Raise the People's Gavel! Swerve, which is remarkably similar to Curve, has attracted $400 million in funding

The fork version of stablecoin trading platform Curve, Swerve Finance, officially launched on September 5th under the banner of fairness and equity. Both the front-end interface and operational methods closely resemble the original Curve platform, with liquidity mining activated upon the platform's launch, attracting over $400 million in funds to date.

Swerve Finance Emerges Overnight

As previously mentioned, SushiSwap attempted to siphon off most of Uniswap's liquidity through liquidity mining in an effort to replace Uniswap, taking advantage of the pain point that Uniswap did not issue tokens. This means of absorbing others' liquidity to build its own platform is known as "vampire mining attack." In fact, this method is effective not only against Uniswap, an automated market maker (AMM) protocol platform, but against all protocols that rely on liquidity.

On September 5th, the forked version of stablecoin trading platform Curve, Swerve Finance, officially launched. Both the front-end interface and operation method are identical to the original Curve, and liquidity mining was activated upon the platform's launch. It also inherited Curve's 2.5x mining acceleration mechanism. Although the platform has not undergone a formal audit, it has attracted over $400 million in funds since its launch. According to official data, the annualized return rate for liquidity mining is approximately between 319% to 799%.

Empowering the People's Gavel

The anonymous founder, in an interview, stated that the reason for forking Curve was due to the unfair and controversial token issuance process of Curve, as well as concerns about centralization, with Curve's founder holding over 70% of governance voting rights. Founder John Deere (pseudonym) stated in an interview:

"DeFi should strive to build a better system than what exists today. DAOs should be fully controlled by their user communities, not by their development teams, founders, or shareholders... We believe that liquidity providers should receive fair and real channels for voicing their risks when guiding such systems. Therefore, fair and true channels for voicing should be available in the platform's future development and governance."

Regarding token issuance, the total supply will be fixed at 33,000,000 SWRV, with liquidity mining continuing for 6 years. Additionally, to encourage liquidity to shift to Swerve, a total of 90 million tokens will be allocated in the first two weeks, with the following issuance as shown in the image below:

Swerve: Not Just a Fork of Curve

Interestingly, when discussing the term "fork," the founder mentioned that Swerve Finance is not actually a fork of Curve but more precisely an application built on top of Curve.

As Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje mentioned, since Curve's code is copyrighted, directly copying the code could lead to Swerve Finance violating regulations and causing unnecessary issues.

https://twitter.com/AndreCronjeTech/status/1302161801094848513

Therefore, Swerve Finance separates "contract execution" from "token storage." In terms of "contract execution," Swerve Finance did not deploy new contracts but directly called Curve's existing contracts, while in "token storage," Swerve Finance uses its own contracts. Andre Cronje stated that this approach not only complies with copyright regulations but also allows for the full functionality of the contracts, making it a very wise move from legal and technical perspectives.