CurveDAO member proposes slashing future Layer 2 deployments

CurveDAO member phil_00Llama has filed a proposal to prevent further extensions of the decentralized exchange to additional Ethereum scaling layers. 

The proposal comes in the wake of a similar move by Aave co-founder Marc Zeller, who said in mid-July that the lending protocol should halt its deployment on the Bitcoin Layer 2 BOB, despite passing a temp check vote.

“L2s eat the time of talented devs. Each of those chains require at least the same care as Ethereum, while giving back only very little. By cutting all development in this direction, Curve can regain the head-space to push into more fruitful directions,” phil_00Llama wrote in a proposal on Thursday. 

For years, Ethereum pursued a strategy called the “rollup-centric roadmap” that emphasized scaling the second-largest blockchain by building up an ecosystem of adjacent chains. While embraced by many, this strategy is now being called into question by some who favor of centering the Ethereum base layer. 

Ethereum Layer 2s can often be sites of meaningful economic and cultural activity, though they can arguably also fragment liquidity and an application’s total user base. 

“In my opinion, Curve should double down with Ethereum instead, focusing for example on broader scrvUSD adoption within the Ethereum ecosystem,” phil_00Llama said, noting that “on a slow day” Curve pools on the Ethereum mainnet generate 450x more revenue than all its L2 deployments combined. 

Curve is live on approximately 25 chains, not all of them strictly Layer 2s, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Celo, Gnosis, Hyperliquid, Ink, Polygon, Sonic, among others, according to DeFiLlama .  

The vast majority of its total value locked is on the Ethereum mainnet, at nearly $2.3 billion. Base and Arbitrum represent the next-largest deployments, but both represent merely around $50 million worth of Curve’s TVL. 

“Bringing Curve to L2s has been tried now, but the stats speak for themselves. Very little returns (about 1,500$ per day, all L2s combined) while consuming lots of dev time to develop, while also having mostly much higher maintenance cost due to their fast paste, short lived, nature,” phil_00Llama said. 

“What currently runs can keep running, but lets delete for all Curve Devs all L2-linked entries on their to-do-lists,” he added. “Builders could spend their productive time on more meaningful things.”

It is unclear what will come from this proposal, which has so far only generated one comment critiquing its lack of context. CurveDAO is one of the most active governance forums in crypto.

Curve's native token CRV is trading around $0.90, down 8% on the day. It has a market cap of $1.2 billion, according to The Block's price page .