana
  • Robin Markets integration on Polygon
  • Continue improving yield and options for Bankr Earn
• Optimize vault allocations across all V3 allocators; run keepers for vault and strategy reports
• Improve product offerings
  • Work to enhance product integration, UX, and frontend visibility (WebOps)
  • Continue exploring asset-class vaults (e.g. yvUSD → USDC + USDT + USDS + USDe)
  • Research options for asynchronous withdrawals to expand strategy possibilities (less liquid, fixed-term, etc.)
  • Continue growing usage of auction system, ideally beyond Yearn as well
  • Ongoing work with Corn
    • Protocol-aligned vaults built with/for other protocols
    • White-labeled vaults operated by Yearn for other protocols
• Safety and risk
  • Facilitate Alchemix's migration of $50M out of legacy V2 system
  • Continue to work with SAM to improve monitoring and risk scoring
  • Reduce reliance on multisig and yChad roles
  • Explore more immutable vaults (e.g. yBOLD)
  • Decentralize vault operations (keepers, optimization, etc)

Deadline

2026-01-31

People

Strategist (SMS) Team:

• 5 Core Strategists: Leading design, deployment, and maintenance of V3 strategies, as well as vault yield optimization and harvesting.
• New Contributor(s): Budgeted for onboarding 1–2 additional strategists during this period to support development and expansion.

Money

Compensation

• Total Monthly Budget: $50,000
• Total for 3 Months: $150,000
• Requested Payment Token: yvUSDC-1
• Recipient Wallet: brain.ychad.eth

Additionally, SMS is requesting a loan of $50k each of WETH and YFI to be used to provide protocol-owned WOOFY-vbETH liquidity on Katana. To further support growth in the Katana ecosystem, 20% of Yearn's fees earned on Katana will go to buying back WOOFY from the market and donating to a yvWOOFY Katana vault. Note that these funds are a loan, not a grant.

Edit 11/11: POL request will be moved to its own separate request.

Note: SMS currently sends 75% of both multi-strategy vault-level fees and strategy performance fees (where applicable) to Yearn's treasury. Starting November 1st, SMS will transition to use the new revenue system outlined and approved under YIP-88.

Budget Breakdown

Role	Amount/Month	Total (3 months)
Core Strategists	$45,000	$135,000
New Contributor(s)	$5,000	$15,000
Total	$50,000	$150,000

| POL Token | Amount |
|--------------------|--------------|
| WETH | $50,000 |
| YFI (as WOOFY) | $50,000 |

Amount (Total)

150,000 USDC, $100k in POL

Wallet address

0x16388463d60FFE0661Cf7F1f31a7D658aC790ff7

Reporting

Once