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Curve Finance ended Week 13 of 2026 with $845 million in weekly DEX volume, up 6.8% from the prior week, and 431,000 total swaps, a 10.9% increase. Protocol fees collected rose 28.4% to $260,000. Total value locked (TVL) across the protocol fell slightly to $2.00 billion, down 2.0% from $2.04 billion the previous week, consistent with a broader tightening of liquidity across DeFi during what Curve's own weekly report describes as a period of market downturn. The protocol's peak TVL exceeded $3 billion at the close of 2025.

The headline development this week is a significant drop in the cost of borrowing crvUSD, Curve's native stablecoin. The average borrow rate fell from 8.7% to 5.6%, a reduction of 3.1 percentage points. The change follows a governance proposal, flagged in Week 12's report, that restructured how the rate is managed. Short-term peg defense has been handed to the Peg Stabilisation Reserve (formerly PegKeepers), and a smoothing function now governs how rates adjust over time, preventing the sharp spikes that characterized the previous mechanism. Curve News summarized the outcome plainly: "The rate has been eased! Borrowing crvUSD is cheap again." Separately, the report noted that "borrowing rates have been manually lowered, so they cannot spike as much as they previously could."

The rate cut has a direct downstream effect on scrvUSD, the savings version of crvUSD. Its yield dropped from 6.2% to 4.5% over the same period, since that yield is derived from crvUSD borrow fees. The scrvUSD allocation is governed by the DAO through a Fee Splitter contract, adjustable only via on-chain vote with a seven-day timelock. For holders using scrvUSD as a passive savings instrument, the compression is notable, though at 4.5% it still exceeds the yield available on USD bank deposits in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions where the comparison has been specifically validated.

Curve's lending arm, Llamalend, held steady. TVL there reached $111 million, up marginally by 0.2%, with $57.4 million actively borrowed across 927 open loans. On the pool side, BUCK/USDC entered the top-yield rankings at number one, posting an unboosted 21.0% APY. The xpUSD/sUSDS pool followed at 19.9%, down from 30.3% the prior week when it led the table. The ynRWAx/ynUSDx pool, built in collaboration with Kimber Capital, offers exposure to mortgage-backed private credit in what its documentation calls "Tier-1 jurisdictions" and ranked third at 15.7%. These figures are unboosted base rates. Yield aggregators including Convex Finance, StakeDAO, and Yearn Finance can offer materially higher returns for depositors who route liquidity through their veCRV-aggregation strategies. CRV, Curve's governance token, was trading at approximately $0.221 at time of writing, with a market cap near $330 million and a 24-hour trading volume of $54.3 million. The token fell 5.33% over the prior 24 hours.

The week's activity unfolded against the backdrop of a significant security incident elsewhere in the stablecoin market. On March 22, an attacker exploited a compromised AWS key with privileged minting access in the Resolv Labs USR stablecoin contract, minting approximately 80 million USR tokens using only $100,000 in USDC. The attacker extracted an estimated $25 million. USR's price on Curve collapsed to $0.025 within 17 minutes of the attack. Inverse Finance's DOLA stablecoin, which had backing overlap with USR, experienced a temporary depeg, and DOLA's team acknowledged a $340,000 shortfall it pledged to cover. Fluid, the worst-hit protocol in the exploit, sustained approximately $17.5 million in bad debt. Curve's DOLA pool saw elevated volatility during the episode. The incident is a reminder that Curve's deep composability with other stablecoin protocols creates both liquidity advantages and exposure to contagion when counterparty contracts fail.

For users in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the week's numbers carry practical relevance. India and Pakistan rank first and third globally on the Crypto News Navigator 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, and stablecoin-driven crypto volumes in South Asia rose 80% to $300 billion in the first half of 2025. In markets where USD-denominated borrowing through traditional finance can cost 12% to 18% annually, a 5.6% on-chain borrow rate against crypto collateral is meaningfully competitive for traders and small operators seeking liquidity without liquidating their positions. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where stablecoin adoption is growing at 180% year-on-year and Nigeria alone processed $22 billion in stablecoin transactions in the year to mid-2024, yield pools like BUCK/USDC at 21% substantially exceed local bank deposit rates, though Ethereum mainnet gas costs remain a real barrier for smaller wallets. Kenya ranks fifth globally for transactional stablecoin use, and Nigeria accounts for approximately 40% of stablecoin inflows across the continent. The scrvUSD yield compression, while still favorable relative to local alternatives, signals that returns on the instrument track governance decisions and can move quickly.

Curve's governance calendar will determine whether borrow rates fall further or stabilize at current levels. The protocol's fee market share on Ethereum rose from 1.6% to 44% over the course of 2025, and its 2025 volume reached $126 billion. How it manages the tension between competitive borrow rates and sustainable yield for liquidity providers remains an open question for the remainder of the year.