DeFi20: Curve

A deep dive into Curve's position in the DEX/stableswap landscape — volume/fee/revenue share, top pools by TVL and yield, and the veCRV mechanism that routes protocol fees to CRV lockers via crvUSD/scrvUSD flows.

Curve's share of total DEX volume, fees, and revenue over the trailing year — computed as Curve's protocol-level flow divided by the market-wide DEX category (volume) or total DEX category (fees/revenue) each day.

The absolute figures behind the share charts above — Curve's daily volume, fees, and revenue in USD terms, unnormalized by category totals.

Curve pioneered the stableswap invariant and remains the dominant stablecoin-focused AMM. The charts below isolate Curve's own DEX volume alongside its share of combined volume across all DefiLlama-tagged "stableswap" DEX protocols (55 protocols including Ellipsis, Wombat, Saddle, Nerve, and others) — Curve has held roughly 90-99% of this niche's volume over the trailing year.

Daily DEX volume divided by TVL — a proxy for how hard Curve's liquidity is working. Curve's stableswap pools structurally turn over less than volatile-asset AMMs like Uniswap, since large stable/pegged-asset positions sit for yield/peg-arbitrage rather than active trading.

Where Curve liquidity concentrates across its stableswap/crypto pools, and which active pools (TVL ≥ $1M, excluding exploited pools) currently offer the highest APY — dominated by crvUSD pairs and newer chain deployments (Monad, Fraxtal).

Multi-exposure stablecoin pools hold two or more distinct stablecoins in one position (peg-basket risk instead of single-asset risk) — the category tracked on DefiLlama's stablecoin multi-exposure yields page. Ranking active, non-exploited pools by TVL, 3 of the top 10 are Curve DEX pools (DAI-USDC-USDT, USDC-RLUSD, FRAX-USDE on Ethereum) — the rest span USD AI, Re, Multipli.fi, Balancer V3, Frax, and Pendle. The largest, USD AI's SUSDAI on Arbitrum at ~$304M, and Curve's classic 3pool (DAI-USDC-USDT) at ~$160M, illustrate how basket-stablecoin liquidity has diversified well beyond Curve's original stableswap dominance — though yields on the biggest pools here are thin (Curve's 3pool APY is effectively 0%), with the higher-yielding entrants (Re's REUSD ~6.1%, Multipli.fi's RWAUSDI ~3.9%) carrying newer, less-battle-tested protocol risk.

Curve's value-accrual model long predates Uniswap's fee switch: users lock CRV for up to 4 years to receive veCRV, which grants boosted rewards, gauge-voting power, and a direct share of protocol fees (routed via crvUSD minting fees and admin fees on non-crvUSD markets). Per Curve's own weekly metrics [1][2], CRV circulating supply stands around 1.53B with roughly 853M CRV locked as veCRV (~786M veCRV total) — a lock ratio near 56% of circulating supply. veCRV holders currently earn an APR of ~5.4% (up from ~1.7% a few months earlier) [1], funded by crvUSD minting-fee distributions (~$182k in the most recent tracked week) [1] plus admin fees now also flowing in from the new Llamalend v2 non-crvUSD markets on Optimism [5]. A live DAO proposal would shift the crvUSD-fee split from 80/20 (scrvUSD/veCRV) toward 50/50, redirecting more revenue to veCRV lockers now that the crvUSD peg is holding firmly near $1.00 [3] — unverified/pending as of the article date, not confirmed as passed.

crvUSD (Curve's overcollateralized stablecoin) and Llamalend (its lending markets) are Curve's other major growth vector. Per Curve's own reporting [1][5], crvUSD circulating supply is roughly $27-65M in mint volume swings week to week (with a broader ~$367M crvUSD supply across 93,770+ holders cited separately [5]), scrvUSD (the yield-bearing wrapper) currently yields ~3.4%, and the peg has held close to $1.00. Llamalend v2 — funded by a 17.45M CRV (~$6.7M) DAO grant to Swiss Stake AG — just launched first on Optimism with ERC-4626 vault accounting and a new admin-fee route that sends non-crvUSD market fees to the DAO treasury [5], a structural expansion beyond the original crvUSD-only lending model.

Approximated as reported market cap ÷ price (CoinGecko-style methodology) — treat as directional, not exact. Curve's own weekly metrics report CRV circulating supply near 1.53B tokens [1], broadly consistent with the DefiLlama-derived series below. CRV emissions (gauge incentives) have declined sharply from the 2020-2021 launch period, and the corresponding annualized inflation rate — daily emission USD value × 365 ÷ market cap — has fallen from over 1,000% at launch to a low single/double-digit percentage today as circulating supply has matured.