Farmland Integrates Chainlink Price Feeds to Optimise Cross-Chain Yield Farming Strategies

Farmland Finance
5 min readJan 20, 2021

We are excited to announce that Farmland, a cross-chain yield optimisation protocol, has integrated the widely used Chainlink Price Feeds on mainnet to obtain fair market valuations on a variety of crypto-assets, starting first with BTC and ETH. Farmland is using these Price Feeds, which already secure billions of dollars in value for many leading DeFi protocols, to determine the best yield generating strategies in the market given the current on-chain costs and specific collateral provided by users. Thanks to Chainlink, Farmland’s yield optimisation strategies can be calculated on-chain in a highly secure and reliable manner, allowing the process to be automated and resistant to common attack vectors like flash loan attacks.

In addition to Price Feeds, Farmland’s future product development will require a random number generator to create features like random selection of a lucky user or a lottery-style liquidity farming pool. We plan to integrate Chainlink Verifiable Random Function (VRF) as our RNG solution, serving as a secure and provably fair source of randomness that can’t be exploited by external entities or the Farmland team.

What is Farmland Protocol?

Farmland is a decentralised cross-chain protocol that allows crypto-assets from a variety of blockchains to be used as collateral for yield generating DeFi applications, as well as automatically optimised between protocols to earn the most yield. Farmland differentiates itself by providing the following core advantages to users:

  1. Cross-chain asset utilisation: Unlike the current DeFi ecosystem, which is reliant on the Ethereum network, Farmland allows users holding assets on various public chains to participate in DeFi activities such as farming.
  2. Zero gas fees: By aggregating user funds when deploying yield farming strategies and using shared profits to pay for fees, farming costs are drastically reduced for end users.
  3. Full decentralisation: Farmland uses decentralised aggregation functions to conduct farming strategies and distribute revenue, and doesn’t rely on centralised custodians.
  4. High security: In addition to decentralisation and mitigating impermanent loss with shared fees, Farmland categories farming pool tranches according to different risk levels and uses overlaying insurance protocols for added protection of user funds.
  5. Open integration: On top of Farmland’s own cross-chain protocol, users can incorporate multiple existing cross-chain protocols within Farmland like WBTC and Ren Protocol.

Why Chainlink?

In order to properly execute the most optimal yield farming strategies, Farmland must know the prices of the crypto-asset used to pay for fees and the crypto-asset received as a yield-based reward. These price feeds generate an exchange rate used to determine the profitability of different yield farming strategies relative to the costs withheld for fees. Since the first integration involves using BTC in Ethereum DeFi protocols, we will be leveraging the ETH/USD and BTC/USD Chainlink Price Feeds.

Price data is a byproduct of all the trading taking place on various centralised and decentralised exchanges, therefore, a true fair market price must be aggregated across all these platforms and take into account key metrics like volume. Relying on the price feed of a single exchange opens up DeFi protocols to inaccurate price points and data manipulation attacks like flash loans, where a well-capitalised actor can temporarily distort the price of an asset compared to the wider market via a large market buy/sell order.

As the undisputed market-leader, Chainlink provides strong protections against these various attack vectors, specifically through the use of premium data, decentralized infrastructure, and secure node operators. Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by a decentralized network of Sybil-resistant oracle node operators, run by leading blockchain DevOps with extensive experience running highly reliable infrastructure. The nodes source price data from numerous data aggregators like BraveNewCoin, with the nodes’ responses further aggregated together to form a single price update. This ensures that no single oracle node or data source is a centralized point of failure, leading to highly accurate, available, and tamperproof Price Feeds.

<The Chainlink-Powered ETH/USD Price Feed oracle network>

We’re excited to be leveraging Chainlink’s BTC/USD and ETH/USD Price Feeds on mainnet, and look forward to adopting additional price oracles as we scale to support more cross-chain assets. Additionally, we plan and/or are exploring how to utilize other Chainlink oracles in the future, such as VRF, Proof of Reserve, and additional markt data like gas prices and asset valuations beyond just cryptocurrencies.

“Given the rising developer activity across many different blockchains, there is increasing demand for users wanting to tap into yield generating protocols using their preferred assets. Thanks to Chainlink’s high-quality data and decentralized oracle infrastructure, Farmland can make automated cross-chain yield optimization a reality for users within various ecosystems, knowing that our users are fully protected against various oracle attack vectors like flash loans,” stated Yen, CEO of Farmland.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universal smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.

Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.

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About Farmland

Farmland is an aggregator and platform built on top of various cross-chain protocols, for yield farming, lending and other DeFi purposes. Our mission is to allow users from many different blockchain ecosystems the ability to participate in yield generating opportunities across other blockchain ecosystems in a fully decentralized, automated, secure, and low-cost manner.

To learn more, check out our website, read our whitepaper, follow us on Twitter, or hop in our Telegram.

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Farmland Finance

Farmland is an aggregator and platform built on top of various cross-chain protocols, for yield farming, lending and other DeFi purposes.