Join us tomorrow at 2 PM PT for a Live Llama Party featuring the Flywheel DeFi crew! Join in Discord or watch on YouTube.
Find yourself somebody who looks at you the way Curve Finance looks at market volatility. The world may be melting down, but at least you can benefit from the finely tuned Curve FUD→$$$ Engine.
Observing Curve dashboards over the past week, other interesting trends emerge. For instance, Curve set a new record in terms of active users.
During the depegging, all of CT was glued to screenshots of 3pool drifting off balance in unprecedented fashion. The current USDT balance has never been lower, (so if the Fiddy indicator holds...)
The Curve 3pool enjoyed massive utilization, seeing its second largest week in recent memory, eclipsed only by the collapse of FTX.
In recent weeks, 3pool trading volumes had been fairly subdued. The race to the bottom for stablecoin trading has been fascinating. Recent events spotlight the challenges with manually rebalancing concentrated liquidity during the short windows when most of the money is made. Hence, Curve enjoyed dragging Univ3 while all else collapsed.
The massive rebalancing in 3pool provided Curve the plurality of fees on the week, amounting to about a third of Curve’s overall revenue for the week.
Notably, the Curve Tricrypto pool has seen very strong utilization of late following the recent spike in volume, which appears to have sustained past the initial jolt.
Tricrypto utilization has been about 37% over the past week, whereas it was in the 4-5% range in preceding weeks. This phenomenon may not even simply be the effect of the crazy weekend — the past 24 hours its utilization is a heft 71%. Curve noted this may be a result of the market becoming friendlier to USDT:
We’ve also seen some slight shakeup in the broader stablecoin wars. Unusual activity around Paxos’s USDP:
TrueUSD remains the breakout stablecoin over the past month.
The $TUSD pool on Curvewhich is now offering 15% - an above average yield which may persist for at least the near future if their incentivizes continue.
Some threads you may want to review on the stablecoin before you blindly ape:
The past week has shown Curve is by no means the only bespoke FUD→$$$ Conversion Engine. Synthetix also printed $1.5MM in fees.
It’s a nice bonus, and it’s also not a fluke. The launch of v2 Perps has led to a major uptrend in volume.
At least one whale noticed…
Liquity Protocol is also flush from the big week.
The highly decentralized stablecoin has seen a consistent uptrend, bolstered no doubt by recent events but also part of a sustained pattern.
Following this weekend’s turbulence, CT printed threads on $LUSD even faster than Curve printed money. We couldn’t catch them all, but here are a handful of recommended threads on the protocol:
Remarkably, a vote to tweak new parameters for its bLUSD pool endorsed by Curve does not appear as though it will reach quorum on Convex. Vote ends today.
In the stablecoin shakeup, worth keeping an eye on Reserve Protocol’s stablecoin-as-a-service platform. They’ve recently helped backstop $eUSD, diversifying its collateral and pushing it through Curve governance.
They recently chatted more on the great Flywheel DeFi podcast.
It’s a good piece of due diligence if you are interested in aping into the $RSR governance token’s pool to earn some hefty reward:
Another stablecoins to keep an eye on during this transitional period is Zunami Protocol’s $UZD:
Also making some news has been the release of Gearbox v3…
Finally, if you made it all this way, here’s some (maybe) free money? Of course there’s updates on the long-anticipated Arbitrum airdrop:
Further, Sturdy Finance is airdropping to some Curve users:
We don’t know anything about Sturdy Finance, so make sure to do your own research on this and all tokens listed in this newsletter.
We’ve all seen this past week how quickly fortunes can evaporate, so make sure to be careful! We’re neither good nor active traders, but we have an affinity for protocols that are antifragile and perform strongly during crypto’s frequent crashes. We pointed out $CRV, $SNX, and $LQTY as some of our faves, let us know in the comments what else we forgot!
Disclaimers! Author has exposure to 3CRV, Tricrypto, Liquity