Ahead of the Curve - August '24

Curve -

After a short [two year] hiatus, the official Curve news site is back! In this issue we recap all of July 2024's major Curve updates! Already feels like ancient history with August looking to be... interesting.

crvUSD

July became an historic month for $crvUSD, marking the first month Curve fully used $crvUSD as the veCRV reward token instead of 3CRV.

Following a successful governance vote, the $crvUSD feeless FlashLender contract is now live.

Users may now take out flash loans for $crvUSD. More information on the process is available in the documentation.

The Llama Risk team has released several useful resources related to $crvUSD, including a chain-agnostic agent-based simulation market in collaboration with Xenophon Labs and a regulatory brief on Peg Keeper coins based on a Bank of International Settlements document reviewing global stablecoin policies.

Despite a volatile month in the markets, the LLAMMA liquidations protections appear strong, per the Chaos Labs risk dashboard:

Llama Lend

Sorting has arrived on Llama Lend. More than just sorting, the major UI update also compacts the interface to better show off all the active markets.

Ethereum Llama Lend Markets as of July 2024

This condensed display is useful, as so many interesting markets have been deployed on Llama Lend. One such notable market involves the very first market using a Curve LP tokens, this time in the form of a Usual Money pool that earns points instead of $CRV.

A variety of yield-bearing stablecoin pools have also been added, notably offering up to 53x leveraged trading.

Which is not to neglect the several launches on Arbitrum

Including $asdCRV!

To learn more about how to interact with Llama Lend programmatically to launch markets and perform liquidations, refer to the Curve Titanoboa Llama Lend tutorial

DEX

Despite the hefty attention on $crvUSD, Curve's DEX continues to thrive:

Curve top TVL DEX markets on Ethereum

The DEX landscape continues to evolve with crypto trends. Nowadays, pools are less likely to be incentivized with $CRV emissions, and more frequently by native trading yields or points.

The points narrative has been strong enough to work its way into the Curve UI. Observe some notable recent pools promoting points:

NG pools boast major advances in technology, which have underpinned several recent trends including pool efficiency leading to elevated native APYs. Here is a look under the hood at some of the power of NG pools for redemption rates:

Other News

A major story for the month of July is the flurry of locking.

The locking frenzy was covered in an article by OurNetwork that reviews updates of major lockers Convex and Stake DAO

ON-256: DeFi Yields 🔼
Coverage on Convex, Stake DAO, Tranchess, Pendle and Aura
OurNetwork

Lock rates are not the only "up only" chart around Curve lately. Raw transactions are looking good...

The most exciting hockey stick line is surely the Curve Github repository

The Curve Github repo is always best place to catch all the latest updates on Curve. One fun recent update is a means to open fee collection to the public.

Another major dev update is Curve's deployment to Mantle, the 16th officially supported chain:

Adjacent to Curve, the community led development of CRVHub has added a great new resource for Curve, which now adds onchain commenting on proposals.

Talks

The Curve team mostly talks through code, but occasionally turns to words.

Martin Krung spoke at ETH CC

And Curve Founder Michael Egorov has been particularly busy, doing a fireside chat at Stable Summit.

To celebrate $CRV being listed on HashKey, he also participated in a great space on 𝕏

Until his next time talking, you can get his hottest takes directly on Telegram

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