Curve DAO Token (CRV) is the governance and incentive token of Curve Finance, a decentralized exchange designed for swapping assets that should trade at almost the same price, such as one dollar stablecoin for another, or ether for a liquid-staked version of ether. Holders lock CRV to vote on how the protocol is run, to direct new token rewards to particular pools and to collect a share of the fees traders pay. Curve began on the Ethereum Blockchain and has since been deployed on many other networks.
CRV is not the exchange itself, and it is not crvUSD, the dollar stablecoin Curve issues against crypto collateral. The protocol was created by the developer Michael Egorov and is governed by the Curve DAO, in which only locked tokens, called veCRV, carry votes. That "vote-escrow" design was later copied by many projects, including Aerodrome.
Curve in plain terms
Picture a currency booth at an airport that only swaps vouchers worth the same amount, say two brands of one-dollar gift card. Because the cards are nearly identical in value, the booth can charge a tiny fee and handle very large swaps without changing its quoted rate much. People who leave their cards in the booth's drawers so others can swap earn a small cut of every trade.
CRV works like a membership card for the club that owns the booth. Members who promise to keep their card locked away for longer, up to four years, get more votes and a bigger share of the fees. One of the most important votes decides which drawers receive extra rewards, which is why outside projects that want their own vouchers to be easy to swap compete hard for members' votes.
History
Egorov described the exchange's pricing method in a November 2019 white paper titled StableSwap, and Curve went live in January 2020. The CRV token followed in August 2020, when its contracts were deployed by an unknown party ahead of the planned date and the team chose to adopt that deployment rather than start again. It quickly became a core venue for stablecoin trading in decentralized finance.
From 2021 other protocols began accumulating CRV to control its votes, most prominently Convex Finance, a contest the industry nicknamed the "Curve Wars". In 2021 Curve added pools for volatile pairs such as USDT, wrapped bitcoin and ether. In May 2023 it launched crvUSD, which uses a lending-and-liquidation mechanism called LLAMMA that sells a borrower's collateral gradually as prices fall instead of all at once.
How the exchange works
Each Curve market is a liquidity pool priced by an automated market maker. Its StableSwap curve behaves almost like a fixed one-to-one exchange while the pool is balanced, and bends towards the constant-product formula only when one asset runs short, so large swaps between similar assets suffer little slippage. Each pool charges a small fee on every swap. Part of that fee is paid to liquidity providers, and in most pools half of it, the "admin fee", goes to veCRV holders. Pools for stablecoins such as USDC and Tether (USDT) remain its best-known markets.
Supply and vote-escrow
CRV has a maximum supply of about 3.03 billion tokens, most of it reserved for liquidity providers and released over many years. Emissions fall by a factor of the fourth root of two each August, about 15.9 percent a year; in August 2026 they dropped to roughly 97 million CRV a year, the first time below 100 million. To vote, holders lock CRV for between one week and four years and receive veCRV, which cannot be transferred and declines towards zero as the unlock date approaches:
- is the number of tokens placed in the lock.
- is the time left until the tokens unlock.
- is the maximum lock period of four years.
A holder who locks 1,000 CRV for four years starts with 1,000 veCRV. Someone who locks the same amount for one year receives veCRV, and after six months that has decayed to 125. veCRV also lets liquidity providers raise their own CRV rewards by up to 2.5 times.
Uses and the Curve Wars
- Gauge voting. Each week veCRV holders decide how new CRV is split between pools, which steers yield farming rewards and therefore liquidity.
- Fee income. veCRV holders receive a share of trading fees and crvUSD interest, paid out weekly.
- Governance. veCRV votes on fee levels, new pools and treasury matters through the DAO.
- Vote buying. Stablecoin issuers and other projects pay veCRV holders, directly or through Convex, to point rewards at their pools, a market openly called bribing.
Exploits, liquidations and criticism
On 30 July 2023 attackers drained several Curve pools, including alETH, msETH, pETH and CRV/ETH, through a bug in the reentrancy lock of older versions of the Vyper programming language used to write the smart contracts. Estimates of the losses ranged from about $50 million to $70 million, and part was later returned by white-hat hackers and the attackers. In June 2024 a fall in the CRV price triggered the liquidation of large over-collateralized loans Egorov had taken out against his own CRV on several lending platforms, leaving about $10 million of bad debt, which he later repaid.
Critics point to the concentration of voting power in a few aggregators, to inflation that rewards mercenary capital, and to the founder's large personal leverage. In 2025 Egorov also launched Yield Basis, a separate protocol whose bitcoin pools are built on Curve and funded by a crvUSD credit line approved by Curve governance.