Will Curve Finance stop L2 development?

Curve Finance is considering stopping L2 development per a governance proposal by a community member.

In the proposal, community member phil_00Llama explained that layer-2 development consumes time. He added that talented developers could benefit Curve Finance more if they focus exclusively on Ethereum development.  

Layer-2 chains aren’t profitable for Curve Finance

According to the forum post, layer-2 chains are not profitable for the protocol, bringing in a mere $1,500 per day. That’s for all layer-2 chains combined. “All the 24 L2s, on which Curve is currently deployed, result in a total of roughly 1,500$ of daily revenue, or 62$ on average per day per L2,” wrote phil_00Llama. 

He further explained that deploying Curve Finance on layer-2 chains incurs high maintenance costs “due to their fast pace, short-lived nature.”

Curve Finance is deployed on approximately 25 EVM-compatible networks, including Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, and more. Data from Messari show that over 93% of Curve’s trading fees have come from Ethereum pools since 2020.

“Curves’ Ethereum Pools generate on a slow day 28,000$ of revenue, the equivalent of approximately. 450 L2s, given their average revenue,” stated phil_00Llama. 

Over the past 30 days, Ethereum’s revenue on Curve reached $1.65 million. Other layer-2 chains have collectively contributed around 1% of Curve’s daily revenue.

In the proposal specification, phil_00Llama suggested keeping existing operations intact and deleting L2-linked items from developers’ to-do lists. He emphasized that developers should spend more time focusing on Ethereum and working on meaningful projects.

“In my opinion, Curve should double down with Ethereum instead, focusing, for example, on broader scrvUSD adoption,” wrote phil_00Llama.

The proposal did not gain strong traction from Curve community members, with one reply requesting more background and context.

Curve Finance has a total value locked (TVL) of $21.451 billion, ranking it second after Uniswap. In 2025, Curve Finance received $13.26 million in fees and generated $6.62 million in revenue. The protocol recorded a 30-day trading volume of $7.453 billion. CRV is currently trading at $0.8784, up 63.3% compared to last month.

This is not the first time a decentralized protocol has considered stopping layer-2 development.

Two weeks ago, Marc Zeller, the co-founder of Aave, stated that it would cease Bitcoin Layer-2 BOB development. He added that Aave’s deployments on Soneium, Celo, Linea, zkSync, and Scroll are operating at a loss due to the DAO being “too lenient.”

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