Curve Finance has launched on the Stellar mainnet, making its first native deployment outside the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem, partly in response to institutional demand.
According to The Block, Curve Finance and the Stellar Development Foundation announced that StableSwap has launched on Stellar. Users can now create their own liquidity pools without needing separate permission to establish a pool, find existing pools, swap assets, and provide liquidity to pools.
StableSwap is designed for swapping assets whose prices move closely together. These include stablecoins pegged to the same currency, wrapped tokens representing Bitcoin, and synthetic versions of cryptocurrencies.
Institutional demand influenced the choice of Stellar
Curve founder Michael Egorov said demand from institutions partly influenced the team’s decision to start exploring networks outside the EVM. According to Egorov, Stellar stood out as a suitable option because it is closer than many other networks to the EVM world the team is familiar with, and because there is institutional demand for Curve.
Stellar is already one of the networks used for stablecoins and tokenized assets. Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund is on the network, while MoneyGram also uses Stellar for money transfers.
The new pools also offer issuers a tool for creating markets for supported assets. Curve said that if liquidity grows and financial applications integrate the pools, the infrastructure could also be used to sell collateral during liquidations or let users close their positions.
Next up: assets with different price movements
Curve plans to bring FXSwap to Stellar as well once its audit is complete. While StableSwap focuses on assets with similar prices, FXSwap supports swaps between assets whose prices fluctuate relative to one another; this includes not only crypto asset pairs but also pairs tied to foreign currencies and real-world assets.
It has not yet been announced when FXSwap will launch on Stellar. According to DeFiLlama data, Curve—which began operations in 2020 and later expanded into lending services and the crvUSD stablecoin—has approximately $1.27 billion in total value locked across all networks.
Not investment advice.