# Pickle Finance

*Engineering for one of DeFi's longest-running yield aggregators*

**Authors:** [Vadim Zolotokrylin](https://holdex.io/c/people/vadim-zolotokrylin)

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[Pickle Finance](https://www.pickle.finance/) launched in September 2020
as one of DeFi's earliest yield aggregators,
with Vitalik Buterin acknowledging the project within days of launch.
The pseudonymous founding team
(Larry the Cucumber, BigBrainBriner, 0xPenguin, and Rick)
built it on Ethereum, suffered a $19.7M exploit two months in,
and rebuilt afterward as part of the Yearn ecosystem alliance.
By 2024 the protocol was running PickleJars across Polygon, Arbitrum,
and OKExChain with quadratic governance via vote-locked DILL.

At its core, Pickle automates compounding yields from multiple DeFi protocols.
It combines farming incentives, vaults,
and governance to bring stablecoins closer to their pegs.
The pVaults (Pickle Vaults) run active strategies,
including leveraged flash loans that short off-peg stablecoins,
to generate returns for vault owners and the protocol.
Governance sits with PICKLE token holders,
who create and vote on proposals for changes to the protocol.

Our role at Pickle is product engineering.
The work happened inside the post-2020 multi-chain expansion phase rather than
at the founding.

## What we shipped

Holdex came in once Pickle had stabilised after the exploit
and was scaling out across new networks,
with engineering capacity needed for the strategy ports
and the multichain harness.

## The story

Pickle's post-exploit rebuild and Yearn-aligned expansion created the setting
for Holdex's engagement.
The work belonged to the practical part of DeFi engineering: strategy ports,
multichain support, and the application surface around a protocol
that had already survived its hardest early test.

## Links

- Site: [pickle.finance](https://www.pickle.finance/)
- Docs: [docs.pickle.finance](https://docs.pickle.finance/)
- Twitter: [@picklefinance](https://twitter.com/picklefinance)
- CoinGecko: [pickle-finance](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/pickle-finance)
- CoinMarketCap:
  [pickle-finance](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pickle-finance/)