Curve Finance, Uniswap Trade Volumes Soared Amid USDC Depeg

By Nivesh Rustgi

Several DeFi players have posted some serious figures amid the market’s latest chaos.

The trading volume on the decentralized stablecoin exchange Curve Finance hit $6.03 billion on March 11 due to the panic caused to the depeg of Circle’s USDC stablecoin.

The platform's popular stablecoin pool, composed of Circle’s embattled USDC, Tether’s USDT, and MakerDAO’s DAI, accounted for nearly 80% of the total trading volume.

The DEX's liquidity providers (LPs) made $4.9 million in fees in the past seven days.

Volumes on Uniswap also soared. The WETH-USDC pool, for example, hit $8.8 billion in trading volume over the last week across nearly 100,000 traders. WETH is a wrapped version of Ethereum that can be more easily integrated into smart contracts.

Similar pools, like USDT-USDC and DAI-USDC, hit $6 billion and $1.4 billion over the same period.

High volumes also mean LPs on Uniswap are also enjoying a hefty payout. The two most profitable pairs are WETH-USDC ($4.7 million) and USDT-USDC ($2.4 million).

These volumes are roughly triple the volumes of non-USDC pools. For instance, the WETH-USDT pool witnessed $2.8 billion in volumes in the same period.

What happened to USDC?

The fears of a centralized entity collapse are fresh in the minds of crypto investors, which could have been the reason for many traders looking to jump ship from USDC to ETH and other stablecoins over the weekend.

The panic was caused after Circle revealed that it had $3.3 billion in deposits at the now-defunct Silicon Valley Bank. The dollar-pegged token plummeted to $0.87.

The U.S. authorities have since responded to the issue by confirming that both Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank customers would be made whole on March 13.

The announcement by the U.S. Treasury Secretary Monday morning helped restore the market's confidence and USDC's dollar peg. Still, the stablecoin has been hit hard by the events.

CoinGecko data shows the total supply of USDC dropped from $43.7 billion to as low as $35 billion on Saturday. Since then, the second-largest stablecoin by market cap has regained ground and is now at $40.5 billion.

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