Get ready for a curveball. Curve bounties, data and more are coming to Flipside Crypto. Get ready with this deep dive into Curve protocol.
Hope you’re ready for a curveball — community-enabled analytics on Curve protocol are coming to Flipside Crypto. That means labeled, on-chain data, bounties and more, all focused on the popular protocol.
Let’s take a closer look.
What Is Curve? ↩️
As we mentioned above, Curve is an automated market maker and decentralized exchange on the Ethereum network. It first made its debut in early 2020, and quickly garnered attention for its high total volumes and deposits.
Curve is a non-custodial exchange that enables users to swap between various stablecoins — hence its reputation as a “Uniswap for stablecoins.” It’s known for low fees and low slippage, designed to make it easier for users to execute trades.
Curve sets itself apart from other exchanges by using liquidity pools to execute these trades, rather than matching buyers and sellers directly. Liquidity providers are rewarded for providing liquidity to these pools, often with rather high APRs. However, these APRs, while higher than rates provided by other DeFi pools, can be quite volatile, leading to lower-than-expected returns.
LPs also get rewarded for their deposits in various other ways. They can receive deposit bonuses, for example, if they deposit coins with low balances into specific pools, for example, or participate in incentivized pools. These feature additional rewards for LPs on top of the usual trading and lending fees.
What Is CRV? 🪙
The CVR token, also known simply as CRV, is the native currency for the Curve protocol. It's also the governance token for the CurveDAO.
It’s primarily used to reward the liquidity providers that help make the protocol’s low-fee swaps possible. As of November of last year, each trade on the platform features a .04% fee that is used to fund those rewards. That rate declines annually, however. Deposits and withdrawals, meanwhile, incur fees of between 0% and.02% depending on their previous balance.
CRV Price History 📈📉
That’s a significant decrease from its all-time high, which saw the token trade at nearly $7 in September of 2020. The price of CRV declined quickly following that high, trading at less than $1 for most of Q4 2020 before beginning to rise in early 2021.
In recent weeks, the token has recovered from a fall to roughly $1.33 on May 22 to its current price of $2.37.