Cream Finance, also known as C.R.E.A.M., is a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol that aims to provide financial services to individuals, institutions, and other protocols. It is a part of the yearn.finance ecosystem and operates as a permissionless, open-source, and blockchain-agnostic protocol. Cream Finance is accessible to users on various networks including Ethereum, a major smart chain, Polygon, and Fantom. The protocol allows users to deposit assets such as Ether or wBTC to receive compensation, akin to a traditional savings account. The CREAM token, integral to the protocol, enables users to lend, borrow, stake assets, and participate in the governance of the network.

Cream Finance operates by providing liquidity to crucial DeFi assets through automated market making (AMM). This allows users to borrow and lend supported assets and receive liquidity mining compensation in the form of its CREAM token by supplying any supported asset as collateral. The platform collects swap, lending, and borrowing fees from users in return. As an ERC20 token on the Ethereum network, CREAM can run Ethereum Virtual Machines through smart contracts, enabling users to create Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for its community. This results in better composability, i.e., the ability to plug different financial services into each other.

Cream Finance seeks to serve a variety of use cases in the DeFi sector. It aims to list and support tokens that are important to the DeFi sector, including major stablecoins (USDT, USDC, BUSD, yCRV, etc), governance tokens (COMP, BAL, YFI, LEND, CRV, CREAM etc.), and other leading cryptocurrencies such as ETH, renBTC, and LINK. Users can stake CREAM tokens for a period of up to four years to receive compensation. However, it's important to note that compensation is only given at the end of the staking period.

Cream Finance was launched unexpectedly on the Ethereum network on August 3, 2020, through the YOLO liquidity pool. In September 2020, it became operational on a major smart chain. The protocol was created as a fork of Compound Finance. The project, whose name stands for Crypto Runs Everything Around Me, was initiated by Taiwanese entrepreneur Jeffrey Huang. Huang, who also founded Mithril (MITH), a platform based on the Ethereum network, labeled himself as the “semi-benevolent dictator of CREAM” upon launch. The CREAM token has a total supply of 9 million coins, with around 150,000 currently in circulation. This number will increase as more tokens are released monthly to stakeholders and those who process transactions.