DeFi boom as well as limited total supply (No pre-mining and supply increases as yield farmers providing liquidity by staking and lending their tokens) contribute to the supply/demand imbalance of YFI governance token, leading to the rapid appreciation.
First of all, it has a comparatively minuscule total supply limited to just 30,000 coins. Second, over 60% of them are currently locked in various staking pools, according to data scientist Alex Svavenik.
Andre Cronje, software engineer who built yearn.finance and created YFI governance token, intended for YFI to be a valueless 0 supply token. "We reiterate, it has 0 financial value” as he wrote in his blog.
However, that didn't stop yield farmer from pumping YFI to the outer stratosphere as it jumped 270% in 5 Days.
Treat it as a speculative coin and short-term swing trade it (No need to hold it for more than a week) on the 1hr time frame.