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Ahead of the Curve - September '24

Curve

• 7 min read
Ahead of the Curve - September '24

In the 300 year arc of Curve, August 2024 will most likely be known for the major Curve emissions reduction:

$CRV Halves
Curve’s $CRV token officially celebrated its fourth birthday with its most notable emissions reduction to date. The emissions reduction was officially triggered at Aug-12-2024 10:21:59 PM UTC The famous tx reducing $CRV issuance for the next year. https://t.co/Aspm0ROkJE — Saint (Llama) Rat (@saint_rat) August
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Between the inflation cuts and revenue increases, Curve is turning "profitable" (depending on how you map traditional financial accounting methods into the web3 world).

At times this even led to periods where incentives could provide a nearly 2x efficiency bonus!

Lending

As happens so often in cryptocurrency, markets in August were volatile. However, borrowers in crvUSD and Llama Lend were comfy. While markets dumped, soft liquidation automatically converted their positions into crvUSD. Whenever prices reversed, these positions were automatically de-liquidated on the way up.

With many users unfamiliar with the novel mechanics of LLAMMA, the volatile markets provided such borrowers with a crash course in best practices, like keeping an eye on health instead of liquidation prices.

Traders don't necessarily need to understand the underlying mechanics of the Peg Keeper, but under the hood these special contracts have unique powers to mint $crvUSD and trade these into their affiliated pools to keep the stablecoin on peg.

This month we saw more data on Peg Keepers added to the UI, including the ability for users to help claim profits (and get a portion for the help!)

If you are studying Curve lending markets, traders will surely want to study advanced tactics like leverage trading.

For very advanced users, look into performing your own liquidations using Flash loans.

The Llama Lend Titanoboa tutorial series has everything you need to get up and running to interact with Llama Lend markets using Python/Vyper.

Pools

A developing narrative lately has been the rise of high base APY pools.

StableSwap-NG pools have a dynamic fee structure, in which a larger fee is charged when the pool is imbalanced. This serve as a tax on arbitrageurs, whose rebalancing trades will be profitable regardless of fees.

The end result has been several pools enjoying notably high APYs, often times in excess of rewards.

TriCrypto pools also performed well in periods of volatility.

All Curve pools also enjoy 24/7 uptime even in the most extreme conditions, as they do not rely on concentrated liquidity.

With the $crvUSD peg tighter than ever, it's been a good opportunity for yield farmers looking for dollarcoin yield.

Bitcoin pools have also made a comeback lately, as the token's relative strength has seen pools for newer tokens like stBTC, dlcBTC, eBTC and many more in the pipeline.

This happens in the wake of the emerging "BTC-Fi" narrative, as well as concerns about governance changes to WBTC.

Note for yield farmers looking to maximize their boost to look at the growth of Onlyboost, which automatically optimizes between Convex and Stake DAO.

Governance

Curve governance continues to be actively reshaped in realtime, with Reserve Protocol taking advantage of market conditions to increase their voting power.

It was a big month in governance, with a successful DAO vote to provide a grant to Swiss Stake, the company building Curve. In the process the company provided a snapshot of all the progress from the company looking backwards:

Plus a roadmap looking forwards:

But by far, the most contentious vote took place outside of the DAO, as Curve fans debated the style of the UI

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