Curve Finance: StableSwap, crvUSD, veCRV, and the Curve Wars (2026)

TL;DR

• Curve Finance is the dominant decentralized exchange for like-priced assets — stablecoins, wrapped pairs, and liquid staking tokens — thanks to its StableSwap invariant, which delivers an order of magnitude more capital efficiency than constant-product AMMs for assets near a 1:1 peg.
• The veCRV vote-escrow model invented in 2020 created an ecosystem-wide phenomenon known as the Curve Wars, in which protocols including Convex, Yearn, and Frax Finance compete for voting power to direct CRV emissions to their preferred pools.
• crvUSD, launched in May 2023, introduced the LLAMMA soft-liquidation mechanism — a fundamentally new approach to overcollateralized stablecoin design that gradually rebalances collateral instead of triggering cliff-edge liquidations.
• The July 2023 Vyper compiler reentrancy hack drained roughly USD 73 million but did not break Curve itself; most of the funds were eventually recovered. Curve remains a top-five DeFi protocol by TVL across 50+ chains in 2026.

Table of contents

• What is Curve Finance?
• How Curve Finance works
• The CRV token and veCRV
• The Curve Wars
• crvUSD and LLAMMA
• History and timeline
• Key players
• Curve in 2026 — current state
• Research and reports
• Use cases and examples
• Risks and criticism
• How to LP on Curve
• Comparison table
• FAQ
• Glossary

What is Curve Finance? (definition)

Curve Finance is a decentralized exchange optimized for low-slippage trading between assets that should hold a stable price relationship to one another. Its hallmark is the StableSwap automated market maker, an invariant designed to minimize slippage when assets are near parity (for example USDC and USDT, or ETH and stETH) while still providing protection when one of the pool's assets depegs. Where a Uniswap v2 pool charges meaningful slippage even on small stablecoin trades, a Curve pool can move millions of dollars between USDC, USDT, and DAI for single-digit basis points of impact.

The protocol was launched on January 19 2020 by Michael Egorov under the working name "Curve.fi" and quickly became the deepest stablecoin liquidity venue in DeFi. Today Curve operates on 50+ chains, hosts thousands of pools, and remains a top-five DeFi protocol by total value locked. Its veCRV model has been forked dozens of times across DeFi (and is the spiritual ancestor of Aerodrome's ve(3,3)) and its native stablecoin crvUSD is one of the most innovative dollar-pegged designs of the post-Terra era.

Curve matters because stablecoin liquidity is the foundation of all of DeFi. Almost every lending market, perpetual exchange, derivative protocol, and aggregator depends on the ability to move large amounts of dollars across stablecoin brands at near-zero cost. Curve made that liquidity programmable, composable, and rentable through governance.

How Curve Finance works (technical mechanics)

The StableSwap invariant

The StableSwap bonding curve is the foundational innovation. A traditional Uniswap v2 pool follows the constant-product invariant x * y = k, which produces meaningful slippage for any non-trivial trade. A constant-sum invariant x + y = k provides zero slippage but offers no protection when the assets diverge in price.

Curve's StableSwap blends both. A configurable amplification coefficient A makes the curve behave like constant-sum near parity (deep liquidity, zero slippage) and like constant-product as the pool becomes imbalanced (preventing the last unit of either asset from being drained at parity prices). The result is a single invariant that delivers ~100x more capital efficiency for pegged assets than Uniswap v2 while still protecting LPs from depeg events.

The original StableSwap paper (Egorov, November 2019) is required reading for anyone serious about AMM design.

Tricrypto and crypto pools

For volatile assets — like ETH/BTC/USD — Curve introduced "Tricrypto" pools in 2021. These use a generalized version of StableSwap that includes an internal price oracle to track the relative prices of the three assets and dynamically rebalance liquidity around the current quote. The Tricrypto pool (Tricrypto2 and later Curve NG tricrypto-ng) is one of the more capital-efficient venues for spot ETH-BTC-USD swaps in DeFi.

Curve NG (next-generation pools)

Curve NG, introduced in 2023, is a unified contract architecture that combines StableSwap, Tricrypto, and the new pool factories under a single, more gas-efficient implementation in pure Vyper. NG pools support optional embedded oracles, dynamic fees, and rebalancing logic that earlier Curve pools lacked.

Liquidity gauges and CRV emissions

Each Curve pool has an associated liquidity gauge. LPs deposit their LP tokens into the gauge to earn CRV emissions and the trading fees from their pool. The Curve DAO controls how CRV emissions are distributed across all gauges via a weekly gauge-weight vote — and this is the heart of the Curve Wars.

Fee distribution

Curve charges a small fee on every swap (typically 0.04% on stable pools, 0.4% on crypto pools). 50% of fees go to LPs in the pool itself, and 50% are distributed to veCRV holders weekly as 3CRV (or sometimes crvUSD) — making veCRV one of the few real-yield tokens in DeFi where holders earn protocol revenue rather than dilutive emissions.

The CRV token and veCRV

CRV is the governance and incentive token of Curve. It launched in August 2020 with a 3.03 billion total supply and a long emission curve (~30 years). Daily emissions are distributed to liquidity providers as gauge rewards.

The transformative innovation came at launch: vote-escrow. Users can lock CRV for up to four years and receive veCRV — a non-transferable balance that scales linearly with lock duration. A user locking 100 CRV for four years receives 100 veCRV; the same user locking for one year receives only 25 veCRV. veCRV decays over time as the lock period elapses, so holders must continuously re-lock to maintain voting power.

veCRV grants three rights:

1. A 50% cut of all Curve trading fees — paid weekly in 3CRV stablecoin LP tokens (and increasingly in crvUSD).
2. A boost of up to 2.5x on personal CRV emissions — meaning two LPs depositing the same amount can earn very different CRV yields based on how much veCRV they hold.
3. Voting power on gauge weights — directing how Curve emissions are split across pools.

This last property is what created the Curve Wars.

The Curve Wars

The Curve Wars refer to the multi-year competition among DeFi protocols to accumulate veCRV and direct CRV emissions toward their preferred pools. The economics are simple: deeper Curve liquidity for a stablecoin (or any pegged asset) directly improves the asset's peg quality, reduces slippage for users entering and exiting, and increases the asset's adoption.

So if you are issuing a stablecoin like DAI, FRAX, MIM, GHO, or USDe, every dollar of additional Curve liquidity for your stablecoin is worth a multiple of that in real economic value. As a result, dozens of protocols spent billions of dollars between 2021 and 2025 buying CRV, locking it into veCRV, and bribing other veCRV holders to vote for their pools.

Convex Finance

Convex launched in May 2021 and quickly became the dominant veCRV aggregator. Users deposit CRV into Convex and receive cvxCRV (a liquid wrapper) that earns the underlying veCRV revenue plus boosted CVX emissions. LPs deposit their Curve LP tokens into Convex and earn the maximum 2.5x veCRV boost without locking any CRV themselves. At its peak Convex controlled approximately 50% of all veCRV.

The CVX token has its own vote-escrow mechanism — vlCVX (vote-locked CVX) — which lets CVX holders direct Convex's voting power on Curve gauges. A bribe market called Votium emerged where stablecoin issuers and other protocols paid CVX holders directly for their votes, often delivering 10-50% APR to vlCVX holders simply for voting.

Yearn, Frax, StakeDAO, and the long tail

Yearn Finance, founded by Andre Cronje, built yveCRV and yvBOOST products. Frax Finance accumulated significant veCRV and CVX positions to support FRAX peg liquidity, and ran Convex Frax basepool integrations. StakeDAO and Concentrator built smaller but meaningful veCRV aggregators. Conic Finance attempted to build a meta-LP layer on top of Curve before suffering its own exploit.

Curve Wars in 2026

The Curve Wars have cooled but not ended. With Convex still controlling tens of millions of veCRV and bribe revenue stable at USD 50-100 million annualized, the dynamic remains a live part of the DeFi economy. New entrants — particularly Ethena's USDe — continue to participate. The era of explosive yields is over; the equilibrium is mature.

crvUSD and LLAMMA

In May 2023 Curve launched its native overcollateralized stablecoin: crvUSD. The protocol launched alongside the crvUSD event and introduced an entirely new design pattern called LLAMMA — Lending-Liquidating Automated Market Maker Algorithm.

The LLAMMA mechanism

In a traditional CDP-based stablecoin like DAI, when collateral falls below the liquidation threshold, the position is liquidated all at once: the collateral is auctioned to repay the debt and a liquidation penalty is charged. This produces sharp, gas-heavy events and exposes borrowers to "cliff-edge" liquidations.

LLAMMA replaces this with a continuous AMM. Each crvUSD borrower's collateral is split into many discrete price bands. As the collateral price falls into each band, that slice is gradually swapped into crvUSD at the band price. As the price recovers, the same slice is gradually swapped back. The borrower's position is therefore rebalanced continuously rather than liquidated at a single point. This:

• Eliminates the dramatic liquidation auctions that historically destabilize stablecoin pegs.
• Reduces bad-debt risk by spreading liquidation across many small swaps.
• Gives borrowers a "soft" liquidation zone where they have time to add collateral or repay.
• Shifts some of the volatility cost onto borrowers (who pay an implied funding rate during soft-liquidation), but reduces tail risk.

Collateral types and growth

crvUSD launched with sfrxETH, wstETH, WBTC, WETH, and ETH collateral, then expanded to include sUSDe, sDAI, and other yield-bearing assets. Borrowers earn yield on the underlying collateral while paying a borrow rate set by the PegKeeper mechanism, an algorithmic stabilizer that mints/burns crvUSD into Curve pools to maintain the peg.

By 2026 crvUSD supply has grown to multiple hundreds of millions of dollars and competes alongside DAI, USDS, GHO, and USDe as the leading on-chain decentralized dollar.

History / timeline

• November 2019 — Michael Egorov publishes the StableSwap whitepaper.
• January 19 2020 — Curve.fi launches on Ethereum mainnet with its first pool.
• August 13 2020 — CRV token launches with the veCRV mechanism.
• 2020-2021 — Curve becomes the dominant stablecoin DEX; 3pool (USDT/USDC/DAI) becomes the most liquid stablecoin pool in DeFi.
• May 2021 — Convex Finance launches and rapidly accumulates veCRV.
• 2021 — Tricrypto pools introduce volatile-asset trading on Curve; Curve Wars emerge as Convex, Yearn, and Frax compete for voting power.
• 2022 — Multi-chain expansion accelerates across Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Chain, Base, and dozens more.
• May 2023 — crvUSD launches with LLAMMA on sfrxETH and wstETH collateral.
• July 30 2023 — The Curve Vyper reentrancy hack. USD 73M drained from several pools; most funds recovered through whitehat negotiations and bug bounties. Egorov's personal CRV-collateralized loan positions briefly threaten cascading liquidation, prompting industry-wide efforts to support a coordinated unwind.
• 2024 — Curve NG (next-generation) pool architecture rolled out; crvUSD adds sUSDe collateral; MIM/Curve attack and Nexus Curve claim closed out.
• 2025 — Curve Lending matures; crvUSD listings on lending markets including Aave v3 and Spark increase utility.
• 2026 (Q1) — Curve TVL holds steady in the multi-billion range across 50+ chains; veCRV revenue accrual continues; new gauges launched for tokenized RWAs and LST/LRT pairs.

Key players (entities and research backlinks)

• Michael Egorov — Founder, principal architect of StableSwap, Tricrypto, and crvUSD.
• Curve DAO — Onchain governance entity that controls gauges, fee parameters, and protocol upgrades.
• Convex Finance — Largest veCRV aggregator; CVX/vlCVX created the secondary bribe market that defines the Curve Wars.
• Frax Finance — Built veFXS as a sister vote-escrow system; deeply integrated with Curve via Convex Frax and Frax basepool.
• Yearn Finance — Created yveCRV and yvBOOST; founder Andre Cronje was an early Curve ally.
• MakerDAO / Sky — Long-running stablecoin issuer, deeply integrated as collateral and counterparty.
• Aave — Listed crvUSD as collateral in Aave v3; also issuer of GHO, a peer stablecoin.
• Lido Finance — stETH/ETH is the largest LST pool on Curve.
• Ethena — sUSDe is now a major collateral type for crvUSD.
• Conic Finance — Built a meta-LP product on top of Curve; later suffered an exploit.

Curve in 2026 — current state, market data

As of April 2026:

• Curve TVL: ~USD 1.8-2.5 billion across all chains.
• Daily DEX volume: USD 100-400 million.
• Active chains: 50+ including Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Fantom, Linea, Scroll, zkSync.
• veCRV outstanding: ~700 million CRV locked.
• Average lock duration: ~3.5 years.
• crvUSD circulating supply: several hundred million USD.
• Convex veCRV holdings: still the single largest controller of voting power.
• Weekly fee distribution to veCRV: USD 1-3 million typical.

These figures place Curve consistently in the DeFi top 10 by TVL despite the explosion of newer DEXes including Aerodrome and Uniswap v4.

Research and reports

• BIS Quarterly Review on AMMs (December 2021) provides one of the earliest mainstream-finance analyses of Curve's StableSwap design and its capital-efficiency implications.
• BIS Quarterly Review on DeFi (2021) examines Curve in the broader DeFi context and notes its dominance of stablecoin liquidity.
• Messari's State of DeFi 2024 tracks the evolution of veCRV, the Curve Wars, and crvUSD adoption.
• Delphi Digital DeFi Thesis 2024 frames the veCRV model as the original real-yield governance design.
• Nansen DeFi Report 2024 provides on-chain analytics on the Curve Wars bribe market and Convex's voting power.
• DefiLlama 2024 DeFi Review tracks Curve's market share against Uniswap, Balancer, and Aerodrome.
• Galaxy stablecoin report 2024 examines crvUSD alongside other decentralized dollars.
• IOSCO DeFi final report (2023) discusses governance and operational risks of vote-escrow systems.

Use cases / examples

1. Stablecoin swaps. A user moves USD 5 million from USDC to USDT through 3pool with a few basis points of slippage — orders of magnitude better than Uniswap v2 would offer.
2. LST swaps. A staker exits stETH back to ETH through the stETH/ETH Curve pool with minimal price impact.
3. Liquidity provision with boost. An LP deposits USDC/USDT/DAI into 3pool, stakes the LP token in the gauge, and runs Convex on top to capture the maximum 2.5x boost without locking CRV directly.
4. crvUSD borrowing. A user deposits wstETH, mints crvUSD against it, and uses LLAMMA's soft-liquidation zone to safely lever ETH exposure — earning Lido staking yield while paying a manageable borrow rate.
5. Bribe-market participation. A vlCVX holder votes weekly on Votium for the highest-paying gauge, capturing 10-30% annualized in stablecoin bribes from issuers competing for emissions.

Risks and criticism

• Smart-contract risk is real. The July 2023 Vyper reentrancy drained roughly USD 73 million across alETH/ETH, msETH/ETH, pETH/ETH, and CRV/ETH pools. Although the bug was in Vyper rather than Curve itself, the impact on users was the same. Most of the funds were recovered through whitehats and bug bounties.
• Stablecoin depeg risk. When one asset in a Curve pool depegs, LPs are left holding more of the depegged asset (because the pool fills with the cheap asset as arbitrageurs sell it in). Examples: USDC's brief March 2023 depeg, the UST collapse, the FRAX-3CRV scare.
• Governance and emission-direction risk. A small number of large CVX/CRV holders can theoretically steer emissions in self-interested ways. The bribe market has formalized this dynamic.
• crvUSD liquidation pressure. Although LLAMMA softens liquidations, in extreme volatility a borrower's position can still rebalance into a deep loss. The PegKeeper mechanism can also temporarily struggle to defend the peg in stress.
• Egorov's personal loans. During the July 2023 hack window, founder Egorov held large CRV-collateralized loans across Aave and other lenders that almost cascaded. The episode raised legitimate concerns about founder concentration risk that were never fully resolved.
• Multichain/bridge risk. Curve runs on 50+ chains. Some deployments rely on bridges that introduce additional smart-contract surface area beyond Curve itself.

How to LP on Curve (step-by-step)

1. Visit curve.fi. Always confirm the URL and prefer https://curve.fi (or https://classic.curve.fi for legacy pools).
2. Connect your wallet (MetaMask, Rabby, Frame). For large amounts, prefer a hardware wallet.
3. Pick a pool. For stable yield, use a stablecoin pool (3pool, FRAX/USDC, crvUSD/USDC). For ETH yield, use stETH/ETH or rETH/ETH.
4. Deposit assets. You can deposit one or both pool assets. Single-sided deposit incurs a small slippage cost.
5. Receive LP tokens. These represent your share of the pool.
6. Stake LP tokens in the gauge. This is what earns CRV emissions and makes you eligible for veCRV boost.
7. Optional: Lock CRV for veCRV. Lock for up to four years to receive maximum boost. Or deposit through Convex Finance for the same boost without locking.
8. Claim rewards regularly. Or use a yield aggregator like Yearn or Concentrator to auto-compound.
9. Monitor pool composition. If one stablecoin in your pool starts to depeg, your LP token will increasingly hold the cheap asset. Decide whether to exit early.

Comparison table — Curve vs Uniswap vs Balancer vs Aerodrome

crvUSD vs DAI/USDS/GHO/USDe

FAQ

What is Curve Finance?

Curve Finance is a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum and 50+ other chains optimized for trading like-priced assets — primarily stablecoins, wrapped versions of the same token (such as ETH and stETH), and pegged derivatives. Its signature StableSwap invariant minimizes slippage and impermanent loss for assets that should trade close to 1:1, making Curve the dominant venue for billions of dollars in stablecoin and LST liquidity. The protocol launched in January 2020 and has been one of the largest DeFi protocols by TVL ever since.

Who founded Curve Finance?

Curve was founded by Michael Egorov, a Russian-born physicist with a PhD background and prior roles at LinkedIn and NuCypher. Egorov authored the StableSwap whitepaper in November 2019 and launched the protocol in January 2020. He remains the principal architect of subsequent designs including Tricrypto, the crvUSD stablecoin with its LLAMMA mechanism, and Curve Lending. Egorov is one of the most influential builders in DeFi but has also faced controversy related to large personal CRV-collateralized loans during the 2023 hack.

What is StableSwap?

StableSwap is the bonding-curve invariant invented for Curve in 2019. It blends a constant-sum curve (zero slippage when the pool is balanced) with a constant-product curve (positive slippage protection for extreme imbalance) using an amplification coefficient A. The hybrid design lets liquidity providers offer 100x or more capital efficiency on stable pairs compared with constant-product AMMs such as Uniswap v2. StableSwap is now used or copied by Aerodrome, Velodrome, Saddle, Solidly forks, and many others.

What is the CRV token and what is veCRV?

CRV is the governance and incentive token of Curve. Users can lock CRV for up to four years to receive veCRV (vote-escrowed CRV), a non-transferable balance that scales with lock duration. veCRV holders earn 50% of all trading fees, vote on which pools receive CRV emissions (gauge weights), and get a personal LP boost of up to 2.5x. The veCRV model invented vote-escrow in DeFi and has been forked by Frax, Yearn, Pendle, Balancer, Aerodrome, and many others.

What were the Curve Wars?

The "Curve Wars" describe the multi-year competition among DeFi protocols to accumulate veCRV voting power and direct CRV emissions to their own pools. Convex Finance emerged as the dominant aggregator, controlling roughly 50% of veCRV at peak, while Yearn, Frax, StakeDAO, and others ran smaller boost layers. Stablecoin issuers (Frax, MIM, MakerDAO, USDe) competed to bribe veCRV/vlCVX voters to point emissions toward their pool, since deeper Curve liquidity directly improves a stablecoin's peg quality.

What is crvUSD?

crvUSD is Curve's native overcollateralized stablecoin, launched May 2023. It is minted against blue-chip collateral (sfrxETH, wstETH, WBTC, WETH, sUSDe, and others) using LLAMMA — a novel automatic-market-maker liquidation mechanism that gradually converts collateral into crvUSD as the price falls, rather than triggering an instant liquidation cascade. This "soft liquidation" significantly reduces the risk of bad debt and protects users from sudden cliff-edge liquidations.

What was the 2023 Curve Vyper hack?

On July 30 2023 a reentrancy bug in specific Vyper compiler versions (0.2.15-0.3.0) was exploited against several Curve pools that used the affected raw-call patterns. Roughly USD 73 million was drained, of which the majority was eventually recovered through whitehat negotiations and bug-bounty payouts. The pools affected included alETH/ETH, msETH/ETH, pETH/ETH, and CRV/ETH. Curve itself, the StableSwap math, and the Curve DAO were not at fault — the bug was in Vyper, the compiler.

How does Curve compare to Uniswap and Balancer?

Uniswap v3/v4 use concentrated liquidity that is best for volatile pairs and lets LPs choose price ranges, but they are less capital-efficient for stable assets. Balancer uses weighted pools that allow custom asset ratios (e.g. 80/20). Curve's StableSwap is purpose-built for like-priced assets and is the most efficient DEX in the world for stablecoin and liquid-staking-token swaps. Most protocols use a combination — Uniswap for volatile pairs, Curve for stable and pegged pairs.

How do I provide liquidity on Curve?

Visit curve.fi, connect a wallet, choose a pool (such as 3pool or stETH/ETH), deposit one or both assets, receive LP tokens, then stake those LP tokens in the pool's gauge to earn CRV emissions and a share of trading fees. To boost your CRV rewards up to 2.5x, lock CRV for veCRV. To skip the work of locking and still get most of the boost, deposit through Convex Finance. Yields range from 2-30% APY depending on pool and incentive layer.

What are the main risks of using Curve?

The biggest risks are (1) smart-contract risk — proven by the July 2023 Vyper hack, which, although most of the funds were eventually recovered, showed that obscure compiler bugs can affect even the most-audited protocols; (2) depeg risk on stablecoins inside a pool, which can leave LPs holding the depegged asset; (3) governance and emission-direction risk via the Curve Wars; (4) crvUSD liquidation risk, although the LLAMMA design mitigates the worst of it; and (5) bridge or cross-chain risk for non-Ethereum deployments.

Glossary

• StableSwap — Curve's hybrid invariant that combines constant-sum and constant-product behavior to minimize slippage on like-priced assets.
• Amplification coefficient (A) — The parameter that determines how aggressively a StableSwap pool behaves like constant-sum; high A = deeper near-parity liquidity.
• Tricrypto — Curve's three-asset volatile pool (typically USDT/WBTC/WETH) using a generalized StableSwap with internal oracle.
• Curve NG — The next-generation pool architecture introduced in 2023 with optimized Vyper code, embedded oracles, and dynamic fees.
• CRV — Curve's governance and incentive token.
• veCRV — Vote-escrowed CRV; non-transferable balance earned by locking CRV up to four years.
• Gauge — The contract that distributes CRV emissions to a specific pool.
• Gauge weight vote — Weekly veCRV vote that allocates emission share across all gauges.
• Convex / CVX / vlCVX — The dominant veCRV aggregator and its own vote-locked governance token.
• Curve Wars — The competition among protocols to accumulate veCRV/vlCVX and direct emissions to their pools.
• Bribes — Payments by protocols (typically through Votium) to veCRV/vlCVX holders to vote for the protocol's gauge.
• crvUSD — Curve's native overcollateralized stablecoin launched May 2023.
• LLAMMA — Lending-Liquidating Automated Market Maker Algorithm, the soft-liquidation mechanism powering crvUSD.
• PegKeeper — Algorithmic mint/burn mechanism that defends crvUSD's peg by injecting/removing supply into Curve pools.

Related reading (internal links)

• What is DeFi? The 2026 Guide
• Stablecoins Explained (2026)
• What is Ethereum? The 2026 Guide
• Ethereum Layer 2 Networks (2026)
• Hyperliquid Explained (2026)
• Pendle Finance Explained (2026)

Related comparisons

• Compare: Uniswap vs Curve
• Compare: Curve vs Uniswap v2
• Compare: Uniswap v3 vs Curve
• Compare: Curve vs Uniswap v4
• Compare: Curve vs Balancer
• Compare: Curve vs Raydium

Sources and further reading

• Curve official site — https://curve.fi
• Curve docs — https://docs.curve.fi
• crvUSD docs — https://crvusd.curve.fi
• Curve forum / governance — https://forum.curve.fi
• Convex Finance — https://www.convexfinance.com
• StableSwap whitepaper — https://classic.curve.fi/files/stableswap-paper.pdf
• Crypto pools whitepaper (Tricrypto) — https://classic.curve.fi/files/crypto-pools-paper.pdf
• DefiLlama — Curve protocol page — https://defillama.com/protocol/curve-dex
• Aave research portal — https://research.aave.com/
• Frax docs — https://docs.frax.finance
• MakerDAO — https://makerdao.com
• Sky (formerly Sky/Maker) — https://sky.money
• BIS Quarterly Review on AMMs (December 2021) — https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt2112v.htm
• IOSCO DeFi final report (2023) — https://www.iosco.org/library/pubdocs/pdf/IOSCOPD754.pdf
• Galaxy Digital research — https://www.galaxy.com/research/

About the author

DeFi Intel Research is a crypto-native research desk publishing institutional-grade DeFi and on-chain market analysis. The team has provided liquidity on Curve since 2020 and operates active veCRV and vlCVX positions. We have positions in CRV, CVX, and crvUSD; nothing in this article is financial advice. See /about for full author bios and disclosures.

Last updated: 2026-04-26