Yesterday we finally enjoyed the moment that followers have WEN-ed and whined about for nearly a year.

This morning’s Leviathan News livestream featured Small Cap Scientist offering the bull case for $crvUSD, a must listen:

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In today’s article, we cover the reaction to the launch, help on using the pool, resources for tracking the pool, and some early numbers on activity.

Launch Reaction

Will the release of $crvUSD stop the chorus of “wen?” Unlikely. Even though users are actually able to use $crvUSD now, there’s still several more parts to plug into the broader infrastructure. Some of the next steps, like hooking pools up to gauges, require the DAO to act. The DAO operates on a timeframe of weeks and not days.

To the first point, in the wake of the launch we also saw confirmation that $stETH is planned as the next collateral type.

Wait a second… if Curve is decentralized, then why did they delay using stETH? Is something nefarious afoot, in which Curve is trying to reward $sfrxETH and punish other forms of collateral?

That’s certainly one possibility. However, we see no reason why any sane person would doubt the eminently reasonable and coherent explanation from Curve: $sfrxETH just so happened to have a good oracle. The fact that Curve’s DAO is presently voting on changes to allow for a wSTETH pool only adds credibility.

On the topic of decentralization, we’d add that Curve using custom oracle implementations that might remove dependence on other oracle providers should also be considered a positive benefit.

How to Use?

For more information about how to use the UI, consult https://resources.curve.fi/, which has been updated with detailed information on $crvUSD and is being updated as new questions are asked.

Yesterday, on an impromptu Leviathan News livestream, we took the UI for a test drive from the point of view of Mich’s multi-million dollar position..

Another way to interact with $crvUSD is the variety of liquidity pools that have been spun up as part of its peg keeping architecture. These pools, which pair $crvUSD and one of [USDC, USDT, USDP, TUSD] are meant to allow arb trades to provide stability and liquidity to the system. They are all showing directly on the Curve UI, but absent gauges the pools are likely to be a little quiet for the time being.

How to watch the action?

The $crvUSD UI has some metrics built in. For instance, the LLAMMA details tab on “advanced mode” has a good visualization of how liquidity is distributed among the various bands.

Following the contract activity directly on Etherscan is also an easy way to see exactly what’s going on. The Controller contract shows all interactions in which users adjust their position:

Meanwhile the AMM page is even busier.

You can also use the token tracker on Etherscan to see some stats on $crvUSD, but some variables can be a bit misleading. For instance, the $crvUSD contract mints more $crvUSD than circulates, so the totalSupply() function is not the most accurate way to calculate this (instead sum up the total debts of each market).

A few Dune dashboards have already appeared. One nice one from marcov_91 https://dune.com/Marcov/crvusd

Or this one from subinium: https://dune.com/subinium/crvusd

The great DefiLlama will be supporting crvUSD very shortly after they tabulate their accounting.

EigenPhi provides rich and detailed diagrams for every complex arb trades, simply paste the transaction hash and see a nice visualization of the token flow:

Such arb trades are easy to hunt down on Telegram, where the curve_monitor_backup channel is another great way to grab such data. In addition to seeing large transactions on Curve, the channel has been hooked up with alerts for every new interaction with $crvUSD and even features some good running commentary.

Activity

How have users interacted with $crvUSD since it went live? At the moment, there’s very little reason on-chain why a user might take out such a loan unless they simply needed dollars. That is to say, there’s no incentivized pools for holding $crvUSD, so the only thing one may be able to do is trade it for another stablecoin and try to farm above the borrow rate.

The borrowing rate is at 2.71%, but this number has been in flux since the start. It initially started at 10%, but adjusts based on supply and demand in the system.

Among the actual transactions we’ve seen so far, most users have been basically doing test transactions. We assume they are test transactions this because we see a half dozen transactions under $1000, but with gas fees still raging above 50 gwei, the fees alone to create a position tend to be close to $100. Not the wisest idea to spend $100 on a $1000 position. We have to imagine anybody creating a small loan is simply testing to get the hang of it, in some cases we’ve seen observations where it precedes a larger transaction.

Similarly, most of the arbitrage trading of the pool tends to be done at more cost effective sizes. Given that the costs of arb trading are also quite intense (largely from checking the oracle price), it has to be fairly large to be worthwhile. An ordinary deliquidation amount over the past 24 hours fell in the range of $25K to $105K, but some transactions (which we also presume just tests) pulled the trigger for less than $2.

One of the more interesting results, is that 1Inch is already tracking routes through the $crvUSD pools that were set up, so it’s possible we’ll see some activity in this fashion..

We surely missed a few hundred resources, so feel free to drop them in the comments and we’ll update this article!