Pickle Finance
Engineering for one of DeFi's longest-running yield aggregators
Table of Contents
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.
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
- Docs: docs.pickle.finance