Yield farm
A yield farm is a type of DeFi protocol that offers users interest in return for staking their cryptocurrency in pools or farms.
Yield is generally provided in the form of additional tokens of the same type as that deposited (on lending and borrowing protocols) or more frequently in the form of the native protocol reward token.
Technically any protocol can be considered a yield farm, provided they allow earning an interest on deposits.
History
Yield farming became popular with the Compound token (COMP) launch in June 2020. COMP was distributed to users in return for supplying capital for other users to lend.[1] Compound's total value locked increased from $97.7 million to $484 million within the first two weeks of the yield farming launch, and as of April 2022 it is $6.11b.[2]