How Curve Finance’s CRV Token Launched Without Anyone Knowing

In a stunning turn of events, Curve Finance‘s highly anticipated token, CRV, was launched by an anonymous developer rather than its core team. The token is living up to market expectations with an absurd valuation, but many community members are disappointed by the way things were handled.

One of the most anticipated token’s of 2020, Curve’s native governance token, was slated for launch in “early August 2020.” The project’s Telegram group was flooded with inquiries from excited users as to when the token would launch.

Yesterday, Frank Topbottom, a crypto analyst on Twitter, said that Curve’s token seems to have been deployed along with the protocol’s AragonDAO. An employee from Curve replied that this was a scam, prompting the Twitter user to delete their tweet.

I apologize if I made a mistake, and have already deleted the tweet, but… it means that someone has deployed the entire ecosystem of $CRV token, including DAOs on Aragon. So crazy

— Frank Topbottom (@FrankResearcher) August 13, 2020

As it turns out, this was the actual launch, not a scam, of Curve’s governance token, but the team behind Curve didn’t even know.

The code for the token and DAO was recently made public via GitHub, and an anonymous developer decided to put it all together and launch the smart contract.

After confirming the deployed contract contained the same code, the Curve team rushed to ensure the deployer didn’t make any significant changes or add any backdoors. With the help of Aragon, they concluded that there was nothing malicious in the contracts.

Curve ended up declaring this as their official token and DAO launch, which hasn’t sat well with some community members.

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