Swerve was launched by a pseudonymous developer known as "John Deere" who started it as a passion project outside of his full-time job. When asked about his personal background in an "ask me anything" session, he stated that he is "just a lowly farmer" who likes "sane token distributions." He has also said that he has experience in software development and crypto.

Although he started it by himself, John Deere has given credit to the community for assisting in its design and implementation. He has said that while he is guiding the project during its initial growth, he hopes to pass on its development to the community.

In October 2020, Swerve governance voted to hire community member "FairlyRarePepe" as an additional developer.

Swerve was launched as a community-focused alternative to Curve. Swerve's founder has been very critical of Curve, saying that the platform is not fairly governed and that its founder has too much power. Swerve's founder has said that it offers better swap pricing and larger annual percentage yields on stablecoins than other platforms.

Swerve also uses a reward gaming mechanism called "Boost" through which liquidity providers that lock up SWRV can receive a higher APY than those that don't boost. The rate at which one's APY is boosted is determined by a calculation that incorporates the number of tokens locked by the user and the total amount locked, among other factors.

Trading on the platform is subject to a 0.03% fee, of which 50% is awarded to liquidity providers and 50% is taken as an administrative fee and sent to the Swerve treasury, which is capped at $200,000. In October 2020, its governance voted to accept a grant to further build on decentralized finance platform Serum (SRM).

In October 2020, founder John Deer stated that his priorities for the project were to increase the platform's volume and better incentivize the holding of SWRV.

Swerve has a total token supply of 33 million. All minted SWRV is awarded to liquidity providers, with the development team stating that there was no premine and no tokens allocated to the developers.

Nine million SWRV was distributed during the first two weeks, and another 9 million SWRV will be distributed over the first year. Starting at year two, 3 million SWRV will be distributed per year until all 33 million tokens have been minted by the end of year six.

SWRV is an ERC-20 token issued on the Ethereum blockchain, which means that SWRV transactions are validated by the Ethereum network. Ethereum uses a proof-of-work consensus algorithm in which miners compete among each other to add new blocks to the blockchain and a majority of all nodes in the network must confirm a record for it to be posted.

Swerve's treasury is controlled by a small group of multisignature key holders who were selected by a governance vote. Three community members and four external representatives hold the treasury keys.

The Swerve protocol's smart contracts were audited by Cryptic Labs and Peckshield, both of which found no critical security flaws. However, in October 2020, Swerve announced that it had been alerted to a security vulnerability in the smart contracts that power the platform, stating that it was working on a fix.

SWRV can be purchased on cryptocurrency exchanges such as OKEx, Huobi Global, Binance and MXC.COM, among others. It can be traded against the U.S. dollar, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), and stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and Binance USD (BUSD).

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