23 September 2023
CRV, the native currency of Curve Finance, the decentralized exchange focused on stablecoins, is shaking off August’s weakness and printing higher highs when writing on September 22. Trackers reveal that CRV is up 22% in the past two weeks, adding 10% in the last week alone.
Coincidentally, there has been increased activity from a whale moving CRV from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by client count.
Whale Offloads CRV From Binance To Curve Finance
According to The Data Nerd, a tracker, a whale transferred 1.542 million CRV, worth roughly $684,000, from Binance. Afterward, the whale, only identified as “0x171,” added liquidity to Curve Finance.
Over the last week, the whale has been actively supplying liquidity to Curve Finance, providing 5.36 million CRV worth $2.27 million.
CRV is the governance token in CurveDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind Curve Finance. Since the exchange is decentralized, CRV holders have voting rights. Moreover, they can receive rewards whenever they supply liquidity to any of Curve Finance’s pools.
Curve Finance used an automated market maker (AMM) model for the trustless swapping of stablecoins, including DAI, USDT, USDC, and other tokens like ETH and wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC). However, to function optimally, Curve Finance relies on liquidity pools where users can supply liquidity and get a share of fees distributed in CRV.
The withdrawal of coins from Binance to a non-custodial wallet is a vote of confidence for CRV. The token has been free-falling in Q3 2023. To illustrate, CRV crashed by 32% in August alone.
The draw-down was worsened by the broader contraction in crypto occasioned by waning momentum around the approval of several complex derivatives for Bitcoin and Ethereum. At the same time, regulatory actions, especially from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), significantly impacted sentiment and token prices.
CRV Sold Off After Hack
The free-fall of CRV can be directly pinned to an exploit of multiple Curve Finance liquidity pools in late July 2023. In a re-entrancy attack, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the older version of a Vyper compiler, draining over $61 million worth of tokens from Curve Finance’s pools.
Through the re-entrancy attack, the hacker could infinitely withdraw deposited tokens from Curve Finance’s pools, resulting in losses.
Curve Finance has since patched the vulnerability, but CRV prices are yet to recover despite the recent pump. Also, its co-founder and CEO, Michael Egorov, had to liquidate a big chunk of CRV that he had used to secure loans on multiple platforms, including Aave.
By early August, Egorov had sold 106 million CRV via over-the-counter (OTC) trades at a discount to multiple entities. Top buyers included Justin Sun, the co-founder of Tron, who bought 2 million CRV, and Jeffrey Huang, who acquired 3.75 million CRV.