All terms
Doing whatever a protocol rewards, specifically to earn the reward.
Farming is optimizing for an incentive: providing liquidity for emissions, transacting for points, or using a protocol repeatedly to qualify for an expected airdrop. Airdrop farming is the most common form.
The economics are frequently worse than they look. Gas, spreads, impermanent loss and the capital tied up are real costs paid now against an uncertain reward later, and a farmed airdrop that arrives is often worth less than what it cost to earn.
Protocols increasingly filter farmers out deliberately, because a user who arrives for a reward and leaves when it ends is not the user they were paying for.
Running dozens of wallets through a testnet for a year, then finding the eligibility rules exclude exactly that pattern.
Where to go next
More defi terms
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