January 3, 2024: Wavey Making ππ
How one user solved Convex gas woes, plus Curve launches on BSC, Arbitrum
We may have been offline for the tail end of the year, but the chain never took a holiday...
Of course, if anything ever happens to us, your itch for flywheel news can be well scratched by subscribing to cryptouf.ethβs Mirror, which provides outstanding weekly updates on both Curve and Prisma:
While we donβt intend to provide a comprehensive overview of everything we missed while we were loafing, we will review three of the biggest stories.
Gas Tax Holiday
Our absolute favorite story from the break was the initiative of the legendary wavey0x.
Gas usage on Convex has always of course been a rough point for users looking to maximize Curve yield. An analysis of gas usage over the last year and a half showed the problem was only getting worse.
The reason it climbed steadily upwards through time deals with how Curve contracts calculate boosts. It essentially involves iterating over each week since the last time a boost was stored, so the longer itβs been since the boost was stored the more gas that gets used.
As it turns out though, itβs possible for outside users to access this function permissionlessly to store certain boosts.
Therefore, wavey0x was able to create a fix for the problem that lowered gas costs across the board.
Appropriately, this earned him the chad acclaim he always deserved:
The full story is written up on Waveyβs blog, a must read!
$crvUSD on Arbitrum
Curve has finally launched some incentivized $crvUSD pools on Arbitrum!
Of course, Curve has been on Arbitrum for a long time, and Arbitrum had consistently been one of Curveβs larger sidechain presences. However, a serious deployment on the chain by Curve had been stalled, pending full release of NG architecture.
In fact, this delay became used by opponents to hammer Curve during STIP voting back in early Octover.
Canβt rush perfection though.
As a gift to ring in the New Year, the full $crvUSD pools got deployed to Arbitrum, and have been delivering healthy rewards to anybody with the foresight to bridge early.
The rewards of course will undoubtedly equilibrate to market rates as degens catch on, but the excitement caused a surge of $1MM worth of the stablecoin onto the chain.
Reminder that more liquidity sinks for $crvUSD is the most important piece of the puzzle for juicing $crvUSD adoptionβ¦
The $crvUSD rewards are a placeholder, with plans to next tap into the 3.5MM ARB the DAO has been sitting on for this moment.
BSC
Quietly dropped over the holidays, Curve launched onto Binance Smart Chain!
As the third largest chain, this has significant potential to become a decent driver of activity.
As of yet, thereβs no pools launched by Curve, but Accumulated Finance has taken advantage of the permissionless deployment capabilities to launch the first pool on behalf of Velas, a fast and carbon neutral blockchain powered by $VLX token.
In terms of major chains, only Tron remains, and diligent readers may note thereβs been at least hints this may be afoot as wellβ¦