FARM is the native token of Harvest Finance, a yield-farming protocol that shifts user funds around different decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to generate returns. It’s native to the Ethereum blockchain and also trades as a BEP-20 token on the BNB Smart Chain.

FARM hit its all-time high on its first day of trading on Sept. 2, 2020, likely because it launched with a circulating supply of 0 tokens and the few coins that went into circulation shortly after that soared to high prices.

Crypto price aggregator CoinGecko records FARM’s all-time high as $5,078, while CoinMarketCap pegs it at $2,236 and Messari at $2,911. While data providers disagree on the all-time high, all aggregators agree that FARM’s price crashed a few weeks after it was released to about $78, just as the “DeFi summer” of 2020 was drawing to a close.

The token rose once again during the crypto boom of 2021, soaring to about $410 in February 2021. When the market crashed in the spring, it dragged FARM down with it. The token sank as low as $43.61 in June 2021.

During the second wave of the 2021 crypto boom, FARM rose to highs of about $303. But when the second wave subsided toward the end of the year, FARM tanked. Matters were made worse when an October 2020 hack drained $24 million from Harvest Finance, causing FARM to plummet by 65% in just one hour. The spiral continued into 2022. By May 2022, FARM had fallen to a low of $33.35.

The protocol had hard-coded a maximum supply of 5 million tokens. In the fifth week after it went live, holders voted to cap the supply to 690,420 by reducing the number of tokens the protocol minted by 4.45% each week until the end of August 2024.

Still, before it comes close to reaching that cap, FARM’s supply is increasing rapidly over time, according to Messari, going from about 250,000 FARM in October 2020 to about 456,000 in January 2021, and so the project’s market capitalization hit its all-time high far later than the price of any single FARM token; the market cap peaked at $194 million in February 2021.

Harvest Finance mints and distributes new tokens each week. Of the new tokens, 70% go to those that provide liquidity to Harvest Finance and provide capital for its asset management strategies, 10% goes toward the development of the protocol; and 20% are held in a development fund, occasionally sold through crypto mixer Tornado Cash to pay the coders who build it.

Harvest Finance, which functions sort of like a decentralized investment syndicate, keeps 30% of ETH and 8% of BSC of the profit its investments make and then distributes the rest of the profits to those who provide capital.

FARM represents shares in this investment syndicate.

“Directly speaking, the value of $FARM comes from the profits generated in the various deployed strategies,” Harvest Finance wrote in its documentation. Holders can stake FARM to compound their shares over time – similar to a public company paying dividends to investors.

Harvest Finance’s launch team is anonymous. Its investments are governed by the “Council of 69,” a community investment syndicate that backs early-stage crypto projects.

Anyone can submit a proposal for an investment via a Snapshot message. FARM holders vote on these proposals with their tokens. Successful applications are scrutinized by members of the syndicate.

The council is not an elite, elected membership; anyone can help out with research. It is, as community moderator “Gruad” told CoinDesk, “Not a super formal process. Just a bunch of Farmers talking about pros and cons.”

In October 2020, Harvest Finance was exploited for $24 million after an arbitrage trade manipulated the price of stablecoins held in the protocol’s votes. FARM fell by 65% in an hour, and Harvest Finance’s total value locked fell from just over $1 billion to $290 million, according to data from DefiLlama. Its TVL had fallen to $109 million as of June 2022.