What is Curve Finance and what does it do?

Curve Finance is a decentralized exchange designed mainly for swapping assets that are meant to have similar prices, such as one dollar stablecoin for another. Users trade against smart contract pools instead of an order book, and anyone can deposit tokens into those pools to earn a share of trading fees. Curve's CRV token launched on Ethereum in August 2020.

What does Curve Finance do?

Curve's core product is the StableSwap pool. In the November 2019 StableSwap whitepaper, author Michael Egorov explained that standard constant-product pools work well for volatile tokens but move the price too much on large stablecoin trades. StableSwap uses a pricing curve that is almost flat while a pool is balanced, so a trade barely shifts the price. If the pool becomes lopsided, the curve bends back toward the standard shape so liquidity is still available.

A setting called the amplification parameter controls how flat the curve is. A higher value means lower slippage near the balanced point. To learn how these pools hold deposits, see our guide to liquidity pools.

What is the CRV token?

CRV rewards liquidity providers and powers governance. Curve's docs give a fixed maximum supply of about 3.03 billion CRV, with issuance falling by 16% each August and the remaining emissions spread over roughly 200 years.

Holders can lock CRV for between one week and four years to receive veCRV. Locking for four years gives one veCRV per CRV, and the balance shrinks steadily as the unlock date approaches. veCRV cannot be transferred. It lets holders vote in the Curve DAO, including on gauge weights that decide where new CRV goes, and it earns a share of trading fees and interest from Curve's stablecoin markets.

What is crvUSD?

crvUSD is a stablecoin minted when a borrower takes a loan against collateral such as wrapped bitcoin. Instead of liquidating a loan all at once, Curve spreads the collateral across up to 50 price bands in a system called LLAMMA. As the collateral price falls, it is gradually converted into crvUSD, and if the price recovers, it is converted back. This soft liquidation can still cause losses, and a loan is fully liquidated when its health reaches 0%. A Peg Stabilization Reserve adds or removes crvUSD from Curve pools to help keep it near $1.

What happened in the July 2023 Curve exploit?

On July 30, 2023, several Curve pools were drained. The Vyper team's post-mortem traced the cause to a bug in the Vyper programming language's reentrancy guard in versions 0.2.15, 0.2.16 and 0.3.0, not to Curve's own design. The Block reported that affected pools included those tied to JPEG'd, Metronome and Alchemix, and that Curve said about 70% of affected funds had been recovered by August 11, 2023. The episode showed that bugs in shared developer tools can reach many protocols at once. Details here are current as of October 2026.