One of the first lessons I learned about money was...

Idle cash generates no income. 

Money laying around does no good, whether in your wallet, under your mattress or in your bank, its pretty much the same. DeFi is changing this. 

So lets say I'm hodling a certain cryptpocurrency in hopes that the demand increases driving up the price. This isn't a bad strategy for the long term. However, you could be hodling and generating returns. Two birds one stone. 

One of my favorite ways to generate extra income is to yield farm. What is yield farming?

Yield farming is providing liquidity to a pool using permission less liquidity protocols. Basically, locking up your crypto into a smart contract and getting rewards, similar to staking. Although, it is a little more complex. Who, I ask is better at managing your money than you? No one.

My rewards generated from farming come from gas fees generated by the Defi platform and other sources. Some are paid in multiple tokens and those rewards are then deposited into other liquidity pools generating even more crypto. 

Yield farming is usually done with ERC-20 tokens and the rewards are usually a ERC-20 token as well. However, this is changing rapidly as gas fees are increasing and other blockchains are becoming more recognized for their efficiency and power. Cross-chain bridges are a Defi necessity that all chains aren't capable of. We will see a race in this area of blockchain development like Band protocol and SNX to name a few. These liquidity pools power the market place where people like us can lend, borrow or exchange crypto. This is extremely important to understand that this is new technology and is the wild west of cryptocurrency projects.

In part two I will cover a few strategies as well as some projects that are up and coming power houses.