The stablecoin-and-pegged-asset AMM that shipped on Monad the same week mainnet launched — still a fraction of the size of Curve's flagship Ethereum deployment.
Curve is an AMM built specifically for swapping pegged or like-valued assets — stablecoins, or wrapped versions of the same underlying asset — with minimal slippage. Its "StableSwap" invariant blends a zero-slippage constant-sum curve near the peg with a Uniswap-style constant-product curve further away, preventing a pool from ever fully draining one side. A configurable amplification coefficient (A) tunes how flat that curve is: the whitepaper's own worked example uses A=100 and reports roughly 100x lower slippage than a comparable constant-product pool under those parameters; real deployed pools for major pegged pairs often run much higher amplification than that illustrative example. A change to a pool's amplification only happens via DAO vote and is ramped in gradually, never applied instantly. Curve also runs crvUSD, its own decentralized stablecoin with a distinct soft-liquidation design, and a separate "CryptoSwap" invariant for non-pegged volatile pairs that periodically re-pegs liquidity around a tracked price oracle.
A typical stable-pool fee sits around 0.04% — far below the roughly 0.3% common elsewhere — split evenly between LPs and an admin fee. Admin fees are collected weekly, swapped into crvUSD, and distributed to veCRV holders. Locking CRV into veCRV (one week to four years, longer locks earning more voting power on a linear decay schedule) grants a boost of up to 2.5x on a holder's own LP rewards, plus a weekly vote on which pools receive CRV emissions — a gauge weight vote that can only change once every ten days per gauge. That governance vote happens exclusively on Ethereum mainnet; sidechain and L2 deployments, Monad included, receive CRV emissions through a permissionless cross-chain gauge factory that bridges tokens minted by a root gauge on Ethereum, but the actual weekly voting stays on L1. In practice: emissions can flow to a Monad pool, but nobody votes on Monad to make that happen.
Against a plain constant-product AMM, StableSwap's entire reason to exist is the roughly 100x slippage improvement its own whitepaper claims for near-pegged pairs — the tradeoff other AMMs don't make. Against Uniswap V3, concentrated liquidity is a general-purpose efficiency tool that can be pointed at stable pairs too, and V3's lower fee tiers have taken real stablecoin volume from Curve over time — but V3 LPing needs active range management, while Curve is a simple pool-share deposit with no range decisions. Against Uniswap V4, V4 has no purpose-built stable invariant out of the box; a custom hook could approximate one, but nothing ships it natively the way Curve does. Against Kuru's order book, Curve guarantees liquidity at some price even with zero active market-maker participation, where a CLOB's pricing degrades toward its AMM backstop the moment market makers step back — Curve trades a potentially worse price for a hard liquidity guarantee. Against Balancer's Stable pools specifically, the relationship isn't competition so much as lineage: Balancer's own documentation describes its Stable-pool math as based directly on Curve's StableSwap design.
Curve was announced as part of Monad's mainnet-launch integration slate and confirmed live within days of Monad going live on November 24, 2025, minting crvUSD to fund a bridge and launching a low-volatility pool pairing crvUSD with a Swiss-franc-pegged asset. By December 2025 Curve had rolled out a dedicated "FastBridge" for Monad, seeded with 650,000 crvUSD, specifically to skip the multi-day withdrawal delays typical of native L2/L1 bridges. Monad TVL has grown since, but remains a small fraction of Curve's dominant Ethereum deployment, reflecting how young and comparatively untested the Monad pools still are relative to Curve's flagship chain.
Curve's math is optimized for assets that stay pegged — if one side of a pool depegs meaningfully, the amplification design means liquidity providers end up disproportionately holding the depegging asset as arbitrageurs trade against the pool, rather than a diversified share of the loss; analysts describe the resulting LP exposure as similar to holding a short straddle across the pool's assets. Curve pools also have a real hack history: in July 2023, several stable pools were exploited via a reentrancy bug present in specific Vyper compiler versions (0.2.15, 0.2.16 and 0.3.0) — a language-level bug that hit multiple Vyper-based protocols the same day, not a flaw in Curve's own contract logic. Gross losses were reported around $70M; roughly 73% was recovered within about a week through white-hat intervention and negotiated returns, settling the net loss closer to $20M. Separately, in May 2025 Curve's official X account was briefly compromised for a phishing link and, days later, its domain was hijacked at the registrar level — Curve states no contracts or funds were affected in either incident, and pushed users toward an ENS-based access point afterward as a hijack-resistant alternative. Monad's deployment, still under two years old, has meaningfully thinner liquidity and a shorter track record than Curve's flagship chain.
Note: CRV holders can lock into veCRV to vote weekly on which pools get CRV emissions and to boost their own LP rewards — half of trading fees go to veCRV holders, half to LPs directly. That vote happens on Ethereum mainnet even for chains like Monad that receive the emissions.
Curve's core contracts haven't been drained by a logic bug since July 2023, when a bug in specific versions of the Vyper compiler — not Curve's own code — enabled reentrancy across several Vyper-based protocols at once, including a few Curve pools. About 73% of the roughly $70M gross loss was recovered within a week. Two 2025 incidents (an X account compromise and a DNS hijack) affected Curve's social/web presence, not its contracts or funds.
Curve's StableSwap invariant is purpose-built for near-1:1 pricing and gives materially lower slippage on large stable trades than a plain constant-product pool — its own whitepaper example cites roughly 100x lower slippage under illustrative parameters. Uniswap V3's concentrated liquidity narrows that gap when actively managed, but requires ongoing range decisions Curve's simple deposit model doesn't.
The pool automatically rebalances toward more of the depegging asset as arbitrageurs trade against it, leaving LPs overweight the broken token — loss scales roughly with how far and how long the depeg persists. This is the main scenario where Curve's low-IL-for-correlated-assets assumption breaks down.
Yes — Curve is live on Monad with crvUSD pools, and the team seeded a dedicated FastBridge with 650,000 crvUSD specifically so users can skip the multi-day withdrawal delays common on native L2 bridges.
Sources: Curve Finance, What Is Curve Finance? StableSwap, crvUSD, Risks and Security — Zealynx, Overview & Tokenomics — Curve Resources, StableSwap whitepaper (PDF), Curve Finance liquidity pool hack — Chainalysis, Curve domain incident — Curve News, Curve best yields, week 51 2025 — Curve News
Last reviewed 2026-07-08. More Monad research.
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