Curve Finance [CRV]: Volume surpasses $1B as stablecoin talks heighten

• Curve Finance’s daily volume surged above $1 billion after attention diverted to its stablecoin.
• Adoption over time was still a struggle, although active addresses increased.

Stablecoins decentralized exchange Curve Finance [CRV] might have gained from the regulatory decision to stop BUSD minting. In light of the development, DeFi Llama revealed that the CRV registered $1.07 billion in the last 24 hours — the highest of the first 45 days in 2023.

Read Curve Finance’s [CRV] Price Prediction 2023-2024

Is DeFi the way out?

Information from the DeFi aggregator showed that the last time the CRV protocol had such a high volume was during the FTX crash. 

Recall that this period was when there was mistrust for centralized crypto projects, and investors opted for players in the DeFi ecosystem. So, this could be another repeat of the scenario, only that this time, its regulation at play.

The spike in trading volume could mean that many investors were converting into crvUSD, the Automated Market Maker’s (AMM) decentralized stablecoin. For context, crvUSD uses a novel lending-liquidating algorithm while allowing collateralization of other crypto assets.

Besides the trading volume and renewed crvUSD interest, the Curve Total Value Locked (TVL) also has been impacted.  

According to DeFi Llama, the protocol’s TVL performance was a 0.04% decrease in the last 24 hours. But this improved from the 5% decline from the previous days. The boost implies that there has been an increased supply in the Curve Finance ecosystem. At the same time, the input has contributed to its overall health.

Source: DeFi Llama

Price-wise, CoinMarketCap data revealed that the CRV governance token also picked up a 12.35% increase in the last 24 hours. This trajectory contrasted with the broader market sentiment, which mostly displayed consolidation.

Addresses get more active but…

Despite the positive atmosphere around CRV, the project’s network growth remained at a very low point. The metric describes traction and adoption over time and the rate at which first-time users transact on the network. With the decrease, it implied that Curve was hardly getting new addresses.

However, the token’s short- and long-term holders have increased their activity on the Curve Finance protocol. This was because the 24-hour active addresses almost hit 1000 as of 13 February.

Realistic or not, here’s CRV’s market cap in ETH’s terms

An evaluation of the on-chain data from Santiment showed that the hike was the highest in almost four months, the last of which occurred in October 2022.

Source: Santiment

With a repeat of the FTX collapse after-effects in play, CRV will probably continue to gain more ground. However, there is no certainty about how long this attention would last.