Swerve

What Is Swerve (SWRV)?

Swerve is a decentralized liquidity exchange pool that was forked from Curve. Similar to Curve, it is primarily focused on stablecoin pools. It launched with just one combined pool of Dai (DAI), USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT) and TrueUSD (TUSD). In December, the project reported that the pool had reached nearly $1 billion in total value locked.

As a decentralized autonomous organization, Swerve uses an Ethereum-issued ERC-20 token, SWRV, for governance in addition to rewarding liquidity providers.

The project was announced on Sept. 3, 2020, and launched the next day.

Who Are the Founders of Swerve?

Swerve was launched by a pseudonymous developer known as "John Deere" who started it as a passion project outside of his full-time job. When asked about his personal background in an "ask me anything" session, he stated that he is "just a lowly farmer" who likes "sane token distributions." He has also said that he has experience in software development and crypto.

Although he started it by himself, John Deere has given credit to the community for assisting in its design and implementation. He has said that while he is guiding the project during its initial growth, he hopes to pass on its development to the community.

In October 2020, Swerve governance voted to hire community member "FairlyRarePepe" as an additional developer.

What Makes Swerve Unique?

Swerve was launched as a community-focused alternative to Curve. Swerve's founder has been very critical of Curve, saying that the platform is not fairly governed and that its founder has too much power. Swerve's founder has said that it offers better swap pricing and larger annual percentage yields on stablecoins than other platforms.

Swerve also uses a reward gaming mechanism called "Boost" through which liquidity providers that lock up SWRV can receive a higher APY than those that don't boost. The rate at which one's APY is boosted is determined by a calculation that incorporates the number of tokens locked by the user and the total amount locked, among other factors.

Trading on the platform is subject to a 0.03% fee, of which 50% is awarded to liquidity providers and 50% is taken as an administrative fee and sent to the Swerve treasury, which is capped at $200,000. In October 2020, its governance voted to accept a grant to further build on decentralized finance platform Serum (SRM).

In October 2020, founder John Deer stated that his priorities for the project were to increase the platform's volume and better incentivize the holding of SWRV.