The Defiant

Curve Turns Off Mochi’s Rewards After 'Amazingly Scammy' Tactics Trigger Outcry

Mochi launch reignites the Curve wars as influential Defiers decry its brazen tactics to maximize rewards.

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Curve Turns Off Mochi’s Rewards After 'Amazingly Scammy' Tactics Trigger Outcry

A fresh salvo has been fired in the Curve War and the Establishment isn’t happy.

Mochi is an overcollateralized lending protocol that allows users to borrow USDM, its native stablecoin, against their crypto assets. It functions similarly to Maker, Abracadabra and Cream.

Launched yesterday, the project is in the spotlight for its brazen tactics to maximise CRV rewards for its USDM liquidity pool deployed on Curve Finance, which has now killed its gauge altogether, cutting off its rewards.

Here’s how it all went down.

On Nov. 10, Mochi launched its governance token, MOCHI INU, and incentivized liquidity for its USDM stablecoin. As is customary, DeFi users aped in, and liquidity quickly grew above $100M.

Mochi then proceeded to leverage its own token and used the proceeds to buy and lock 6,000 ETH ($28M) worth of Convex Finance’s CVX tokens, which can be used to exert influence over Curve governance and therefore, the allocation of CRV rewards.

This move immediately drew the ire of prominent DeFi figures.

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Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje called it “amazingly scammy”.

It’s worth noting that Yearn is a seasoned veteran of the Curve Wars as it was the first protocol to get whitelisted by Curve and has been accumulating CRV tokens ever since. Cronje also created the CRV Bribe tool.

Prominent DeFi investor Tetranode wasn’t so subtle.

A few hours later, Curve announced that the USDM gauge would be killed, essentially turning off CRV rewards for Mochi’s pool.

Mochi had previously tweeted their launch plans, but are yet to publicly respond to Curve’s latest action.

It will be interesting to see how Mochi responds, as Curve’s announcement has left the door open for restoration of the gauge with a full DAO vote.

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