Swap CRV at the Best Rate

What is CRV?

CRV is the token that coordinates Curve, an automated market maker specialized in assets meant to trade close together, from dollar stablecoins to staked-ether pairs. Michael Egorov published the stableswap design in late 2019, the exchange went live in early 2020, and the token and the CurveDAO followed on 13 August 2020. Curve later added its own stablecoin, crvUSD, built on a soft-liquidation lending design.

The token's job is twofold: it pays liquidity providers through continuous emissions, and, once locked, it governs the protocol that decides those payments.

How CRV works

Locking is the core mechanic. CRV locked for between one week and four years becomes veCRV, non-transferable voting weight that decays as the lock runs down. veCRV holders vote weekly gauge weights that direct CRV emissions among pools and lending markets, receive half of pool trading fees, distributed in crvUSD since June 2024, and boost their own liquidity rewards by up to 2.5 times.

DAO votes run on-chain for seven days; ownership votes need a 30% quorum with 51% support, and creating a proposal requires 2,500 veCRV. Passed proposals execute against the contracts, so a Curve vote changes the protocol directly.

CRV supply and tokenomics

The maximum supply is 3,030,303,031 CRV, written into the token contract. About 1.3 billion was allocated at launch: 26.4% of the total to the core team, 5% to early users, 5% to a community reserve, 3.6% to investors and 3% to employees, on vesting schedules that completed by August 2024. The remaining majority is emitted to liquidity providers, with the rate cut by about 16% every August over roughly 200 more years.

Who builds CRV

Egorov remains the protocol's lead developer through Swiss Stake, the Swiss company that builds Curve's software and is funded largely by DAO grants. Development direction, parameter changes and treasury spending all pass through veCRV votes, and much of that voting weight sits with liquid-locker protocols, with Convex holding roughly half of all veCRV by Curve's own account.

How CRV is governed

Curve governance decides pool parameters, gauge additions, fee splits and treasury grants on-chain, with discussion on the project's governance forum. The vote-market layer is a real feature of the system: protocols accumulate veCRV or pay incentives to steer gauge weights toward their pools, a dynamic known as the Curve wars that concentrates influence in aggregators and the coalitions paying them.

What people use CRV for

CRV's uses all orbit the lock: without veCRV the token is only an emission asset, while locking switches on votes, fee share and boosts.

• Lock for veCRV to vote gauge weights and DAO proposals.
• Collect a share of pool fees, paid in crvUSD.
• Boost liquidity-provider rewards by up to 2.5 times.
• Use CRV as collateral in lending markets that accept it.

CRV risks and considerations

The protocol's history documents its risks. On 30 July 2023 a compiler bug in the Vyper language broke reentrancy protection in several pools and roughly 70 million dollars was drained, part of it later returned or recovered. In June 2024 the founder's large CRV-collateralized loans were liquidated across several lending venues, briefly leaving bad debt that he repaid the same week. In May 2025 a registrar-level hijack of the old domain pushed the project permanently to the curve.finance domain.

Structurally, emissions dilute holders who do not lock, voting power concentrates in lockers and vote markets, and the fee share depends on volumes that come and go with market conditions. The token contract itself is immutable, but the DAO can change most protocol parameters above it.