Curve - Harvest vs Convex?
Curve is an AMM and DEX, similar to Uniswap.
But it's lesser known in part because it doesn't have the wide range of assets that Uniswap does.
Because of its focus on stable coins and low-volatility assets, it also uses a different bonding curve than Uniswap's AMM does, which is more general purpose.
I'll dig deep into Curve at another time - the whitepaper can be found below.
But I'll continue my exploration of Harvest Finance which can be used as a way to auto-compound Curve, and do a light introduction and comparison to Convex after the link to the white paper.
https://resources.curve.fi/pdf/curve-cryptopools.pdf
Curve on Harvest
Every farm on Harvest has a detailed section which looks like this:
It explains the source of yield and the underlying asset, which in this case are the Curve LP tokens which represent three underlying assets.
Those assets ARE NOT CRV, OVN or ARB.
The assets in the liquidity pool are: USD+, FRAX and USDC.e which are all stable coins.
In Harvest, you see them in the header.
When one or more of those tokens are deposited (if not all three, then Harvest automatically swaps from one deposit to have all three) it returns a receipt, which is fcurve_OVN.
This was super-confusing to me because I expected the ftoken to enshrine in the name the underlying assets. But OVN represents Overnight Finance.
Different story for another time.
But the important thing is this means, instead of me receive any kind of crv token, Harvest returns it's ftoken which returns those assets, but uses the underlying protocol contracts for the liquidity provision on Curve's AMM.
Depositing on Curve
Were I to have deposited on Curve instead of using Harvest, I would have seen something like this in Curve's dashboard:
I would have received Curve's LP Tokens, been able to stake them on Curve, and were I to withdraw from the contract, received the three underlying assets listed above.
However, I manually did something similar to what Harvest does automatically, which was I staked those LP tokens NOT ON Curve, but on Convex instead.
Staking Curve LP Tokens on Convex
You can see that the instruction on the Convex site is to deposit into the Curve pool, as I referenced above. But to stake them here, as I did, "to earn CVX on top of Curve's native rewards."
Similar to how I staked (without the extra step) on Harvest to get $FARM vis a vis the $iFARM receipts, I receive $CVX.
So, why do I do this extra step?
For this, I'll need to dig further into what Convex is in a later post.
The point of this is to continue the Harvest series by illustrating what Harvest does and automates under the hood.
You can read more about that here:
Harvest Finance and Harvest Finance - My Portfolio
https://www.defikarma.xyz/article-w7iljcrz/post/harvest-finance-3P4T8Ffj7WLCCt5