The yveCRV vault on Yearn Finance allows users to stake their CRV tokens, earning rewards in the form of 3CRV tokens. The vault perpetually stakes the CRV tokens into Curve DAO'S governance voting escrow, so ... the tokens are as good as gone. However, for each deposit, Yearn mints and issues to the depositor yveCRV which can be considered tokenized liquidity.

Per below, it was pretty instantly popular with over 1.5mm CRV tokens deposited over the first 2 weeks after the February 5th announcement.

A detailed primer on both of these vaults can be found on Yearn's Medium.

The title of the chart is "natural" deposits. This is because I have excluded yvBOOST deposits into the yveCRV vault to isolate direct user interactions. If we take a look at the below example transaction, when a user deposits into the yvBOOST vault they are issued yvBOOST tokens representing their deposit. The next step is an interaction with the yveCRV contract.

So, if we look at yveCRV activity we see a pretty telling story as volume has tailed off, approaching zero.

Users came back to the vault in May and for about 6 weeks, there was consistent and significant inflow into the yveCRV vault with weekly volume sustaining 450-500k CRV tokens for a few weeks.

On April 30th, Yearn announced the yvBOOST vault as an enhanced option for CRV or yveCRV holders. The vault automatically compounds the 3CRV rewards and performs a swap for yveCRV. This allows the vault to offer a current 63.34% APY on deposits, up from the 37.99% on the yveCRV vault.

I mention above that the yvBOOST vault utilizes the yveCRV vault. Deposited CRV is still staked perpetually into the Curve DAO and Curve remains an important partner and backbone of Yearn.

We also saw the bump to natural yveCRV deposits from the increased attention on Yearn following this announcement. How did users react to the new vault? With significant enthusiasm. The first week of deposits saw 2.87mm yveCRV tokens deposited into the vault, more than the first month total of yveCRV's own deposits.

Now, it looks like users have lost interest in the yvBOOST vault as that trend line has a pretty steep slope. And there is no doubt that deposits have tapered off, but let's exclude the initial deposit rush and take another look.

There's still a significant decrease in overall deposits with a meaningful change in late August persisting to present. However, native deposits are not the only access to this vault! Jump to Bounty 3 on zapping in and out of Yearn's vaults for more.

Using approval transactions as a proxy for new "customers" we see the same story. New addresses on the yvBOOST pool have slowed to a weekly moving average of about 5 per day following 30-50/day immediately following the announcement and sustained high teens throughout the mid Summer.

So, we see a direct bump in users and deposits following the yvBOOST announcement. If anything, the announcement reminded users of the yveCRV vault. I would theorize that the sustained deposits into the yveCRV vault are not simple contagion, but that users were using it as a de-facto swap pool. The yvBOOST vault holds yveCRV so users need the yearn token before they can use the vault. Depositing native CRV in to the old vault is one way to acquire yveCRV without selling the token. Users maintain support of Curve by ensuring their tokens contribute to the DAO, and can then take their yveCRV to the boosted pool.

I'll investigate that in 2 ways. First is with rewards. The yveCRV pool pays out rewards in 3Crv which users have to manually claim (or restake). There is a significant one-off increase in 3Crv rewards claimed by users in just one week following the boost announcement - the last of May. However, this quickly falls with late summer claim volume a fraction of the pre-boost vault activity!

If users were leaving their yveCRV in the vault, we'd expect to see a sustained increase in weekly claim volume. That just doesn't happen.

Finally, let's look at volume (in CRV tokens) by type of transaction.

During the week of the announcement, there was significant withdraw activity removing liquidity from the vault. We see the same sustained deposits for a few weeks and it isn't until late June that withdraws pick back up. In the same week (of June 27th) that 2.18mm tokens are withdrawn from this pool, we see a volume spike of 1.25mm in deposits to the yvBOOST vault.

continue reading about yearn // curve with
yveCRV Vault Rewards v Fees
ZapIn ZapOut w yvBOOST

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