Stake CRV

Once you have staked your CRV, there are things you need to consider going forward:

• Firstly, to claim your fee rewards paid out in 3CRV tokens, you can look for the green “Claim” button in the box labeled “veCRV 3pool LP claim” at the bottom of the page. 
• Secondly, you can choose to either swap your 3CRV rewards back into a stablecoin, or stake your 3CRV and earn more CRV. To do so, you can head to the Minter, scroll down to 3Pool, and click “Deposit” to stake them into the gauge. This will allow you to earn more rewards by participating in the staking process.
• Lastly, as a participant in the Curve protocol, CRV holders can vote on all DAO proposals by vote-locking (i.e. staking) their CRV. Users who reach a voting power of 2500 veCRV can also create new proposals. VeCRV, which stands for vote escrowed CRV, is a feature that allows users to lock their CRV in a virtual locker for a specific amount of time in order to gain voting power. While your contribution and vote are highly valuable to the ecosystem, it won’t affect your rewards directly.

Native staking rewards on CRV are composed of:

• Trading fees: Trading fees on Curve Finance are distributed among users who have vote locked their CRV. Every time a trade takes place, 50% of the fee is collected and distributed to veCRV holders based on the amount of veCRV they hold. These fees are collected weekly, within 24 hours after Thursday midnight UTC and are converted to 3CRV. It’s important to note that the total annual trading fees are divided by all active CRV vote lockers. As the amount of locked tokens increases, the fee reward rate goes down.
• Boosted Rewards: Each CRV locked for four years is equal to 1 veCRV. The veCRV token allows you to acquire voting power to participate in the DAO and earn a boost of up to 2.5x on the liquidity you are providing on Curve. Head over to the minter. If your current boost hasn’t moved, you will need to claim CRV from each of the guage you’re providing liquidity in to update your boost.

You can use our Staking Calculator to better understand how these factors may impact your rewards.

Whilst we want to ensure staking is as safe and transparent as possible there are still things to consider regarding whether a specific staking option is right for you.

• Slashing risk: There is no slashing risk involved when staking CRV tokens.
• Unbonding risk: The minimum lockup time is one week and the maximum lockup time is four years. However, it takes ~8 days after you lock CRV before you can first claim your rewards in 3CRV. Further, locking is not reversible, although you can extend a lock and add CRV to it at any point, you cannot have CRV with different expiry dates in one account. This means that investors will not be able to sell their tokens immediately, but instead need to wait at least 8 days for the tokens to unbond before they can be traded again. This is something to keep in mind when deciding to stake, as the crypto markets are highly volatile. Consider keeping funds liquid if you do not intend to hold CRVlong-term. 
• Protocol security risks: There is an inherent risk that the protocol could contain unknown bugs, this risk applies not only to staking but also the investment in CRV.

Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of all the risks related to staking.

The CRV token is the native currency of Curve Finance / Curve DAO. The main purposes of CRV are to incentivise liquidity providers on the Curve Finance platform as well as getting as many users involved as possible in the governance of the protocol.

Token Utilities:

• Staking: You can stake CRV tokens by vote locking them, which allows you to earn 50% of protocol trading fees on a weekly basis, as well as boost you liquidity rewards paid out in CRV rewards to a maximum of 2.5 times.
• Governance: By vote locking your CRV tokens, you are able to participate in the protocol’s governance by casting votes on important decisions such as adding or removing assets from liquidity pools, adjusting fee sharing, and other key protocol updates. This process allows token holders to have a say in the direction and development of the protocol and its ecosystem.

The total supply of CRV is capped at 3.03 billion and it was officially launched on the Aug 13, 2020. The initial release rate was around 2m CRV per day. You can find the current release rate and the full schedule here.

Initial Token Distribution Breakdown

The ~1.3 billion initial token supply is distributed as follows:

• 5% to pre-CRV liquidity providers with 1 year vesting
• 30% to shareholders (team and investors) with 2-4 years vesting
• 3% to employees with 2 years vesting

5% to the community reserve