CRV Liquidity Mining [Alpha Tractor]
Curve's long-awaited governance token goes live following a rocky start.
THIS STRATEGY IS BRAND NEW AND EXTREMELY RISKY. CURVE STAKING CONTRACTS SHOULD BE APPROACHED KNOWING YOU MAY LOSE 100% OF YOUR FUNDS.
This is the third post (in one week!) in our Alpha Tractor series - giving you intel into the freshest yield for the most honest farmers only.
CRV’s Peculiar Launch
Curve’s native governance token - CRV - is now live.
For those who missed it, an anonymous account deployed the smart contracts (paying $8k in gas in the process), leaving a grey area of two hours where the community was unsure whether or not the team would in fact confirm the token was ‘live’.
Now that the token has been confirmed by the Curve team, farmers are flocking to the latest harvest.
CRV Farming
Liquidity providers of any of Curve’s 7 pools can now deposit their positions in ‘Gauges’ or staking contracts which accumulate CRV from liquidity mining.
Only those who stake their liquidity positions are eligible for CRV rewards. This means those staking Curve LP tokens via Mintr (sUSD and sBTC) will need to restake to earn CRV rewards. BASED farmers also do not qualify for CRV rewards at the time of writing.
Early liquidity providers can claim their vested CRV in real-time as it unlocks over the course of the next 365 days here.
More on how to earn and claim CRV can be found here.
For those having issues depositing into Guages we recommend depositing 99% of your position to avoid deposit failures rising from trying to deposit 100%. The Curve team has redeployed the staking interface to fix a suite of bugs. <<< Exhibit A of how fast this is moving. Please proceed with caution.
CRV Details
Each day, 2M CRV will be added to the circulating supply with roughly 766k CRV (or 38.3%) distributed to liquidity providers equally across all 7 pools.
CRV’s total supply of 3.03B tokens is allocated as follows:
57% to current liquidity providers
30% to shareholders (team and investors) with 2-4 years vesting
5% to early-liquidity providers vested over 1 year
5% to the community reserve
3% to employees with 2 years vesting
The supply distribution will gradually scale down at a diminishing rate of 2¼ each year, meaning the entirety of the supply will not be issued for over 300 years.
By locking CRV via the Curve DAO, users can earn multipliers on their CRV rewards which vary relative to the length of tokens being locked with a max multiplier of 2.5x.
Launch Sentiment
The decision to roll with the anonymous account that deployed the contracts has been theorized by many to be a legal tactic to obfuscate any future liabilities which may come from the highly anticipated launch.
During the two hours prior to the launch, a handful of savvy farmers started staking LP tokens by interacting directly with the contracts, creating what many are calling a tainted ‘pre-mine’ despite only 80k CRV being earned of the wider 3.03B supply.
If anything, the launch of CRV has felt very rushed. With numerous top-tier exchanges piling on to list the token, the Curve team is scrambling to fix bugs from front-end deposit issues to questions around the launch process itself.
If you consider yourself to be a new farmer, definitely watch this one from the sideline. The amount of gas to get started alone (currently roughly ~$200 to deposit and stake your LP position) is a non-starter and at this point. As expected, this is pretty much a degen farmer’s crapshoot to see who can finesse the most CRV as token price soars in the midst of DeFi token’s heyday.
For those who do get involved, please recognize that Curve is now experiencing unprecedented levels of demand. Whereas the surge to $400M in TVL with YFI proved the base layer worked as intended, the introduction of new staking contracts adds a whole other degree of smart contract risk.
Stay safe out there farmer!