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Glossary

This page should help any new user learn what people are talking about in different social channels or in these resources or the technical documentation.

CurveV1

CurveV1 refers to first product Curve deployed, which was the stablecoin swap pools. This term is used to describe any stable asset swap pool, e.g., USDT/USDC/DAI, stETH/ETH.

CurveV2

CurveV2 was the second product Curve deployed, this was the cryptopool swap pools. Cryptopools are swap pools which have assets which are not stable to each other, e.g., BTC/ETH/USDT, CRV/ETH.

Stableswap

See CurveV1.

Cryptoswap

See CurveV2

Liquid Lockers

Some projects offer to take CRV, lock it in a smart contract as veCRV and give a user tokens representing the veCRV in the smart contract. These are called liquid lockers because the underlying veCRV is locked but can be transferred (is liquid).

3CRV

3CRV is the LP token for the 3Pool (sometimes referred to as TriPool). Trading fees are distributed in 3CRV.

Admin fee

Admin fee is the share of trading fees that are received by governance participants who have locked their CRV (see veCRV).

Base Pools

Base pools are an old Curve concept, yet still working in some pools such as GUSD. Base pool tokens can be paired with other tokens to create new pools, e.g. 3crv pool token (USDT, USDC, DAI) paired with GUSD.

Boosting (also boosties)

The act of locking your CRV to earn more CRV on your provided liquidity.

Boosting your CRV Rewards

CRV

Governance and utility token for the Curve DAO.

DeFi (Decentralized Finance)

Decentralized finance (commonly referred to as DeFi) is an experimental form of finance that does not rely on financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks, and instead utilizes blockchains, most commonly the Ethereum blockchain.

Metamask

Metamask is an Ethereum wallet that allows you to interact with Curve and other dapps. You can also use it with Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets. It's the most popular Ethereum web wallet and is available as an add-on for most browsers.

Metapool

Metapools are a type of pool on Curve composed of one asset as well as as LP tokens from another pool.

Llamas

Llamas are wonderful and magical creatures. Each Curve team member must own at least one llama as part of their contract with Curve Finance.

LP (Liquidity provider)

Users providing liquidity (funds/assets) on the Curve or other DeFi protocols.

LP tokens (Liquidity provider token)

When you deposit into a Curve pool, you receive a counter party token which represents your share of the pool.

veCRV

Stands for vote-escrowed CRV. They are CRV locked for the purpose of voting and earning fees.

Understanding $CRV

Vote-locked CRV

This term is used interchangeably with Vote-escrowed CRV and veCRV.

Yearn

Yearn Protocol is a set of Ethereum Smart Contracts focused on creating a simple way to generate high risk-adjusted returns for depositors of various assets via best-in-class lending protocols, liquidity pools, and community-made yield farming strategies on Ethereum. It was founded by Andre Cronje who has been a long term collaborator of Curve Finance.