Curve Founder Faces $140 Million Liquidation After CRV Price Plunges

The founder of crypto lending protocol Curve, Michael Egorov, was liquidated for $140 million Thursday morning after the CRV token dropped as low as 30% Thursday morning.

The platform allows users to swap like-assets, such as dollar-pegged stablecoins or various liquid staking tokens, for one another. Maximized to reduce slippage for large trades, Curve is something of an arbitrage trader’s paradise. Even micro-differences between stablecoins can mean massive profits for whales trading in large volumes.

As of last night, Egorov was using $141 million worth of CRV tokens to secure a $95.7 million stablecoin loan. "If the price of CRV drops by ~10%," wrote blockchain analytics platform Akrham on Twitter last night, "these positions may begin to be liquidated."

Since then the CRV price has sunk as low as $0.23—setting a new all-time low for the token—and has since rebounded slightly to $0.27 at the time of writing.

"The price of CRV fell through Egorov’s liquidation threshold this morning, with his entire 9-figure lending position liquidated across 5 protocols," Arkham wrote in an update on Twitter.

The firm added that two of his accounts on Curve's Llamalend incurred more than $1 million worth of bad debt, which he's been able to clear after receiving $6 million worth of Tether (USDT) from NextGen Venture Partner Christian Seale sent in two transactions. Seale confirmed what was already visible in onchain data on Twitter.

This isn't the first time Egorov has needed bailing out.

After Curve was exploited last year it sent the price of CRV plummeting to $0.59. And suddenly the lending protocol founder was in danger of being liquidated and needed to repay a $9.2 million worth of Aave loans.

Several well-known DeFi personalities like Tron's founder, Justin Sun, power DeFi user, DCF God, and Jeffrey Huang aka Machi Big Brother stepped in, buying CRV tokens from Egorov.