The Pickle project entered a strategic partnership with Yearn. A challenge now is to design a UI to support the structure of the partnership, and translate some complicated value mechanisms into concepts understandable by the user.

Here’s an outline:

• Yearn is a place where you can deposit assets, to earn yield.
• When you deposit into a Yearn vault, you receive a receipt called a yToken. So if you deposit into the BTC vault, you get a yBTC token in return. If you deposit DAI, you get yDAI.
• Pickle originally created their own vaults, issuing pTokens as receipts. Unlike Yearn, Pickle went one step further, allowing you to deposit your pTokens into Pickle “Farms”, to earn newly minted PICKLE tokens, which you could “harvest” any time you like.
• So if Pickle had a BTC vault, they would also have a BTC farm. If they had a DAI vault, they’d also have a DAI farm.
• The total yield a Pickle customer received was then the sum of the vault yield and the Farm yield.
• How much PICKLE emissions would be directed to each Farm was up to the Pickle holders through voting. (Maybe you’d want to promote the BTC vault more than DAI?)
• The newly minted PICKLE awarded to Farm depositors came from Pickle emissions.
• Yearn was unable to do that, because YFI doesn’t have any emissions. 30,000 YFI tokens were emitted at the beginning of the project, and capped at that number.
• Pickle recently suffered an exploit, where someone drained one of its vaults of $20M in DAI.
• In response to that, and as part of Pickle figuring out how to rebuild, Yearn proposed a partnership in which Pickle migrate its vaults to be Yearn vaults (benefiting from the Yearn security infrastructure, peer review, etc.)
• In return, the yTokens from both Pickle-created Yearn vaults, and Yearn-created Yearn vaults, would all get Pickle Farms where they can earn additional yield through newly emitted PICKLE.
• Yearn also proposed that Pickle implement a confusing but useful concept invented by the Curve project. I’ll use different terminology to describe it.
• Holders of the PICKLE token can lock them in a Pickle Jar, for periods of time ranging from one week to four years. Once you lock them, you have “Jarred Pickles”.
• Jarred Pickles bring you some benefits:
  • Pickle-created Yearn vaults keep 10% of the profits earned for their depositors, and a portion of this revenue flows to Jarred Pickles.
  • Pickle Farms charge their depositors a management fee and a portion of this flow to Jarred Pickles
  • If you are both a Pickle holder, and a customer of the Pickle Farm, you can “boost” your Farm APR up to 250%, depending on how many Pickles you Jar (relative to how much you have deposited in a Farm), and for how long you lock them. (A calculator would be needed to let you play around with Jarred Pickle amount vs lock time.)
  • Jarred Pickle get to participate in Pickle Governance, i.e. any major decisions taken in the project, including how much Pickle emissions to allocate to each Farm, are subject to vote.

Strategically, the hope is that the buying pressure from people wishing to buy and “Jar” Pickles, outweighs the sell pressure from Farm customers who choose to convert their earned Pickle to dollars or something else.

Here’s something complicated — After you Jar some Pickles, say for four years, your “boost” will decay over time, as you get closer to the end of your term. You can preserve your boost by (a) re-extending the duration of your term at any time (doesn’t require more Pickles, just updating the end-date of your lock) OR (b) by NOT harvesting any of your earned Pickles.

Those two boost-maintaining mechanisms are in place at Curve. It hasn’t been decided if some equivalent will be implemented in Pickle, but we can assume it will.

So we need to create a UI that:

• Communicates how all this works.
• Encourages the depositing of yTokens into Pickle Farms.
• Encourages the purchase of, and Jarring of Pickles.
• Provides smooth workflows for interacting with all the elements (the Farms, the Pickle Jar, etc.)
• Gives customers the information they need to monitor their engagement with the product, (balances, USD values, current Farm boost if applicable, etc)