Why this ‘Curve’ball may have investors turning their backs on CRV

• Wintermute Hacker deposits a large sum into the Curve protocol, however, sentiment continues to decline.
• Curve’s market share in terms of volume falls, and interest from whales in CRV grows.

On 20 September 2022, Wintermute, a market maker in the cryptocurrency sector based in the United Kingdom, fell prey to a malicious cyberattack. This resulted in a significant loss of approximately $160 million as a result of the exploit targeting the platform’s DeFi operations.

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Presently, the perpetrator of the aforementioned cyberattack assumed the position of the primary liquidity provider for Curve Finance‘s trading pool. The attacker deposited the illegally-obtained funds into the protocol.

As a consequence of this action, the stolen funds now constitute 28% of the $409 million supporting Curve’s 3pool, a widely used decentralized trading pool. However, it appeared that Curve Finance’s governance couldn’t do anything about the hacker depositing the funds into their protocol.

The CEO of Curve, Michael Egorov was quoted

“All Curve pools are absolutely permissionless, so no one can stop anyone from depositing”.

Another reason the governance of Curve was helpless was that Curve is immutable. This meant that its code cannot be changed once deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. And its creators have no control over who interacts with it or provides liquidity.

Egorov also noted that a positive aspect of the scenario was the transparency inherent in blockchain transactions. This meant that the perpetrator will encounter difficulty in concealing the misappropriated funds, as their movements will always be traceable.

The current state of Curve

Even though the governance’s hands are tied, the sentiment towards the protocol could be impacted. Santiment’s data indicated that the weighted sentiment for Curve was negative. This implied that the crypto community had a negative outlook toward Curve at press time.

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Curve’s volume share in the DEX market was also impacted during this period. According to Dune Analytics’ data

Source: Santiment

The price of the Curve token CRV also fell during this period. Coupled with that, interest in CRV declined as indicated by the falling network growth. Despite these factors, whales continued to invest in the CRV token.

Source: Santiment