Curve turns 5, marking a half-decade since DeFi’s strangest token launch

Five years ago today, Curve Finance — now one of DeFi’s longest-running protocols — saw the launch of its governance token CRV in what remains one of the most unusual moments in crypto history.

On August 13, 2020, an anonymous Twitter account, @0xc4ad, announced that they had gone ahead and deployed the CRV token and DAO contracts before the Curve team themselves had done so.

“Yo, @CurveFinance! Saw your DAO is ready to rock and I gots to MAXIMIZE MY ALPHA! So I went ahead and deployed it for you,” the account posted.

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They linked to the deployment address, token contract, and even the freshly created Aragon DAO, assuring followers the contracts matched Curve’s specifications.

“You guys ready to harvest some CRV with me or what?!?” they wrote, tagging a who’s-who of early DeFi influencers.

The Curve team, ostensibly blindsided, responded carefully. “Interesting. We are proceeding with caution here, so far looks like contracts are the correct ones,” the official account tweeted, noting they would verify before endorsing the launch.

Once confirmed, the deployment effectively became the official CRV token launch, initiated — the story goes — not by the team, but by an opportunistic outsider. The @0xc4ad account soon vanished from Twitter, leaving behind one of DeFi’s most enduring origin stories.

Asked if the mystery will ever be solved, founder Michael Egorov told Blockworks, “Good question! I still don’t really know today. Looks as hard to know as Satoshi’s identity.”

Since that chaotic start, Curve Finance has grown from a stablecoin-focused AMM DEX into a core layer of DeFi’s liquidity stack, influencing protocol design across the industry. Reflecting on its rise, Egorov said: “What went as calculated is market sizing of stablecoin swaps,” though he added Curve’s centrality in DeFi infrastructure “was a bit surprising, but not totally unexpected.”

Today’s anniversary coincides with a CRV inflation drop, reducing the token’s emission rate. Egorov sees ongoing misunderstandings around Curve’s governance design: “Many projects think that token burn is better (CZ thinks that!),” he said, but noting that, to him, “it appears that token locking is simply much more efficient for reducing circulated supply as well as in aligning people with governance.”

Egorov is now focused on Yield Basis, an AMM-based solution to impermanent loss. “I think ve-tokenomics is good, so I apply it there,” he said, adding that Yield Basis will split rewards between LP tokens and real yield without a boosting mechanism.

From an unplanned, community-triggered launch to becoming a foundational DeFi protocol, Curve’s story is proof that sometimes chaos — and a little mystery — can yield lasting decentralized infrastructure.

Correction Aug 14, 2025 at 5:20 am ET: Description of Yield Basis.

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