DeFi protocol Curve Finance may be on the cusp of releasing its new dollar-pegged stablecoin.
On Tuesday, the stablecoin’s code was uploaded onto GitHub by its developers. Details are thin at present, but the new code show several smart contract functions for the new overcollateralized stablecoin,
Curve’s dollar (crvUSD) was confirmed by protocol founder Michael Egerov at a Web3 summit back in July.
Unlike centralized stablecoins like Circle’s USDC or Tether’s USDT, which are backed by hard cash and assets, the value of Curve’s greenback will be underpinned by a cryptocurrency treasury that will comfortably exceed the total value of the crvUSD tokens in circulation.
This is called over-collateralization, and it is done to ensure the new coin won’t slip its $1 peg. Maker’s DAI is perhaps the most well-known example of an overcollateralized stablecoin.
Another stablecoin contender is Aave. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governing the lending and borrowing protocol recently ran a poll to approve the launch of a new overcollateralized stablecoin called GHO.
The GHO proposal was approved by 99.9% of the community, who also pledged half a million AAVE tokens to collateralize it.
Catching up with Curve Finance
Curve Finance is an Ethereum-based protocol that leverages smart contracts that let users swap stablecoins for low fees and minimal slippage.
Users earn annual rewards by staking their crypto in any of the liquidity pools on the protocol, which at the time of writing hosts a mammoth total value of $5.49 billion.
Last month, Curve fell victim to a frontend hack. Attackers made off with a little over 327 Ethereum (at the time worth $570,000), which was then sent to the FixedFloat crypto exchange for laundering.
FixedFloat managed to freeze 112 Ethereum of the looted funds on the day of the attack. A few days later, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao reported that his exchange froze 83% of the funds, at the time worth $450,000.
In a report conducted with domain registrar company iwantmyname, Curve said its platform had been targeted through a compromise in an external provider’s hosted domain name service (DNS) infrastructure.
One customer’s domain was targeted, and from that, hackers managed to change the domain’s DNS records to point to a cloned server, in a type of attack known as DNS cache poisoning.
People interacting with the domain found themselves inadvertently redirected to a page of the attacker’s choosing while thinking it was the original domain and using the site as usual.
Curve also recommended that people use the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) for added security.
ENS was launched five years ago by members of the Ethereum foundation to enable people to register memorable domains for their crypto wallets instead of being limited to the unwieldy string of random numbers and letters that typically represent a blockchain address.