CRV Price Recovers From 6-Month Lows, What’s Driving The Price?

Curve Finance’s native token CRV has recovered from a 6-month low, and many believe that the news of Huobi co-founder Jun Du buying CRV tokens has contributed to it. 

Jun Du bought 10 million tokens valued at $4 million from Micheal Egorov, founder of Curve. Egorov had offered his tokens for sale to bolster his at-risk loan positions, primarily for borrowing stablecoins using CRV tokens as collateral. 

Curve Finance, one of the biggest DeFi protocols on the Ethereum blockchain, recently saw its in-house CRV price recover about 25% at the start of the month. It had previously dropped by 35% between July 30-31 following the panic selloff spearheaded by Curve Finance’s $47 million exploit. 

The July reentrancy attack was not the only exploit recorded on Curve Finance as the DeFi protocol had previously lost over $570,000 in August 2022 after hackers compromised the front end of its liquidity pool. 

However, the recent acquisition of 10 million tokens by Jun Du projects a positive outlook for CRV tokens, especially the recent attack on its ecosystem. Confirming the transaction, Du noted that he has locked up his investment for a period of one year as veCRV. 

Apart from Du, the Aave Chan Initiative, a delegate platform from Aave’s governance forum, recently put forward a proposal for the purchase of about $2 million worth of CRV. After the planned purchase, which is to be made by the Aave Treasury, the CRV tokens would also be locked up as veCRV for about four years. 

Egorov has so far sold 72 million CRV tokens to various investors and the continued purchase and acceptance of the CRV token demonstrates its popularity and utility. 

One such investor who remains bullish on CRV is Justin Sun, founder of the Tron network. He recently acquired 5 million CRV from Egorov by paying using Tether’s USDT in a direct Over-the-counter (OTC) trade. Justin confirmed the purchase in a tweet noting that both platforms “As steadfast partners” will keep being “…committed to providing support whenever needed.”

According to a Twitter post by Sandra from Nansen, other popular purchasers of Curve tokens include Cream Finance, Machi Big Brother, DWF Labs, DCFGod, and Andrew Kang, co-founder of Mechanism Capital. 

A vast majority of these transactions were conducted through OTC, with Egorov realizing over $20 million, which he applied to balancing his borrowings and removing himself from liquidation. Egorov also sent another huge supply of CRV (17.5 million) to an address starting with 0xf51. 

Once the largest DeFi protocol on the Ethereum blockchain, the vast majority of Curve trading volumes still come from Ethereum.