Cryptoverse in Chaos: Giants Race for New DeFi Darling, Curve, Yam Plots Comeback

Sead Fadilpašić
Last updated: | 3 min read

The governance token CRV of Curve, exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum (ETH), was launched prematurely by an anonymous ‘Chad,’ and major exchanges moved to list it, as numerous theories are flying around, while YAM announced its transition to 2.0. This all happened in a matter of hours.

Source: Adobe/kitsana

The Cryptoverse went from Yamming straight to Curving in less than a day, as one industry observer summarised the situation.

Curve’s smart contract for the token was available for all to see on GitHub, a software development platform. An anonymous developer decided to pay the ETH 19.9 (USD 8,427) fee and go ahead and deploy “the most anticipated DeFi project and the darling of yield farmers,” as Adam Cochran, Partner at decentralized autonomous organization Metacartel Ventures, described it.

In an unexpected twist, the team behind the Curve said they had to adopt it, which Cochran found “the worst possible choice [which] shattered significant trust in their team.” He also offered several possibilities of what might have happened, ranging from genius to scamy.

Per CoinGecko, CRV, with a market capitalization of USD 5.7 million, is trading at USD 16.25 (at 8:11 UTC). Its 24-hour trading volume is USD 12.4 million. At one point today, it reached the price of USD 54. Its fully diluted valuation is USD 54.4 billion at the moment.

All this has led some, like Bitcoin evangelist at Kraken, Pierre Rochard, to wonder if the future of finance is front-running, and many seem to believe that this situation will be damaging for Curve. Furthermore, some say there is something “fishy” happening – Truffle Suite CEO Tim Coulter, for example, said that Curve Finance has the authority on which deployed contracts to use. “A quick “nope” would have directed everyone not to use it. In fact, you could have even earned some security street cred by directing the world not to trust random deployments claiming to be CRV,” he wrote.

And then, as a cherry on top of a cake in an open-air circus on a scorching hot summer day, major crypto exchanges started listing the token. Binance announced that it would list CRV at the same time they were stressing the current “insanity” of DeFi – with some people claiming that the listing wasn’t discussed with the team, and the team reacting with “OMFG.”

OKEx too announced the listing. And it’s not all – “in the true spirit of DeFi Listing Week, we’re listing [Curve] on Poloniex right away,” said the exchange in an announcement.

As this is all developing, don’t you think that there’s a chance to catch a breath, as the coin that just yesterday announced that it had lost the battle with a code bug – following a ‘we started from the bottom and now we’re here’ 3-day long story – has announced its second iteration.

Already yesterday, upon the announcement that the unprecedented community effort wasn’t able to eradicate the bug issue, YAM Finance said they’ll be back. But, as everything in DeFi, things progress quickly, and everything happens in a matter of just hours – the team today announced their YAM migration plan. “If the community chooses, we will facilitate this 2-phase plan over the coming weeks to migrate to audited versions of the YAM protocol,” said the blog post, stressing that the community still controls the project.

YAMv2 tokens will not rebase, meaning that no new coins will be released, and will have no on-chain governance functionality in phase 1, while in phase 2, YAM system will be audited and redeployed as YAMv3. More details coming soon, the team said.

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