How is Curve's Stablecoin Performing Based on Data?

Curve always releases exciting crvUSD market cap and peg charts that look perfect and enviable. However, these charts don't provide much information—they only show lines either going up (market cap) or staying flat (peg). How does crvUSD compare to other stablecoins based on nearly a month of data?

**TL/DR**

crvUSD is still in its early stages but shows strong performance in peg stability and utilization. Currently, crvUSD is experiencing rapid growth, so it's recommended to revisit this data when the stablecoin's growth levels off.

**Methodology**

For transparency and reproducibility, we simplified our methodology as much as possible. We obtained almost all data directly from CoinGecko, allowing anyone to replicate this process at home.

The only exception is that CoinGecko doesn't have market cap data for crvUSD, so we created a simple Dune dashboard to conveniently obtain on-chain data, thanks to Dune's new free tier plan that allows CSV file exports.

Of course, our data scale here is small—less than a month of data, and crvUSD's share is very small relative to other stablecoins. Please note that everything below comes with important caveats.

We may revisit this issue after having more data, but currently this is our first attempt at benchmarking crvUSD against other stablecoins.

We've made all raw data public and used simple, publicly available Jupyter Notebooks for plotting, so anyone can use this data.

**Peg Performance**

While Curve has been publishing charts showing crvUSD maintaining stability around $1, we wanted to see how precise this peg is compared to other stablecoins.

During this period, almost all stablecoins clustered in the same messy pile of colored lines, except for LUSD towering above.

Just yesterday, we saw very brief dips in TUSD and USDD, so we can clearly see what impact this had on crvUSD (TUSD is a peg keeper for crvUSD). Fortunately, crvUSD has mechanisms to prevent its keepers from losing their peg, and in this case, it recovered quite quickly.

This messy pile of colored lines only provides partial information, but we can use this data to calculate peg metrics for each stablecoin, and also use daily data to calculate each stablecoin's mean absolute error relative to $1.

While not expecting any returns, we still focus on LUSD and express it as standard deviation, which better accommodates LUSD's tendency to float above its peg.

In both charts, the biggest winner is DAI, followed by the 1:1 backed stablecoins USDC and USDT. Meanwhile, Paxos's USDP also performs well.

In the next tier, crvUSD ranks above other stablecoins in terms of price stability. Nevertheless, its lifecycle is still in early stages, insufficient to celebrate victory, but definitely worth watching this metric to see if the peg can maintain its current level as this stablecoin scales up. According to some analysts' estimates, the peg might become tighter if Peg Keeper pools add more liquidity; or if the coin's market cap expands to the point of becoming a hacker target, we might see the opposite effect.

Finally, when we focus on price, we can plot a correlation table to see how stablecoins move relative to each other.

While it's difficult to find key insights from this, we can see that crvUSD's price unexpectedly correlates most highly with USDD over the month, followed by USDT and USDC.

**Utilization**

CoinGecko has trading volume data, so we can try to understand how much these stablecoins are actually being used.

However, we need to process the data somewhat, otherwise we'll get no information except Tether's overwhelming dominance, which is partly influenced by the US crypto war.

In the chart above, we obtained crvUSD's total market cap data directly from on-chain data since CoinGecko doesn't provide this data. With this data, we can measure actual utilization by dividing trading volume by market cap.

On this metric, crvUSD performs well. During crvUSD's growth phase, it looks great, but remember this might be because newly minted crvUSD is immediately traded (currently usually through Conic), driving utilization growth. It's best to reassess this when the coin exits its growth phase, but this is already a good start.

We can break down this metric into daily data for display. The abnormally high value at the end is due to large trades on day 11 that caused TUSD's price to drop. Setting that aside, throughout the entire period, crvUSD has consistently maintained high levels alongside Tether, worthy of further attention.

**Market Cap**

Once again, Tether forms an overwhelming advantage.

But if you want to see how this market cap actually changes, that's another story. In this regard, crvUSD's daily growth is astronomical.

While crvUSD's growth is certainly good, our idea in posting these two charts is that unless crvUSD stops its relatively high-speed growth, it's difficult to reasonably compare all the above data.

**Conclusion**

crvUSD is still in its early stages and currently experiencing rapid growth. Growth cannot continue at approximately 10% per day, so it will be very useful to observe metrics such as peg strength and utilization, and watch for any changes when growth inevitably slows.

It would also be productive to reproduce this analysis by extracting data directly from on-chain sources rather than daily extracts from CoinGecko, using data with finer timeframes than single days.

For predictive analysis, we could also consider the following metrics:

- Resilience: How quickly each stablecoin recovers its peg after volatility

- Deviation frequency: How often each stablecoin exceeds certain thresholds

- Market correlation: Which stablecoins are susceptible to other assets like ETH price

- Capital efficiency: One aspect of the so-called stablecoin impossible trinity