YFI's main utility is that of a governance token, giving voting rights to YFI holders over governance proposals. A further breakdown of the governance rights is the following:
Submission and voting on Yearn Improvement Proposals (YIPs), which govern the protocol and define changes to its tokenomics
Voting on how to allocate fees that are collected by Yearn Finance on yVaults through different veYFI gauge weights. The gauge weights essentially determine yield distributions
Voting to authorize treasury spending and YFI buybacks via the BABY program
Setting of yVaults parameters, such as minimum deposit thresholds

In addition to governance, YFI is also used to earn boosted rewards via its locking in veYFI. It is important to specify that both governance power and yield rewards are proportional to veYFI lock size and duration.

Governance
- YFI token holders: general users want to hold YFI due to the governance rights that are associated with the token, through its locking mechanism into veYFI. As longer and bigger veYFI locks give more governance power, demand for YFI is expected to increase. Since proposals can change financial parameters such as reward structures and fees distribution, users would ultimately want to acquire and hold the token to participate in governance and capture value from protocol earnings.

Yield Maximization:
- users that have deposited in yVaults want to maximize their yields on deposits by acquiring more YFI to lock in veYFI for boosted gauge rewards.

The yVaults are effectively Yearn’s primary value creation product, allowing users to earn optimized yield simply by depositing their assets in the protocol.

Value is captured by the protocol via the collection of fees, which are Yearn’s primary revenue source. These fees contribute to Yearn’s treasury growth and are reinvested in work being done by core contributors to improve the protocol.

Value accrual to protocol:
Value is captured by the protocol via the collection of fees, which are Yearn’s primary revenue source. These fees contribute to Yearn’s treasury growth and are reinvested in work being done by core contributors to improve the protocol.

Value accrual to Token
Value is also accrued to the token, in terms of price increase, via the BABY program, which effectively buys $YFI on open market. These buys create positive buy pressure from the protocol itself, sustaining $YFI price.

Yearn Finance business model is centered around charging fees.

Revenue comes from: 
- Management fee, which is paid for utilizing the services offered by Yearn finance, which are maintained by the protocol and its community
- Performance fees, which is a fee that gets dedicated from the profit obtained via yield strategies that the users invest in

Revenue is denominated in:
The revenue accrued by the protocol as fees from yVaults is denominated in the underlying asset being deposited in the vault, such as ETH, USDC, DAI etc.

Revenue goes to:
The fees being collected are then primarily directed to Yearn’s treasury, which employs it for various uses. The most important of these uses, after the passing of YPI-56, is to employ a portion of these fees to buy back YFI tokens through the BABY program. The remaining treasury funds are used for development costs, operating expenses and for retaining a liquidity buffer that is required to navigate periods of market uncertainty.