August 16, 2021: Harmonic Accord? ๐๏ธ๐ผ
Governance forum discusses launching Curve on Harmony blockchain
Curve dominates within Ethereum DeFi, the second largest amount of TVL with over $10 billies per DeFi Llama. Curve has stated before that it will always be Ethereum-centric, and sure enough, its Ethereum app remains dominant compared with its other chain integrations.
This provides context around the most recent governance forum proposal to launch Curve on the Harmony protocol.
You may be forgiven if youโre not heard of Harmony, a smaller chain with an eco-friendly effective proof of stake (ePoS) consensus mechanism achieved through random-state sharding. Random state sharding shuffles validators among shards to resist shard attacks, offering 2 second settlement times.
Harmony just achieved $100MM in value locked along with growth in several metrics.
Theyโve since been reaching out to various DeFi projects to encourage them to launch on Harmony. Sushi has already bit, bringing the carb-loaded DEX to 11 chains (Ethereum, Fantom, HECO, xDai, Avalanche, Polygon, OKEx, BSC, Harmony, and Celo). Their latest pools are performing as follows:
Terra has also announced a partnership with the chain.
They have hit the Curve governance forums requesting to bring the leading stablecoin platform to the chain.
Theyโre also sweetening the pot by adding in $2MM worth of their native $ONE token.
Now the Curve community gets its chance to weigh in. Of course, the Curve team is small and lean, with limited developers and limitless opportunities. Curve dominating the world is inevitable, the question is where should Harmony fall on this strategic path of conquest?
To help the community make its decision, we tossed together a few numbers sourced from DeFi Llama:
With the exception of the roller coaster that is Binance Smart Chain (where Curveโs footprint is managed by the authorized Ellipsis fork), every chain where Curve launches it achieves at least 10% dominance of the DeFi ecosystem.
DeFiLlama tracks $13MM worth of DeFi TVL which is probably an underestimate since it has not yet started tracking Sushi on Harmony, but the overall value is something under the $100MM TVL boasted on the Harmony homepage. At $100MM, Harmony would move from 28th on the chain rankings up to 21st. This would cap the TVL opportunity for Curve somewhere around $1MM-$10MM as of today.
Of course, the opportunity would not be in the value unlocked by capturing todayโs value, but by the growth Curve enables. Itโs difficult to credibly claim your chain has a functioning DeFi ecosystem without Curveโs low slippage stablecoin pools, as well as the successful volatile pairs enabled by the new TriCrypto pools.
For instance, since Curve launched on Fantom in February, the chain has grown from around a million in DeFi TVL to nearly $400MM, with Curve representing nearly half the value. Curve also launched on Polygon in April, when TVL on the chain grew from around $1B to over $5B today.
In July, Curve launched on xDAI, when the chain boasted $20MM in volume. Itโs grown 50% since then to $30MM, and Curve wasnโt even offering $CRV rewards until last week.
To be sure, Curve brings opportunities and growth wherever it goes. Launching on every chain would be great if all else is held equal. However, itโs a tougher choice if chain expansion came at the expense of, say, the v2 Pool Factory.
Do you have thoughts? Drop them in comments, or better yet, pop over to the Governance Forum and let your voice be heard!
For more info, check our live market data atย https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter atย https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a $CRV maximalist and has no positions in Harmony or $ONE.