Curve is really three tools behind one address: a DEX tuned for swapping assets that should trade near the same price, a set of liquidity pools that pay fees and CRV rewards, and a lending side (crvUSD and Llamalend) with an unusual “soft liquidation” design. How to use Curve Finance depends on which of those jobs you need, and each carries a different risk. This guide starts with a decision table, then covers swapping, depositing and gauge staking, veCRV boosting, borrowing and exiting, all checked against Curve’s documentation as of October 2026.
Key takeaways
- Curve’s official site moved to curve.finance after the old curve.fi domain was hijacked at the registrar on 12 May 2025. Type it yourself.
- Swaps between pegged assets (USDC/USDT, ETH/stETH) get tight prices thanks to the StableSwap curve.
- LP tokens earn trading fees on deposit; staking them in the pool’s gauge adds CRV rewards.
- Locking CRV as veCRV (one week to four years, irreversible) can boost CRV rewards up to 2.5x.
- crvUSD and Llamalend loans convert collateral gradually in price “bands” before any hard liquidation.
What you can do on Curve (and which job you need)
| Your goal | Curve feature | What you sign | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swap stablecoins or LSTs with little slippage | Curve DEX swap | Token approval plus one swap | Routing through a pool holding a depegging coin |
| Earn trading fees on assets you already hold | Deposit into a pool | Approval plus deposit; you receive an LP token | Ending up with the weakest coin if one depegs |
| Earn CRV on top of fees | Stake LP token in the pool’s gauge | LP token approval plus stake | CRV price falls; gauge votes redirect emissions |
| Boost CRV or vote on emissions | Lock CRV as veCRV | CRV approval plus lock | Tokens locked until expiry, no early exit |
| Borrow a stablecoin against ETH, BTC or others | crvUSD minting or Llamalend | Collateral approval plus loan | Soft-liquidation losses, then hard liquidation |
If you want the protocol’s history and tokenomics rather than instructions, read what Curve is first. The rest of this page assumes you have a self-custody wallet funded on Ethereum or one of the networks Curve lists in its network selector.
How to swap on Curve without overpaying
- Open curve.finance from a bookmark, choose the network, and go to the swap page of Curve DEX.
- Pick the token you are selling and the token you want. The router searches Curve’s own pools and may route through more than one.
- Read the quote panel before approving: expected output, price impact, the pools used in the route and the slippage tolerance. For a stable-to-stable swap a large price impact is a warning sign; it usually means the route passes through a pool that is badly imbalanced.
- Approve the input token, ideally for the exact amount, then confirm the swap.
Why are stablecoin swaps cheaper here? Curve’s StableSwap invariant keeps the price almost flat while a pool is balanced, so a trade barely moves it. That only holds while the assets actually trade at par. When one coin loses its peg, arbitrageurs sell it into the pool, the pool fills with that coin, and anyone swapping the other way pays a sharply worse rate. Keep slippage tolerance low (Curve’s default is conservative) and treat a sudden, unusually attractive rate as evidence that something is off.
How to use Curve Finance pools: deposit and stake in a gauge
Choosing a pool
Curve pools fall into two families. Stableswap pools hold assets meant to be worth the same (USDC/USDT, ETH/wstETH). Cryptoswap pools, labelled twocrypto or tricrypto, hold volatile assets such as USDT/WBTC/ETH and concentrate liquidity around a moving internal price, closer to an ordinary DEX with impermanent loss to match. On the pool list, sort or filter by network, pool type, TVL and volume. The figures shown are a base APY, which comes from trading fees and moves with volume, and a rewards range for CRV and any extra incentive tokens. The lower end of the CRV range applies to a position with no boost and the upper end to the maximum 2.5x boost. We do not quote either figure; they change daily.
Depositing
Inside a pool, the deposit tab lets you add all coins in proportion or just one. A balanced deposit adds liquidity without shifting the pool. A single-coin deposit is effectively a swap into the pool’s mix: if you add the coin the pool is short of, the interface may show a small bonus; if you add the coin it already holds too much of, you pay a penalty. That bonus is often a clue the coin you are adding is the one the market is selling. You receive an LP token representing your share.
Staking in the gauge
The LP token alone earns fees. To earn CRV you stake it in the pool’s gauge, and the interface offers a combined deposit-and-stake action that does both in fewer steps. Staked LP tokens move into the gauge contract, so they will not show in your wallet; check your positions page instead. CRV accrues continuously and you claim it from the pool’s withdraw/claim area, paying gas each time, which makes frequent claims uneconomic for small positions on Ethereum mainnet.
CRV rewards, veCRV and boosting
Locking CRV converts it into veCRV, which gives voting power over where CRV emissions go and a boost of up to 2.5x on your own gauge rewards. Curve’s documentation sets the lock between one week and four years. Your veCRV balance decays linearly toward zero as the unlock date approaches, so keeping the maximum weight means extending the lock regularly. Locked CRV cannot be withdrawn early under any circumstances.
If you do not hold CRV yet, our step-by-step CRV purchase guide covers exchanges that list it and when locking makes sense.
How much veCRV you need depends on the size of your LP position relative to the gauge and on how much veCRV everyone else holds; the docs point to a boost calculator, and the pool’s liquidity details show your current boost on Ethereum pools. Curve’s own blog once estimated that a full boost on a $100,000 position in one pool needed around 1.55 million veCRV at the time, which is why most smaller LPs never lock directly.
The alternatives are liquid lockers. Convex, StakeDAO and Yearn pool their users’ LP tokens behind huge veCRV positions and share the boosted rewards, minus a fee, without asking you to lock anything. That adds another contract and another team to trust: on 27 May 2026 security firms reported that an attacker minted trillions of StakeDAO’s vsdCRV tokens on Arbitrum after an apparent deployer-key compromise (The Block, Cointelegraph), a reminder that boosting layers stack risk. Our explainer on how Convex works covers the trade-offs.
Borrowing with crvUSD and soft liquidation
Curve offers two borrowing products that share one engine. crvUSD minting lets you deposit collateral such as ETH, wstETH or WBTC and mint the crvUSD stablecoin. Llamalend markets let you borrow crvUSD against various collateral, or borrow other assets against crvUSD, with lenders supplying the funds. Both use LLAMMA, Curve’s lending AMM.
The difference from most lenders is what happens near liquidation. When you open a loan you choose how many price bands (between 4 and 50) your collateral is spread across. If the collateral price falls into your bands, LLAMMA gradually sells collateral for crvUSD; if price recovers, it buys the collateral back. This is soft liquidation. You are not closed out, but every round trip loses a little value to the AMM, which shows up as a falling health number. If health reaches zero, the loan can be hard-liquidated in the conventional way.
Practical points: more bands spread the conversion over a wider price range and reduce losses per move, at the cost of a lower maximum borrow. Being in soft liquidation also changes your options; you can usually only repay or add collateral, not withdraw. Rates on crvUSD markets move with the peg policy and utilisation, so read them live on the market page. scrvUSD, the savings version of crvUSD, is a separate deposit that receives a share of borrowing interest; check the current rate on the savings page rather than relying on any quoted figure.
Exiting a pool cleanly
- Claim rewards you want to keep, so they are not forgotten in the gauge.
- Unstake the LP token from the gauge (the withdraw area offers unstake, or a combined unstake-and-withdraw).
- Withdraw liquidity either in all coins proportionally or in one coin. A one-coin withdrawal of the coin the pool is short of costs extra; taking the coin it has too much of may show a bonus.
- Check leftovers: approvals given to the pool, the gauge and any zap contract remain in place after you leave.
During a depeg, withdrawing proportionally is usually the honest route: you receive the pool’s actual mix, including the troubled coin, rather than paying a large penalty to exit in the healthy one.
Curve risks: depegs, exploits and fake front ends
- Fake front ends. Curve’s domain was hijacked twice: in August 2022 (users signing on a cloned site lost roughly $570,000–$612,000, by various counts) and on 12 May 2025, when attackers changed curve.fi’s DNS at the registrar and pointed it to a decoy that requested wallet signatures. Curve says contracts and funds were unaffected and moved to curve.finance. Days earlier, its X account had been taken over to post a drainer link. Bookmark the site and treat links from social posts with suspicion.
- Depegs. In a stablecoin pool you end up holding more of whichever coin the market is dumping. See our guide to stablecoin depegging for how this unfolds.
- Smart-contract and compiler risk. On 30 July 2023 a reentrancy bug in certain versions of the Vyper compiler let attackers drain several Curve pools; reported losses were about $70 million, with roughly 70% later recovered. Your pool’s code was fine on paper; the compiler was not.
- Governance and concentration. CRV emissions follow veCRV votes, so rewards on a pool can vanish when vote buyers move elsewhere. In 2023 the founder’s large CRV-backed loans also raised fears of forced selling.
- Approvals. Curve pools, gauges, zaps and lending markets each request permissions. Approve exact amounts, and periodically clean up with our guide on how to revoke token approvals.
For other DEX, lending and yield walkthroughs, see our DeFi guides hub.
FAQ
How do I stake on Curve?
Deposit into a pool to receive its LP token, then stake that token in the pool’s gauge, either as a separate step or with the combined deposit-and-stake option. Staked tokens earn CRV (and sometimes other incentive tokens) on top of trading fees. Separately, “staking” CRV usually means locking it as veCRV, which is a different, irreversible action with a lock of up to four years.
What are Curve gauge rewards?
Gauges are contracts that distribute CRV to staked LP tokens. Each week veCRV holders vote on how emissions are split between gauges, so a pool’s CRV rewards can rise or fall with those votes. The interface shows the rewards as a range: the low end with no boost and the high end with the maximum 2.5x veCRV boost.
Is the Curve Finance app safe to use?
Curve’s core contracts have long histories, but the protocol has suffered a compiler-level exploit (July 2023) and two domain hijacks (2022 and May 2025). Use only curve.finance from a bookmark, check pool composition before depositing, avoid unfamiliar pools with thin liquidity, and approve exact amounts. No DeFi app is risk-free.
How do I mint crvUSD?
Open the crvUSD section of the app, choose a collateral market, enter the collateral amount, the amount of crvUSD to mint and the number of bands, then approve and create the loan. Review the liquidation range shown for your bands. Remember that soft liquidation begins inside that range and quietly erodes collateral while price stays there.
Crypto is volatile and risky; this is education, not financial advice. Do your own research.
