Curve Finance

Curve is an exchange built for one scenario: swapping assets that should cost the same. Stablecoins against each other, one wrapped bitcoin against another, staked ETH against plain ETH. The pool formula is different. When prices sit close together it produces noticeably less slippage than a regular AMM, which is why large stablecoin amounts route here.

That turned Curve into a base layer for large stablecoin amounts: where a regular AMM eats part of the sum in slippage, Curve goes through more evenly. The protocol runs on eight networks including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism and Base. For swapping ordinary volatile tokens it fits worse than general-purpose exchanges.