Curve Overview

In this dashboard, I will give an overview of the Curve Dex swap. Some of the metrics considered when looking at a dex swap genrally, and the prevalence of whales on Curve.

What is Curve ?

Curve is one of the biggest decentralized exchanges on the ethereum blockchain with a focus on efficiency, low slippage, and trading fees. One significant difference to other DEXs is that on Curve, traders will mainly trade stablecoins and variants of BTC and ETH with other variants of the same token. Due to the fact that tokens on Curves are stable relative to their pair, users can swap assets at a minimal cost.

Why is Curve important ?

Here is the swap volume by Dex Protocall in the past 3 months.

What we can see from the graph above is that recently the Curve has been on par with most popular dex swaps by volume on Ethereum, and Curve has had almost $25 billion worth of swaps on the platform in the past 90 days.

General analysis of Curve

from the graphs below we can see the

Curve weekly swap volume
Curve Top swap pools
Curve weekly liquidity events

Curve swap size analysis

I broke the swaps on Curve up into 3 categories to see how large swaps are affecting the curve ecosystem. The three categories are Small: under $1,000,000, Medium: between $10,000,000 and $1,000,000, and Large: over $10,000,000. Additionally I am defining a curve whale as any address that has made a swap valued at over $10,000,000.

The above graphs show

Dex platform swap size breakdown
Curve weekly swap size breakdown
Curve whale contract interactions

Conclusion

If we look at Curve's monthly volume in fall of 2020 the volume is arould 1B, but in the past 3 month the volume has been between 4.3B and 8.5B which is at a minimum a 4x growth in volume.
Curve's primary utility seems to be making large swaps of similar assets. if we look at swap size percentages 68% of the volume on Curve is in swaps over 1M. The second highest dex is Uniswap-v2 with 25% of the volume over 1M. Additionally small transactions on Curve never reach more that 1.5B in weekly volume so when Curve has huge volume spikes it has been caused by whales.
The whales on Curve are using many other defi apps on ethereum. This makes it seem like Curve is helping to create synergy between different apps by reducing the swap cost of like kind assets.