May 31, 2023: TriCrypto-NG Launches 🚀🌌
What to expect from the launch of Curve’s next generation of pools
What a phenomenal month to be a Curve blogger!
Yesterday we saw the deployment of TriCrypto NG, which we last featured in April!
What can we expect now that it’s deployed? If you haven’t noticed the pattern, Curve’s launches are very much tests in prod — ie push as soon as its ready, poke things a bit, and turn on features and scale it up as the spaceship gets built mid-flight.
That is, TriCrypto-NG may be live, but much work left to be done (and you should never rule out that a redeployment or two may occur, so ape cautiously if at all.)
What has caught our attention is the bespoke 50% gas savings. Users of v2 pools are already aware of how impressively they perform, but this level of savings have the potential to place these pools in direct competition with the mass market.
The amount of work and theorycrafting put into optimizing gas consumption is phenomenal. We’re preparing a longer article covering the guts of how this was accomplished, but the changes are so substantial we had to push it back (hopefully tomorrow). For today, we offer a more general overview of the TriCrypto-NG launch.
Deployed along with TriCrypto-NG are two new pools in the vein of the original TriCrypto. One again features Tether as the US dollar component of the Bitcoin-Ethereum-Dollar trifecta. The other pool features USDC instead of Tether, which makes it an efficient routing for the popular USDC-ETH trading pair.
If you’re still dissatisfied — perhaps you want a TriCrypto pool featuring FRAX or LUSD instead — now you can launch your own! The deployment includes a factory so anybody can permissionlessly launch their own pool with any three differentially priced assets. It’s a bit tricky to do so until the new factory is hooked up to the UI, so we don’t expect many such pools to be launched until this happens.
Also soon in the pipeline, an L2 factory contract is also included in the repository. The original v2 factory never even made it to every sidechain, so this inclusion gives us hope we may see some L2 innovation coming soon.
Etherscan is not yet able to verify Vyper 0.3.9 contracts, so at the moment interacting with any of these pools is a challenge (ie generating an ABI interface and figuring out all the parameters on your own). It’s possible, but if you’re expecting this to move the needle, you might temper your expectations until this becomes more user-friendly.
Nonetheless, it’s keeping in the tradition of gradual rollout and testing in prod, presumably because Curve enjoys enraging impatient midwits.
To kick the tires, the first transaction was sent by the team, to test out the ETH-USDC pairing:
The transaction in this case cost $12.10 with gas at 40 gwei. Not bad, and at 167,753 total gas it comes in at the lower end of gas estimates. Gas hawks are watching this closely because the lower end of the range would see volume more competitive with rival AMMs like Uniswap v3, which are save on gas costs by forcing LPs to rebalance liquidity instead of traders.
What might success for TriCrypto-NG look like? Keep an eye on how traders, aggregators, and MEV bots route trades. Smart traders are very intelligent about maximizing profit (relative to, say, memecoin flippers). Such traders are agnostic to everything but the most efficient route. If the new Curve pools find their way into such routes and volume increases, then you’ll know the pool is a success.
Impressive to already see one such trade… a possible sign that TriCrypto-NG will see quick adoption by such advanced traders.
More volume == more fees of course. Not that Curve doesn’t have more fees accumulating than it knows what to do with…
For more on the potential of TriCrypto-NG, check back to the definitive thread from DefiCheetah earlier this month.
$crvUSD
The rollout of $crvUSD has given us reams of data as the stablecoin continues its steady march towards its initial debt ceiling, now approaching $9MM on a $10MM cap.
The pegkeeper has been functioning flawlessly, The Defiant has the scoop:
Rewards to the affiliated pegkeeper pools are going to hit this upcoming Thursday (all prior rewards were a direct subsidy from Mich, these rewards are voted in by the DAO). Expect to see some LPs flooding into these pools as they go live.
So when does $crvUSD hit the billion dollar market cap and silence the skeptics?
Soon, but not all that soon… the rollout remains deliberate and nerfed. Patience though, good things come to those who wait (not financial advice).