The native token of the Curve protocol, $CRV, has overtaken the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) as the most traded token on-chain among Ethereum’s 500 largest whales ahead of the expected launch of Shibarium.

According to whale monitoring service WhaleStats, $CRV has recently flipped $SHIB was the most traded token among these large token holders, although the meme-inspired digital currency remains their largest position by token value, with the average whale holding over $5.3 million worth of $SHIB.

It’s worth pointing out that the figures exclude the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, $ETH, and stablecoins such as USDT and USDC. Curve is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform built on top of Ethereum that has expanded to several other blockchains. It’s a decentralized exchanged and automated market maker protocol focusing on stablecoins and low-slippage trading.

The $CRV token is the protocol’s native governance token, meaning it can be used to vote on governance proposals made to upgrade and improve the protocol. It can also be locked for various periods, up to four years, in a bid to vote on governance and claim protocol fees.

Curve is one of the largest DeFi protocols by total value locked, and at the time of writing it has over $4.3 billion worth of digital assets locked on it, with over $4 billion being on the Ethereum network.

$CRV has overtaken $SHIB as the most traded token among Ethereum whales ahead of the expected launch of Shibarium, an upcoming layer-2 solution that aims to improve the Shiba Inu ecosystem by providing faster transactions at a lower cost, among other important improvements. There are still a lot of questions surrounding the release and utility of Shibarium, however.

Shibarium will work alongside Ethereum to process transactions on the Shibarium ecosystem. It will take a large cut of the transaction load the Shiba Inu ecosystem currently brings onto Ethereum to process it on the Shibarium chain.

Further, the layer-2 will remove tokens from circulating to reduce supply and help boost the price. This is known as a token burning mechanism, in which tokens are sent to wallets that can only receive tokens but not send them, also called Dead Wallets. Shibarium will burn $SHIB and require $BONE for transactions.

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Featured image via Pixabay.