coindesk.com
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve Finance deployed its highly anticipated native stablecoin called crvUSD on the Ethereum mainnet Wednesday afternoon.
Blockchain data on Etherscan shows that the contract has minted a total of $20 million in crvUSD tokens in five transactions within five minutes.
The protocol’s governance token CRV has jumped up to 97 cents on the news, and is up 7% for the day, according to CoinDesk data.
The deployment marks a major milestone for rolling out Curve’s long-awaited stablecoin to the public. Curve, one of the largest decentralized marketplaces focusing on stablecoins with some $5 billion of assets on the protocol, announced that last year it started developing its own dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Curve’s stablecoin will face heavy competition as a slew of rival DeFi protocols issue or are in the process of developing their own native stablecoin to attract users and increase activity at a time when crypto trading and lending is flagging.
Aave, another giant DeFi protocol with some $7 billion of assets locked, deployed on testnet its native stablecoin GHO this February. Lending protocol MakerDAO issues the largest decentralized stablecoin DAI, which has a $5 billion market capitalization.
The crvUSD stablecoin won’t be accessible to the public until later as it is not yet integrated into Curve’s user interface. An admin in the protocol’s official Telegram channel said the stablecoin’s public release is “waiting on front end,” which will come “soon.”