“This is still ambiently interesting… the address manually added to the registry is a gauge for a Frax/USDP pool.
This pool only has about $43 dollars though. Why would devs take time to intervene? Is something afoot?”
Pools grow up so fast these days, don’t they? Today the FRAX-USDP pair has jumped to about $2MM in liquidity with some nice rewards likely to entice more.
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More details about this pool got spotted last night in the Frax Finance Telegram.
Quoth Sam, it’s not a replacement for the FRAX-USDC base pair, but rather a new option for pool creators on Curve.
It’s a nice turn of developments for Paxos. Paxos has long been one of the most upstanding players in cryptocurrency, always going the extra mile to follow the rules. Their reward for good behavior was to get gunned down by crooked cops in a pre-Valentines Day massacre.
Of course, so much happened in the intervening months that the Paxos news got forgotten among the pile of corpses. We are pleased to see the team is making big moves.
As of yet, no pools appear to be created using this base pair, we’ll bet it’s happening soon. Although DeFi is much more rapid than its ossified TradFi competition, some things still play out slowly. Frax is great at finding and seeding new opportunities, and giving them room to grow and thrive.
For instance, it was late last year when $frxETH launched, seemingly too late to spoil the LSD-laced party among wrapped Ethereum competitors. Today, however, the LSD momentum is entirely behind $frxETH, which smashing through 150K ETH as it threatens to become a top three LSD.
We covered much more on the $frxETH progress just yesterday.
Similarly, the Frax-USDP basepair may not be utilized big yet, but give it time. It wasn’t so long ago that $frxETH had very little utility. But if you’ve been keeping an eye on Curve governance, you may have noticed $frxETH on the cusp of a big week.
Sure enough, it’s Thursday, so all these gauges have gone live, in spectacular fashion.
The moral of the story, to the extent there is one, is that those who pay attention to DeFi governance basically have a crystal ball allowing them to see the future.
Take Votium…
Votium recently completed round 42, the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Public scrutiny of its periodic birba-a-ramas may have grown less intense over the past year… the 2021 bull vibes that yielded a $0.87 / $vlCVX faded to but a distant memory.
Although the cash flow slowed in the bear, it notably never stopped. Nor has the capital efficiency disappeared. In fact, quite the opposite: on Tuesday we profiled Spiral DAO’s efforts to build an entirely new business on this overlooked phenomenon.
It’s tough to pick out on the chart above, but total birbs have nearly doubled since the pico-nadir of round 34, which yielded just $1.52MM in time for Christmas. Round 42 hit a local maximum of $2.75, with plenty of interesting trends.
The major players, as usual, were Frax and Convex, both of whom adjusted some of their weights internally.
Frax as usual spread the money among its many paired pools within its ecosystem. Indeed, if you were watching the Votium round, you probably noticed FRAX-USDP before it leaked onto the Frax Telegram.
For Convex’s sake, Round 42 marked an effort to tighten the historically loose $cvxCRV peg. Indeed, the team’s efforts have shown the peg to have an upward trend over the past few months.
It’s not exceptionally clear why Yearn’s $yCRV took a nosedive yesterday, but at the moment the two tokens are battling around the 90% mark, with only $sdCRV holding tight near 100%.
We may well see some big activity focused on Convex in the near future, as both Reserve and Badger DAO are making big moves in the ecosystem.
For Votium Round 42, we also saw some big moves among other players. A nice facet of the Curve Wars is that participants need not necessarily win the wars — just showing up to birb delivers real results.
Stargate is one such example from the recent round:
Here we see $120K produce tangible results
So too did Conflux join their first birb round, as they promised in our prior coverage.
Here we observe their $42K indeed converted into big incentives.
Conflux is playing a savvy governance game here. In this case they utilized Stake DAO’s Vote Market, which is becoming a killer tool for steering veCRV.
So too is StaFi using Vote Market to incentivize liquidity for its $rETH (not to be confused with Rocket Pool’s $rETH).
For more information on Stake DAO’s vote market performance, recommended to follow HubertX13, who posts helpful metrics following each round:
The organization of the birb markets has been a nice benefit to veCRV, once thought to be too complex to be worthwhile, but now it’s becoming straightforward to simply “cash flow for life” off the proceeds.
For a nice deep dive into governance theory, we highly recommend this deep dive by Paladin — who provided a detailed correlation analysis of $/vote with volume.
