Curve DAO Token(CRV)

Curve DAO Token (CRV) is the native token of Curve Finance, a decentralized exchange for trading cryptocurrencies — particularly stablecoins — at low slippage and without the involvement of any intermediary. 

At its core, Curve Finance is a liquidity pool on Ethereum that aims to facilitate highly-efficient decentralized trading and offers yield to its liquidity providers. The platform also supplies liquidity to Yearn.Finance and Compound protocols and passes on the revenue to its liquidity providers. This is made possible by Curve Finance’s AMM (Automated Market Maker) system. As a result, Curve Finance has rapidly emerged as one of the largest Defi platforms in the space in terms of TVL or Total Value Locked.

While Curve Finance was launched in February 2020 by a Russian software engineer named Michael Egorov, Curve DAO, the platform’s decentralized autonomous organization which overlooks its governance, came into being a few months later, in August 2020. The platform has thrived on the DeFi trading boom, with its AMM system delivering large volumes of liquidity and resultantly noteworthy user profits.

CRV price

The CRV token’s price instantly shot up to an all-time high of $60.50 after the Curve DAO launch in August 2020. However, it soon retraced to under $2 within a month and further plummeted to $0.33 by the end of November. CRV price, consequently, closed the year 2020 at a value of around $0.6. 

Boosted by a market-wide positive sentiment, CRV price sprung back to life by mid-January 2021 and rallied on to break out of the $4 resistance by mid-April 2021. A corrective phase followed amidst larger market sell-offs, and bears were back in business. The CRV coin almost lost support at $1 on May 23, 2021. 

The next upward trend in CRV price came during 2021’s second crypto bull run in November/December, which catapulted Curve price to $6.8 on Jan. 4, 2022. Its price has since receded and was again testing the $1 support in Q2 2022.

How CRV works

CRV, the native token of Curve DAO, is used for governance of the Curve Finance platform. The token holders get to vote on DAO proposals and thus participate in important decisions that impact the Curve platform’s workings.

Curve DAO is built atop Aragon, an Ethereum-based tool/platform that aids the creation of efficient decentralized autonomous organizations. It uses Aragon’s functionalities to connect various smart contracts deployed for users providing liquidity. 

CRV tokens have three primary uses – staking, voting and boosting. To get involved in these three functions, you’ll need to lock your CRV tokens and obtain veCRV in return. veCRV is short for vote-escrowed CRV, a reflection of locked-up CRV for a certain time period. Below are the conversion details, sourced from their website:

1 CRV locked for 4 years = 1 veCRV

1 CRV locked for 3 years = 0.75 veCRV

1 CRV locked for 2 years = 0.5 veCRV

1 CRV locked for 1 year   = 0.25 veCRV

Hence, the more the number of CRV tokens you stake for a longer time period, the more voting power you receive. All CRV holders who stake/lock their tokens also receive fees generated by the various liquidity pools running on Curve Finance. In addition, they also earn a boost of up to 2.5x on the rewards generated by their liquidity.

CRV news, updates and highlights

The year 2021 saw the beginning of a phenomenon called the ‘Curve Wars’ which continued well into 2022 as well. The Curve war is essentially a race between different protocols doing everything possible within their means to make sure that their preferred pools on Curve Finance are delivering the highest CRV rewards to users. This considerably increased the buying pressure for CRV, since the token is needed to obtain voting rights. Yearn Finance, Convex Finance and StakeDAOHQ are some of the biggest names engaged in these Curve wars. A point came in November 2021 when Curve had to invoke the Curve Emergency DAO and halt reward emissions to a certain pool, deeming a protocol’s behavior as a clear governance attack.

In another significant CRV news, in May 2022, Curve Finance integrated Aurora, an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) layer built on the Near protocol. The integration allows Curve users to connect to the Aurora network through their Ethereum wallets, and access the decentralized application’s deep liquidity pools, without having to wait or pay high gas fees.

Frequently asked questions about CRV

• Can you mine or stake CRV?

No, you cannot mine CRV. However, CRV coins can be staked to earn a percentage of the trading fees collected on the Curve Finance platform, as staking rewards.

• What are some of the best CRV wallets?

CRV being an ERC-20 token can be stored in any crypto wallet compatible with Ethereum tokens. Some of these include Metamask, Ledger Nano X, Guarda Wallet and Atomic Wallet.

• What can you do with CRV coins?

You can use your CRV tokens to earn staking rewards, vote on various Curve DAO proposals and get a boost on your liquidity rewards. You may also lend your CRV tokens to earn yield through various DeFi products.

• How to buy CRV?

It is best to buy CRV from a well-known crypto exchange. You’ll normally find it paired with various popular crypto coins including ETH, BTC, USDT and XRP.