Curve is ringing in the new year at a breakneck pace. Two new v2 pools launched out of the blue. Almost as if they’re churning these out at factory grade efficiency.
SPELL
The first of the two pools is the well known $SPELL token. For those lacking a degree in advanced Sestanomics, $SPELL is the governance/staking token cornerstone of the magical money ecosystem of Abracadabra — sort of like a digital, highly leveraged, Hogwarts.
Curve diehards are likely already familiar with $MIM, Abracadabra’s stablecoin. Users summon $MIM by lending various other tokens. The protocol has grown so rapidly it got cited in the Senate’s recent witch hunt against stablecoins, singled out for derision by the committee chair, credibly accused wife-beater Sherrod Brown.
Abracadabra – a fast-growing scheme that makes “Magic Internet Money.” Their words, not mine – what could possibly go wrong with something that claims to be “magic money”?
What would end up “going wrong” is that Brown’s humorless deadpan would quickly plummet him to the bottom 5 of PAC DAO users’ crypto friendliness ratings, all but ensuring a very well funded pro-crypto primary and general election challenger should he seek re-election in 2024.
In contrast, $MIM has favorably climbed the right charts. Sorted by highest emissions rate, two $MIM pools fall among the top tier of Curve rewards.
$MIM pushed its way up the charts in part due to their exquisite bribe game. In the last round they partnered with the Terra ecosystem to deposit $4.15MM worth of bribes, second only to $FRAX.
Within Abracadabra, $SPELL serves a function similar to $CRV in the Curve ecosystem. $SPELL can be staked, used for voting, and can earn protocol revenue. Initially it had been launched with a supply of 420 billion. But memesters dreamt of $SPELL reaching a dollar valuation. Today we see the $SPELL supply vanishing rapidly. Evanesco!
Zero Emissions! Claim the W, Greta Thunberg!
The entire Abracadabra ecosystem is one of the fastest moving projects in all of cryptocurrency. If you want to see where the puck is going in DeFi, make sure to keep an eye on @danielesesta’s activity. For just one example, Geist recently noted some interesting behavior on Fantom:
Some watchers have speculated this is related to a set of cryptic tweets by Andre:
The creation of a Curve v2 pool for $SPELL provides some major strategic value for Curve’s growth. One of the most active sources of liquidity for $SPELL to date had been their Sushi pool, doing about 8 figures of daily volume.
With so much $SPELL already floating around the Curve ecosystem, this could have the makings of a very popular pool.
If you want to learn more about $SPELL and the greater Abracadabra ecosystem, plenty of other people have created several in-depth explainers. Or just keep your eye out on Twitter for the Frog Nation.
T Network
The second Curve v2 pool is more of a surprise. Early in 2021 Keep Project and NuCypher had announced what may be the first on-chain merger of two DeFi projects, which people had joked may be called KeaNu. After seeing the new Matrix, however, they appear to have chosen a different name. The merged token is called the Threshold Network Token, with a symbol $T (no relation to Ma Bell).
Early 2022, the merger became official and T Network went live. To accomplish the merger, the team halted NuCypher inflation and launched a vending machine contract, establishing conversion ratios by the final supply at the time of halt. The smoothly executed merger will no doubt become the textbook example for future on-chain M&A activity.
Longtime Curve users will remember KEEP network from their tBTC offering, with both a classic pool and a newer factory pool. Bitcoin yields have been hard to come by lately, but the tBTC pool holds nearly $75MM worth of pet rock. The T Network roadmap has big plans for tBTC v2, the next iteration of their bridge. Long term, the goal of the merger is to provide “tools for user privacy on the public blockchain in a secure and trustless manner.”
Curve was very quick to react to the merger. The T-ETH pool went live before most people had even heard the news.
While $SPELL has several liquidity options already, the new Curve $T-$ETH pool is a rather scarce commodity. The only other major source listed on CoinGecko is on Uniswap v3, where there’s only about $150K worth of liquidity available if I read their confusing interface correctly.
Curve, meanwhile, is already at $7MM. To my knowledge this makes Curve the top destination for $T (fact checks always welcome).
Disclaimers! Author has earned some $SPELL rewards that gas makes inefficient to claim.