Curve, the robot decentralized exchange for stablecoins, is kicking off a new dividend program for holders of its governance token, CRV.
"We'll start moving towards a cashflow-based protocol because the numbers are too sweet to not do it," Curve founder Michael Egorov told CoinDesk in an email.
In order to participate in governance, users need to stake their CRV to the voting contract, exchanging CRV for veCRV (voting escrow CRV). Those escrow tokens will begin receiving half of all the staking fees on Curve starting today.
More details and instructions for the dividend can be found in the Curve documentation.
Each trade on the platform incurs a 0.04% trading fee, which is left in the pool until liquidity providers (LPs) remove their share. With this shift, trading fees will be split between liquidity providers and veCRV holders.
Over the last week, fees on Curve have varied between approximately $70,000 and $150,000 per day. The project just hit a new all-time-high daily volume at over $400,000,000.
For now, 2 million CRV tokens are distributed to LPs annually, though that amount will drop by 15% each year.
Volume is up in part for another reason: a vampire mining attack by Curve fork Swerve just ended. Egorov wrote, "The fork attracted non-Curve people in initially, but after their inflation ran out, they switched to Curve increasing the TVL [total value locked]."
Curve is now in third place on DeFi Pulse, with $1.18 billion in crypto assets staked.
CRV is trading at $1.40, off from a seven-day high of $2.07.