Curve Hack, Liquidations, DeFi, and Contagion Spiral Dropping The Soap (Curve Edition) 🧵 Several months ago, the Russian founder of Curve, Michael Egorov, took out a $100m loan on AAVE to purchase this ultra tasteful (🤮) house in Australia. He used $280M of CRV (at the time) as collateral for this loan. Unfortunately for Michael, Curve was hacked two days ago. The hacker made off with millions of dollars. Bad, right? This was just the beginning of Michael’s troubles. The hacker has about 7 million CRV in his wallet, which, by itself, wouldn’t be a problem - there’s enough liquidity in the markets to handle a 7m CRV market sell. The REAL problem is that everybody knows Michael’s in trouble, and this is creating a reflexive feedback loop of dumping as people stop hunt Michael’s CRV position. CRV is currently dumping like a shitcoin that’s getting text messages from Gary Gensler. Stop hunting isn’t the only issue though - as @Delphi_Digital astutely points out here: xitter.cf/Delphi_Digital/s… The APY on Michael’s Fraxlend position is doubling every 12 hours. This means that he’ll be liquidated in a few days if nothing changes and 59 million CRV will be dumped on-chain. There isn’t nearly enough liquidity to handle a 59m market dump, but this would STILL just be the beginning of the fun. If Michael gets liquidated by Fraxlend, all of his other debt positions will be liquidated too. This likely means Inverse Finance (INV) and Magic Internet Money (MIM) will both die due to the new bad debt, and Aave will get stuck with $63m of bad debt. This means they’ll have to sell $63m of Aave on the open market to pay it off. Fortunately, Aave’s safety fund is currently around $330m, which is more than enough to pay off the bad debt even with market slippage. Michael’s position can be viewed here: debank.com/profile/0x7a16ff8… In the last 12 hours alone, he’s lost $50m due to CRV’s declining price. Michael’s liquidation prices for CRV are approximately $0.38-$0.40 As of the time of this tweet, CRV is currently trading at $0.50. A week ago, it was worth $0.72. In one sense, this is proof that DeFi works as intended. There are no special rules or bailouts, no matter who you are. It’s a brutal free market governed by math and code. In another sense, it’s a black eye for the industry at exactly the wrong time, and could easily set us back by months/years as skeptical boomers who were thinking of dipping their toes back into the DeFi waters get scared off by its Wild West nature. Either way, 🍿