**While I serve as a Community Manager for Harvest Finance, all of my articles are of my own opinions**
At Harvest Finance community plays a foundational role in nearly every decision that is made. From determining the best strategies to updating the UX, the question is constantly asked, ‘What does the community want and expect from Harvest Finance?’ Harvest has run multiple community Creativity Contests to engage with not only the financially savvy but those who are artistically gifted and can contribute to the farmlands in different ways. They did the same with a Developer Contest because they understand there is amazing talent in the community, and engaging with that talent is an overall benefit to growing the DeFi ecosystem. I personally believe this is why Harvest Finance at one point exceeded $1B in AUM, because the community saw an amazing product which they could tangibly connect with.
When the flash attack struck the platform and $32M was stolen, it was with community in mind that Harvest took immediate measures to poll its farmers to understand how to best move forward, and subsequently begin the process for development and issuance of an IOU token called GRAIN. This move by Harvest not only showed their resiliency and dedication to move the platform forward, but their dedication to farmers was first in their minds.
It was with this in mind and great sadness that I saw the attack on Pickle Finance unfold on Twitter and their Discord chat. As a Discord moderator myself for Harvest Finance I can fully appreciate the emotions they were going through in handling the response post attack, and the horrible feeling of responsibility in losing user funds. But in less than 48 hours after the attack I was kicked in the gut again:
Pickle in my opinion has shirked its responsibility to its depositors under the guise of what's best for the survival of the protocol. Consider not only did Pickle Finance lose less USD value in its hack than Harvest Finance, but it also lost 100% of DAI deposits, versus the 17% maximum loss a user experienced at Harvest. Individual users were dramatically more impacted at Pickle Finance yet they were abandoned without any community interaction and apparently very little consideration based on the above statement, which places the survival of the platform before all considerations. But it doesn't end there. Seemingly out of the blue yEarn Finance has come to the rescue and effectively merged/bought out Pickle Finance, which now includes a vague plan to create a new token which tracks user losses. Sounds great right?
Are you kidding me right now? One of the lead devs for yEarn (banteg) is point blank mocking another protocol (Harvest)in the aftermath of an attack, and seemingly trying to leverage the misfortune of Pickle and its community to yEarns advantage in an attempt to overthrow Harvest. Like holy $hit you cannot get more f@cked up than this. Compare this to my recent interview with the Delphi Digital podcast where I was point blank asked who will win in the world of automated yield farming between Harvest, YFI and Pickle, and my response was roughly ‘there is room for all just like in the fiat world there is room for various investing platforms with all the different strategies and nuances’.
To me there is a clear and obvious distinction between the three projects mentioned in this article, one cares about its community and integrates with it in nearly every possible aspect. The other two, well make that decision on your own.
