Anecdote of the CRV launch: In the summer of 2020, the Curve team had published their smart contract code on GitHub for open-source auditing but had not yet announced an official launch date. On August 13, 2020, an anonymous user known as @0xc4ad announced on Twitter that he had deployed the CRV smart contracts himself, paying approximately $8,000 in gas fees. The team had little choice but to accept the situation, reacting with the now-legendary phrase: “Weird flex, but ok.”
Inflation and liquidity mining: New CRV is minted and distributed to Liquidity Providers (LPs). Users deposit assets into pools to get LP tokens, then stake these in "Gauges" to earn CRV. This creates a cycle: users stake liquidity to mint CRV (inflation), then lock CRV to control governance (contraction).
veCRV is a time-weighted representation of locked CRV. Its quantity depends on both the amount locked and the remaining lock duration. veCRV decays linearly toward zero as the lock expiration approaches:
The "Curve Wars": This market phenomenon, initiated in mid-2021, refers to the competition among third-party protocols to accumulate veCRV and control the allocation of future CRV inflation.
Protocol versions:
The Vyper hack and liquidity crisis: In July 2023, a vulnerability in the Vyper programming language led to a hack of around $50M across specific Curve pools. The resulting price crash threatened to liquidate founder Michael Egorov’s $100M+ debt on lending protocols like Aave, risking a systemic collapse. To prevent this, Egorov executed strategic OTC sales, raising the capital needed to repay debts without dumping tokens on the public market.
Anecdote of the CRV launch: In the summer of 2020, the Curve team had published their smart contract code on GitHub for open-source auditing but had not yet announced an official launch date. On August 13, 2020, an anonymous user known as @0xc4ad announced on Twitter that he had deployed the CRV smart contracts himself, paying approximately $8,000 in gas fees. The team had little choice but to accept the situation, reacting with the now-legendary phrase: “Weird flex, but ok.”
Inflation and liquidity mining: New CRV is minted and distributed to Liquidity Providers (LPs). Users deposit assets into pools to get LP tokens, then stake these in "Gauges" to earn CRV. This creates a cycle: users stake liquidity to mint CRV (inflation), then lock CRV to control governance (contraction).
veCRV is a time-weighted representation of locked CRV. Its quantity depends on both the amount locked and the remaining lock duration. veCRV decays linearly toward zero as the lock expiration approaches:
The "Curve Wars": This market phenomenon, initiated in mid-2021, refers to the competition among third-party protocols to accumulate veCRV and control the allocation of future CRV inflation.
Protocol versions:
The Vyper hack and liquidity crisis: In July 2023, a vulnerability in the Vyper programming language led to a hack of around $50M across specific Curve pools. The resulting price crash threatened to liquidate founder Michael Egorov’s $100M+ debt on lending protocols like Aave, risking a systemic collapse. To prevent this, Egorov executed strategic OTC sales, raising the capital needed to repay debts without dumping tokens on the public market.
