What the heck is Cream and why is the Ethereum coin up over 2,000% from its August lows?
Most decentralized finance forks are either controversial or have failed.
SushiSwap, which was forked from Uniswap by a pseudonymous developer, has come under fire after the founder withdrew millions worth of capital he wasn’t supposed to. The forks of Yam, a community governance coin that has itself been the subject of controversy, have withered into irrelevance.
But there’s at least one fork that is doing extremely well: Cream Finance, whose native governance token is CREAM.
This Ethereum-based project has done so well that the founder of the project it was forked from, Robert Leshner of Compound, has become a public supporter of Cream Finance. Simultaneously, the CREAM token has surged over 1,000 percent from its August lows.
What is Cream Finance?
To put it simply, Cream is just a fork of Compound — one of the leading projects in the decentralized finance space. The project saw immediate success, securing Leshner, Andrew Kang of Mechanism Capital, and others as multi-signature participants.
Compound is a money-market protocol that allows users to lend and borrow certain cryptocurrencies like Ethereum or Basic Attention Token.
Unlike Compound, which is very controlled with its listing of coins, Cream is focused on building liquidity for a swath of digital assets that the team knows investors want but can’t access through traditional venues.
For instance, the platform offers support for yCRV, a certificate for deposits on Curve, CREAM itself, Chainlink, BUSD, SUSHI, FTX’s FTT token, Yearn.finance’s yETH, and a swath of other tokens that investors actively want to transact in but cannot through traditional DeFi platform.
This inclusion of these unique tokens has allowed Cream to garner dozens of millions of deposits just weeks into its lifespan.
An interesting component of Cream is accepting deposits of tokens that are yielding interest. This means that users can compound risk, but also receive more in yields in the process.
While launched as a fork with a more adaptive listing process, Cream has since expanded its horizons to become a “full-stack crypto ecosystem with a Balancer Balancer fork and additional products in the pipeline” as Andrew Kang recently explained.
The platform has a new product called CreamSwap, which is basically a decentralized exchange focused on the niche tokens as aforementioned. Many of the coins supported are not available or do not have liquidity on other decentralized exchanges.
2/ What is @CreamdotFinance?
They started out as a @compoundfinance fork, but have signalled their intention to create a full stack crypto ecosystem with a @BalancerLabs fork and additional products in the pipeline
H/T @DonYakka pic.twitter.com/EGyBqjPdTk
— Andrew Kang (@Rewkang) September 10, 2020
Why is the Ethereum-based CREAM rallying?
Since falling as low as $9 at the start of August, CREAM has exploded higher; the coin now trades for $243, over 2,500 percent higher than the lows.
The coin seems to be benefiting from its ability to rapidly iterate on Compound’s code, along with product releases.
Andrew Kang also mentioned that the coin is likely managing to accrue value due to the unique and complex way that Cream’s products are set up:
“The best part is that if projects that users want listed don’t yet have enough liquidity, that liquidity can be bootstrapped through an incentive program on CREAM swap. This allows CREAM to accrue value through the full stack.”