CRV surges 22% in 2 weeks as Whale withdraws from Binance

CRV, the home currency of Curve Finance, the decentralized exchange focused on stablecoins, is shaking off August weakness and posting higher highs as of September 22 writing. tracker discover that CRV has increased 22% in the last two weeks and increased 10% in the last week alone.

Coincidentally, there was increased activity from a whale transferring CRV from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by customer count.

Whale moves CRV from Binance to Curve Finance

Accordingly The data nerd, a tracker, a whale, transferred 1.542 million CRV worth around $684,000 from Binance. Afterwards, the whale, identified only as “0x171,” added liquidity to Curve Finance.

Over the past week, the whale has been actively providing liquidity to Curve Finance, providing 5.36 million CRV worth $2.27 million.

Curve Finance whale moves tokens from Binance| Source: The Data Nerd

CRV is the governance token in CurveDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind Curve Finance. Since the exchange is decentralized, CRV holders have voting rights. Additionally, they can earn rewards for providing liquidity to any of Curve Finance’s pools.

Curve Finance used an Automated Market Maker (AMM) model for trustless exchange of stablecoins including DAI, USDT, USDC and other tokens such as ETH and Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC). However, to function optimally, Curve Finance relies on liquidity pools where users can provide liquidity and receive a share of the fees distributed in the CRV.

Withdrawing coins from Binance to a non-custodial wallet is a vote of trust for CRV. The token was in free fall in the third quarter of 2023. To put this into perspective, CRV plunged 32% in August alone.

CRV price on September 22nd| Source: CRVUSDT on Binance, TradingView

The decline was exacerbated by the broader decline in cryptocurrencies caused by weakening momentum related to the approval of several complex derivatives for Bitcoin and Ethereum. At the same time, regulatory actions, particularly from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), had a significant impact on sentiment and token prices.

CRV sold after hack

CRV’s free fall can be directly attributed to an exploit of several Curve Finance liquidity pools in late July 2023. In a re-entry attack, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the older version of a Vyper compiler and stole over $61 million in tokens from Curve Finance’s pools.

The re-entry attack would allow the hacker to withdraw unlimited deposited tokens from Curve Finance’s pools, resulting in losses.

Curve Finance has since patched the vulnerability, but CRV prices have yet to recover despite the recent increase. Additionally, its co-founder and CEO, Michael Egorov, had to liquidate a large portion of the CRV that he had used to secure loans on several platforms, including Aave.

List of CRV Buyers| Source: Nansen

See you in early August, Egorov had sold 106 million CRV to multiple companies via over-the-counter (OTC) transactions at a discount. Top buyers included Tron co-founder Justin Sun, who purchased 2 million CRV, and Jeffrey Huang, who acquired 3.75 million CRV.

Feature image from Canva, chart from TradingView

Learn Crypto Trading, Yield Farms, Income strategies and more at CrytoAnswers
https://nov.link/cryptoanswers