Curve Finance: The Rise of the Home of Stablecoins

Since 2020, Curve Finance has grown from a niche stablecoin AMM into one of DeFi’s most battle-tested and influential platforms. It solved a real problem: legacy AMMs like Uniswap weren’t built for assets with similar prices, where swapping DAI to USDC or USDT meant eating unnecessary slippage. Curve fixed that with math. Efficient, low-slippage swaps for pegged assets quickly became essential infrastructure, powering all of DeFi.

Innovation from the Start

Curve began with founder Michael Egorov’s StableSwap whitepaper in late 2019, which introduced an optimized AMM formula combining constant sum and constant product market makers to minimize slippage for pegged asset swaps. The protocol launched in early 2020, immediately outperforming generalized AMMs for stablecoin trades and wrapped BTC pairs. Traders, LPs, and arbitrageurs piled in.

In true crypto fashion, the CRV governance token and DAO contracts were deployed in August 2020, not by the Curve team, but by an anonymous community member (0xc4ad), using code that had been made public to give the community an opportunity to review it ahead of launch. Curve verified the deployment and the community adopted it as a legitimate launch.

The Curve Wars and DeFi Liquidity Power

The CRV token introduced a novel governance system known as veCRV (vote-escrowed CRV), giving long-term stakers increased voting power, used for governance, to direct CRV emissions across liquidity pools and to boost LP rewards. This kicked off a competitive flywheel: the more CRV you earned, the more veCRV you could lock, which in turn increased your ability to influence where future emissions went.

Within a week, Curve’s TVL tripled to over $400M. By mid-2021, it peaked around $19B, which was number one in DeFi at the time.

What followed became known as the Curve Wars. Protocols like Convex, Yearn, and StakeDAO raced to accumulate veCRV or court its voters. Why? Because owning Curve vote power meant controlling where liquidity flowed. If you launched a stablecoin and wanted truly deep liquidity, you needed veCRV, or at least the leverage to influence those who held it.

From Stable to Volatile: Cryptoswap and Multichain Expansion

In 2021, Curve rolled out Cryptoswap (Curve v2), extending its AMM design to volatile pairs. In comparison to Uniswap v3, it had no manual range orders, no active LP micromanagement. Just automated, dynamic concentration of liquidity around price. TriCrypto (wETH/wBTC/USDT) proved it worked.

At the same time, Curve expanded across L2s and alt L1s, such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Fantom, and launched its Factory pools, enabling anyone to spin up new Curve markets. Curve’s architecture scaled across chains, bringing its liquidity engine to new ecosystems, while making it easier than ever for asset issuers to deploy on it.

Security and Smart Design

From the outset, Curve prioritized security and rigorous smart-contract engineering, opting for Vyper, a Python-inspired language optimized for safety and readability of math-heavy contracts, and originally developed by Vitalik Buterin. Curve’s contributions to Vyper development, including improved compiler features and reentrancy protection, highlight its commitment to security. The core AMM contracts have maintained a strong security track record despite managing billions in value.

crvUSD and Llamalend: Rethinking Liquidations

Curve reached another major milestone in 2023 with the launch of its native stablecoin, crvUSD, a fully decentralized, overcollateralized stablecoin with a twist: the LLAMMA (Lending-Liquidating AMM). Instead of triggering hard liquidations at a single price point, LLAMMA gradually shifts collateral into and out of stablecoins within a price range. This helps manage risk smoothly during market volatility and allows collateral to be automatically rebought if its price recovers, a common pattern in crypto markets. Because of this protection, LLAMMA enables users to borrow with exceptionally high loan-to-value ratios.

Then came Llamalend in early 2024: a lending protocol built around crvUSD and the LLAMMA engine. Llamalend offers exceptionally high loan-to-value ratios, enabling users to safely borrow or lend with built-in liquidation protections. Its permissionless design has attracted integrations from major DeFi projects, creating strong incentives and enhancing Curve’s ecosystem.

Why Builders Come to Curve

• Deep liquidity for pegged assets and volatile pairs without active management required
• Open, composable architecture with a battle-tested codebase
• Permissionless by design—anyone can deploy, integrate, or extend
• A governance model that aligns long-term stakeholders
• Proven track record in security and risk management

Curve isn’t just a place to swap stablecoins, it’s where new primitives get tested, launched, and scaled. If you’re issuing a stable asset, launching a DeFi product, or building yield strategies, you need Curve in your stack.

Looking Forward

Curve is infrastructure where liquidity happens, reliably, efficiently, and securely. Whether you're launching a new stablecoin, building a custom lending market, or designing custom yield strategies that plug directly into Curve’s liquidity engine, Curve gives builders and issuers the tools to plug directly into DeFi’s most resilient infrastructure.

Come build what’s next.