Curve Wars
The competition among DeFi protocols to accumulate voting power over a vote-escrowed governance token, in order to direct its liquidity incentives toward their own pools.
The Curve Wars refers to the intense competition that emerged among DeFi protocols to accumulate voting power in Curve Finance's vote-escrowed token system (see Kaavon's "Vote-Escrowed Tokenomics (ve-Tokenomics)" glossary definition), since that voting power controls which liquidity pools receive a larger share of the protocol's token emissions through gauge voting (see Kaavon's "Gauge Voting" glossary definition). A pool receiving more emissions typically attracts more liquidity, which in turn benefits any protocol whose token trades through that pool.
Rather than competing by locking tokens directly, many protocols built or used specialized "vote-bribing" marketplaces, paying token holders directly to vote their locked voting power toward a specific pool, or accumulated large locked positions through wrapper protocols designed specifically to aggregate and control voting power at scale. The term "Curve Wars" has since become a general shorthand for this same competitive dynamic whenever it recurs around other protocols using a similar vote-escrowed governance design.
Examples
- During the Curve Wars, several protocols competed to accumulate the largest possible locked positions specifically to control gauge-voting outcomes in their own favor.
- Vote-bribing marketplaces that emerged from the Curve Wars let token holders earn extra rewards simply for directing their existing voting power toward a particular pool.