DeFi Token CRV Tanks 30% as Curve Finance Founder Gets Liquidated

The founder of the stablecoin lending and borrowing protocol Curve Finance, Michael Egorov, is seeing his position liquidated.

He had over 111 million CRV tokens in collateral and $20 million in debt over four DeFi platforms, reported Lookonchain on June 13.

As the price of CRV fell, other positions went underwater, causing a cascade of liquidations.

The #Curvefi founder(Michale Egorov) is being liquidated!

He currently has 111.87M $CRV($33.87M) in collateral and $20.6M in debt on 4 platforms.https://t.co/WM1nW8JKwU pic.twitter.com/huwgetBXuS

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) June 13, 2024

Curve Finance Woes

CRV prices have been crumbling for the past week, having fallen 45% since June 7. This has put pressure on those using the token as collateral for DeFi loans, such as the platform’s founder.

Further pressure has been put on the platform and token prices following a $20 million hack of the UwU lending protocol earlier this week.

In response to the incident, Egorov said that ‘soft liquidations’ worked well. “The system showed a fantastic performance,” he said before adding “This gave time for liquidators to prepare funds and OTC-liquidate the hacker’s position. As a result, the system has no hacker’s funds left, no bad debts, everything operates well.”

Soft liquidations are part of Curve’s Lending-Liquidating Automate Market Maker Algorithm (LLAMMA).

As of June 12, Egorov was borrowing around $96 million in stablecoins, mostly Curve’s crvUSD, against $141 million in CRV, across five accounts on five protocols, according to blockchain intelligence firm Arkham.

$140M CRV nearing Liquidation

Curve founder Michael Egorov is currently borrowing $95.7M in stablecoins (mostly crvUSD) against $141M in CRV, across 5 accounts on 5 protocols.

Based on current rates, Egorov is paying $60M annualized in order to keep his positions open on… pic.twitter.com/ipTlWLZOAx

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) June 12, 2024

Industry observers and DeFi experts had previously warned about the potential impacts of such a large debt position.

“This has ramifications throughout the whole DeFi sector, unfortunately, so expect some pullbacks,” commented trader ‘MisterSpread’ on X on June 13.

“CRV balance on exchanges hit an all-time high, rising 57% in the past two hours,” observed Crypto Quant founder Ki Young Ju in a post on X on June 13.

DeFi Fallout

CRV prices tanked 33% in a matter of minutes in late trading on June 12. The DeFi asset is currently trading at $0.283 following a fall from an intraday high of $0.374. CRV is now down a painful 98% from its all-time high of $15.37 in August 2020.

Other DeFi tokens such as GMX and Frax Share (FXS) are also seeing losses today but not as severe.

Markets are flat on the day at $2.58 trillion, with very little movement from Bitcoin and Ethereum following their falls earlier this week.