Curve Founder Continues To Offload CRV In OTC Deals

Curve founder Michael Egorov, who has the open finance space watching his every move this week as he scrambles to shore up DeFi loan positions, is continuing to send millions of CRV tokens to various addresses in over-the-counter (OTC) trades.

An estimated 110M CRV worth $44M has been sold so far, according to a Dune dashboard tracking the deals.

The most recent trade at the time of writing is a transfer of 2.5M CRV tokens to an unknown address. Jun Du, the co-founder of Huobi, a centralized exchange which regularly processes over $1B in volume, also received 10M of CRV in two separate transactions on Aug. 2.

None of the OTC deal participants responded to The Defiant’s requests for comment by press time.

DeFi Builders Come Together

The deals have been somewhat of a revelation for DeFi.

On one hand, the OTC transactions show that members of the industry can quickly come together when it becomes apparent that a big player has become overleveraged.

On the other hand, it’s easy to say that the deals run counter to DeFi’s ethos of transparency — instead, the terms of the deal are private, leaving most crypto participants in the dark about the specifics of the deals – which allowed investors to buy the token at roughly a 40% discount.

Events were precipitated by a $70M hack of Curve on July 30, which pushed down the price of the exchange’s CRV token by as much as 31%. Egorov, who had over a quarter of a billion dollars worth of CRV locked up as collateral earlier this week, saw interest rates spike on those positions as investors pulled their stablecoins from lending platforms.

The Curve co-founder has since been selling CRV in order to pay down roughly $100M in outstanding loans on lending platforms including Aave, Fraxlend and Abracadabra.

No Set Terms

There don’t appear to be set terms of what buyers of CRV will do once they obtain the tokens — after Wintermute received one of its two allocations of 12.5M in CRV, it sent the tokens to Binance.

MachiBigBrother, a major NFT trader, locked his 3.75M CRV in a contract which gives out token rewards and grants voting power.

Egorov still owes over $60M across lending platforms in DeFi so it’s unclear when the OTC sales of CRV will stop. The founder only has 2.1M in CRV in his primary wallet at the time of writing, but it’s possible he can withdraw more tokens from some lending positions.

Curve Team Sends Ultimatum To Hacker

In an effort to try and recoup its losses the Curve team, along with Alchemix and Metronome, who lost millions in last Sunday’s hack, have sent a message with an Ethereum transaction saying that they won’t pursue legal action if the attacker returns 90% of the funds.

The message also says the hacker must complete the process by Aug. 3 at 8:00 UTC or else the 10% bounty will go to any party which is able to identify the attacker in a way that leads to a conviction in court.

The message was unequivocal about the team’s plans if the hacker doesn’t meet the ultimatum — “We will pursue you from all angles with the full extent of the law.”