What is Harvest Finance?
Harvest Finance is a yield aggregator that automates DeFi farming through vaults which harvest and reinvest rewards on behalf of depositors. Our data shows it across 5 chains with about $18.9M in tracked deposits, ranking 10th of 15 in our Yield aggregators category. Our checks surfaced one security audit.
How the vaults work
A depositor puts an asset into a Harvest vault and receives a share token. The vault farms an underlying strategy, collects rewards, and compounds them back into the position, so returns accrue without manual claiming. The convenience comes with delegation of control to the strategy contracts. Harvest was among the wave of aggregators that popularized this deposit-and-forget model during the 2020 yield-farming period, and it still operates across several networks today.
What we measured
- Deposits: roughly $18.9M tracked.
- Chains: 5, giving moderate multi-chain reach.
- Audits: one review found in our checks.
- Responsiveness: a fast app response near 57 ms.
Honest risk picture
Harvest Finance is widely known for an October 2020 exploit, in which an attacker used a flash-loan-based price manipulation to drain a large sum from its vaults. It is a well-documented episode and worth knowing before depositing, both as history and as a reminder that yield vaults concentrate risk. Even years on, vaults carry smart-contract risk in Harvest's code and every protocol a strategy uses, and reward tokens or liquidity positions carry their own exposure. The 2020 incident is a useful reminder that yield vaults are attractive targets precisely because they pool large amounts of capital behind automated logic, and that price-oracle manipulation has been a recurring theme in DeFi exploits. A protocol recovering and continuing to operate is not the same as the underlying risk being eliminated. Yields vary and we do not publish them. We found no dedicated public status page in our review, so incident updates would come through the team's own channels.
Who it is for
Harvest Finance may suit experienced DeFi users who want multi-chain auto-farming and who factor its history into their own risk assessment. It is less suited to users who want maximal audit coverage or who are uncomfortable with a protocol that has previously been exploited, however long ago.