The DeFi boom of 2020 is real and is showing no signs of slowing down. Over the past couple of years, the DeFi ecosystem has evolved significantly with the foray of new market participants which are continuously building new infrastructure.
The new kid in the block is a decentralized Ethereum liquidity exchange pool called Curve Finance. According to DeFi Pulse, the protocol is getting closer to a $1 billion mark in total locked value [USD]. As the upward movement continued, a TVL of $922.7 million was recorded.
The figures first shot up on 14th August from a mere $254.5 million, surging by an astonishing 262.5% in a period of two days. With this, Bitcoin locked in Curve Finance’s exploded to 11.637.
This comes after popular cryptocurrency exchanges such as OKEx, Huobi, and Binance announced support for its native token, CRV.
This token is used for the purpose of voting in platform governance. In addition, CRV is also used as a reward for liquidity providers. In addition, a portion of the trading fees collected is used to conduct constant token burns.
Unexpected deployment fuels Curve adoption
Initially developed as a viable alternative to trading stablecoins on general-purpose DEXes, Curve is a well-known name in the space and hence, the anticipation surrounding the launch was also quite high.
It was the unfolding of an interesting turn of events that multiplied the hype. This involved an anonymous DeFi user who deployed the Curve token and contracts on the Ethereum mainnet well before the team’s official announcement. The user, with a relatively new Twitter account, revealed,
“Yo, @CurveFinance! Saw your DAO is ready to rock and I gots to MAXIMIZE MY ALPHA ! So I went ahead and deployed it for you. Get at me in DM to verify and lets get this party started!!”
While the Curve team had no prior knowledge about the contract deployment, hours after the above Twitter post, however, the officials of the DeFi platform verified the deployment process and confirmed the legitimacy. This subsequently forced Curve Finance to launch its decentralized autonomous organization or DAO and governance token CRV.
In an official statement, the Curve team announced,
“Someone deployed $CRV based on smart contracts we had published on github, front-running our efforts. While we initially were skeptical, it appeared to be an acceptable deployment with correct code, data, and admin keys. Due to the token/DAO getting traction, we had to adopt it.”
The Curve team further added that the deployment had correct code, data, and admin keys and also went on to add that the community member who deployed it relinquished any admin power.
Pre-mining accusations
Curve Finance is touted as one of the most prominent platforms in the space. But speculations regarding users’ pre-mining CRV token surfaced in the DeFi community. This was due to the fact that contracts were already deployed by the anonymous user unexpectedly. Soon after which some DeFi users started staking yCRV, tokens that represent shares of Curve’s liquidity pools, in a bid to earn CRV tokens even before the team could verify that the contracts had been properly deployed.