DeFi Exchange Curve Finance Tops $6.8B Daily Volume

Curve Finance, the largest decentralized crypto exchange, has registered more than $6.8 billion in daily trading volume across all chains.

Curve Volume at All-Time Highs

Crypto prices may be falling, but trading volumes are soaring higher.

Daily trading volume on DeFi exchange Curve Finance hit a new all-time high of $6.8 billion Thursday as volatility rocked the crypto market. In a tweet posted by Curve’s official Twitter account, the protocol revealed that it had facilitated $5.8 billion worth of swaps on Ethereum mainnet and an additional $1 billion of volume on other Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains such as Avalanche, Fantom, Polygon, and Arbitrum. 

Curve is the largest decentralized crypto exchange and currently hosts $9.8 billion in total value locked. The exchange specializes in like-asset swaps between stablecoins and liquid staking Ethereum tokens. Curve’s biggest liquidity pool, known as 3pool, lets users swap between USDT, USDC, and DAI with low levels of slippage. 

Several factors have contributed to Curve’s record-breaking trading volume. Earlier today, fears over Tether’s USDT stablecoin losing its dollar peg caused panic among investors, with many using 3pool to exchange USDT for the perceptually more stable USDC and DAI. At the same time, arbitrageurs were taking the opportunity to extract USDT from the pool for less than a dollar and redeem it with Tether at a one-to-one ratio with U.S dollars. Additionally, today’s sharp decline in Bitcoin and Ethereum has led many to use Curve’s tricrypto2 pool to exchange wrapped Bitcoin and Ethereum for USDT. 

Curve is not the only exchange to see a spike in trading volume from recent market volatility. CoinMarketCap data shows that several centralized exchanges such as Kraken, FTX, and Bitfinex have all seen more than 100% increases in spot trading volume over the past 24 hours. Derivatives volume also surged, with Kraken and Bitfinex registering 173% and 142% gains, respectively. 

Data from The Block shows that the 7-day moving average volume across all exchanges has spiked from a yearly low of $16.32 billion on Apr. 20 to $39.31 billion today. If the current daily volumes persist, the moving average will likely come close to its all-time high of $88.12 billion set almost a year ago on May 26, 2021. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing this piece, the author owned ETH, CRV, and several other cryptocurrencies.