July 11, 2024: Business as Usual 🏦💸

Usual Protocol launch attracts $88MM TVL

Welcome into the arena, Usual Protocol!

End the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses.

— Usual Finance Mission Statement

In other words… It’s a rigged system! We need a revolution!!

Based on the first two hours, it looks like the revolution may even be successful this time!

The new protocol launched amidst the ETH-CC festivities with gusto. The protocol boasted $32MM TVL in 5 hours, $13MM of which was deposited into Curve.

But what is it? Should you ape your net worth without doing any due diligence?

We’ll briefly touch on the aspects that intersect with Curve, before pushing our more opinion-based commentary on Usual beneath the fold.

Usual uses a Curve stablecoin-NG pool for the primary source of their liquidity, a healthy $24MM as of publication (out of $88MM total TVL.)

We’ll see if the hefty trading fees keep up, as has been the case for some super-successful pools lately, like WEETH. Note that initial vAPY is always elevated.

For this pool, USD0 is their primary RWA-backed stablecoin (referred to as a Liquid Deposit Token) and USD0++ is a wrapped and locked version of USD0 that represents a liquid bond. We describe these tokens in more detail for subscribers below, while those who won’t support our newsletter are instead referred to the read the docs for their own selves.

Why a Curve pool? Perhaps they were following Figue’s recommendation from StableSummit to use a Curve pool as the primary source of liquidity.

Or perhaps they are following the money.

Zoom in on the list of backers and you’ll see a lot of the Usual suspects. A veritable who’s who of DeFi heavyweights, including Curve notables like Mich, Charlie, Mr Block and Julien Bouteloup.

BUT! The fools didn’t think to ping CurveCap though, so we can provide our full review of the protocol without risk of too much bias, offered beneath the fold …