Case Study - GHO Vault - Earn yield on your GHO Tokens

Overview

Thomas one of our founders and lead developer who is passionate on web3 technologies participated in the GHO EthGlobal Hackathon, EthGlobal is a large and popular company in the web3 space that creates coding competitions to onboard more developers into web3 and blockchain.

Tom and his team won 2nd place 🥈 with their project GHO Vault. The first GHO Yearn V3 Vault to earn yield on your GHO. Built using the Yearn Finance V3 Vaults. Put simply GHO is a cryptocurrency stable coin (a crypto currency that stays the same price in this case 1 dollar) In non technical terms a platform that allows users to earn interest on their GHO holdings, essentially serving as a digital trustless bank. All of this is made possible by smart contracts.

Smart contracts are like digital agreements written in code that automatically execute actions when certain conditions are met. They're kind of like having a virtual middleman who ensures everything happens as it should without needing to involve traditional banks or lawyers. In the case of GHO Vault, these smart contracts make it possible for users to earn interest on their GHO holdings in a secure and straightforward way, without needing to worry about complicated processes or intermediaries.

The team noticed that the variety of DeFi products for GHO (A Stable Coin Cryptocurrency) is very limited, so we decided to build a yield aggregator for GHO, which aggregates some of the current yield sources for GHO. We used the novel Yearn V3 architecture to make each strategy independent and at the same time composable. We have included strategies that harvest rewards from GHO stable-LPs from Curve finance and Balancer.

The front end is was built/mocked to be easy to use for users with a modern feel. Built using NextJS 14 to enhance performance, ease of use and development speed. For styling Tailwindcss was used for it modern themes and development speed. A further css library was used ShadcnUI, a lightwieght css library that allows you to only install the css componets you want therefore keeping the project smaller and ligthwieght, while still proviidng clean modern and interactive components. For wallet interactions and blockchain connectivity we used the Family ConnectKit npm plugin into NextJS. This allowed us to easily plugin wallet interactvitry, for both metamask, coinbase and other wallets thanks to Family ConnectKit's support of most popular connectors and chains whoch made the ui expereice much better due to the UX of the Family ConnectKit wallet popup.

Overall the project was a great success and we are looking forward to participating in future hackathons and exploring the web3 space further.

What we did