- Things continue to get more and more bizarre in the DeFi world.
- The crazy is to be expected when “you give people a permissionless uncensorable platform.”
- This time, the center of attention was one of the most popular DEX Curve Finance and its highly anticipated token launch.
Within hours of the surprising launch of the CRV token, the leading spot exchange Binance announced the listing of the token with deposits now opened but said due to the token’s limited circulating supply, trading won’t start until a “sufficient enough” levels of CRV deposits are reached.
The trading for the pairs CRV/BNB, CRV/BTC, CRV/BUSD, CRV/USDT, will be opened on Saturday, August 15th, at 4:00 AM (UTC).
As expected, the listings pushed the price of CRV to as high as $54, as per CoinGecko, before going back to $14.12. On Uniswap, at one point, 1 CRV got about 124 ETH. As a result, its market cap “briefly surpassed” even that of Bitcoin on a fully diluted basis.
As such, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao wants people to “use your judgment. Be responsible for your actions.”
But the community isn’t thrilled with Binance’s decision. One trader criticized CZ for “contributing to this “insanity’” saying, “you listed a CRV without consulting with the team after it had already been premined” and that Binance’s FOMO led other crypto exchanges, OKEx and Poloniex, to FOMO list CRV as well.
OMFG
— Curve (@CurveFinance) August 14, 2020
Does it get any more decentralized than this?
The launch of the CRV token itself has been nothing short of peculiar. Instead of Curve Finance, the token was launched by an anonymous developer.
An exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum, Curve, is designed for stablecoin trading. A popular DEX in the DeFi space, Curve accounts for more than 20% of all DEX volume for the past two months.
Just launched CRV is its native governance token, which is also used as a reward for liquidity providers. A portion of the trading fees collected on the platform will be used for burning CRV tokens.
The token came in the market at 6.25 PM EST yesterday, sooner than its scheduled launch after an anonymous user deployed the open-source CRV token and CurveDAO contracts on the Ethereum mainnet.
Sorry guys, $CRV left the admin keys and entire project laying around on pastebin and someone launched it
Guess we just have to go with it because this makes total and complete sense
— moon is tweeting (@MoonOverlord) August 14, 2020
Initially seen as a scam, the Curve team later confirmed that the contract is authentic, and they have adopted it after it gained traction.
Someone deployed $CRV based on smart contracts we had published on github, front-running our efforts.
While we initially were skeptical, it appeared to be an acceptable deployment with correct code, data and admin keys.
Due to the token/DAO getting traction, we had to adopt it.— Curve (@CurveFinance) August 14, 2020
Users subsequently found that wallets have been staking Curve assets and earning CRV assets before the official launch, which led to unfair “premine” allegations.
About 20,000 CRV tokens were also awarded to early stakers, as is the design of this protocol, and one or more of the wallets presumably belong to the developer, dubbed “Chad” who prematurely launched the token.
Interestingly it only cost 19.9 ETH, worth about $8,400 to deploy the contract.
Before the community got heated up about the “pre-mining” of tokens, Curve’s project lead Charlie commented, “I think it’s kinda cool personally” on the Discord channel.
As for the CRV token distribution, out of the initial 1.3 billion tokens, 5% of tokens with a one year vesting period will provide liquidity to the platform along with another 57% of all CRV tokens that will also be distributed to LPs from the 3.03 billion total supply. Employees and shareholders will get 3% and 30%, respectively, with a vesting period between two to four years while the remaining 5% will go to community reserve.
But this isn’t deterring the DeFi users given the new record $5.22 billion of total value got locked in the sector today
