How a "Chad" minted Curve tokens early and briefly surpassed BTC's market cap

Curve's tokens launched early this morning after an unknown individual/s deployed open-source contracts and minted CRV. Community reaction was mixed, with some observers calling it a "Scam."

The team wrote on Twitter that "Someone" deployed $CRV based on smart contracts we had published on GitHub, front-running their efforts.

At the time of writing, CRV has a little over 200k tokens in circulating supply and a diluted market cap of $175 billion.

For the uninitiated, Curve is a decentralized exchange and liquidity that powers many "Yield farming" outlets in the DeFi space, allowing users to "Lock" capital into one of the many pools available in order to gain attractive interest rates on their crypto holdings.

Its CRV tokens were a much-awaited launch, but not imagined in the way they were released today.

The Curve team did not backtrack the token issuance, despite reports of them initially calling it a scam.

Crypto exchanges Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex rushed to list CRV on their platforms, with trading to begin soon.

Not everyone following the saga was pleased with the way Curve handled the launch, considering its brand name and value in the broader DeFi market.

Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, said the Curve team made the "Worse possible choice" with how they handled their launch.

For now, a major consensus on Twitter amongst commentators is that the Curve launch was dubious, but CRV will see higher prices due to the massive retail interest and hype behind it.