Michael Egorov

Michael Egorov is the founder of Curve Finance and the inventor of the StableSwap invariant, the mathematical breakthrough that made efficient stablecoin-to-stablecoin trading possible in DeFi. With a PhD in physics from the Australian National University and a background in quantum computing research, Egorov brought a level of mathematical rigor to AMM design that few in the space could match. Before Curve, Egorov co-founded NuCypher, a cryptographic infrastructure project focused on proxy re-encryption. His transition to DeFi was driven by a specific technical insight: the constant product formula (x*y=k) used by Uniswap works well for assets with divergent prices but is extremely inefficient for assets that should trade near 1:1 — stablecoins, wrapped tokens, and synthetic assets. The StableSwap curve concentrates liquidity around the expected price ratio, dramatically reducing slippage. Curve Finance launched in January 2020 and rapidly became the highest-TVL protocol in DeFi, handling billions of dollars in daily stablecoin volume. The CRV token and "vote-escrow" (veCRV) mechanism — where tokens are locked for up to four years to earn boosted rewards and governance weight — spawned the "Curve Wars," an ecosystem-wide competition among protocols to accumulate CRV voting power and direct liquidity incentives. Convex Finance, Yearn, and dozens of other protocols built entire strategies around Curve's gauge system. In 2023, Egorov faced a personal crisis when massive CRV-collateralized loans across multiple lending platforms threatened cascading liquidations. The episode exposed concentration risks in DeFi but also demonstrated the system's resilience. Egorov continues to develop Curve, including the crvUSD stablecoin and Curve v2's "tricrypto" algorithm for volatile asset pairs.