Michael Egorov is the CEO of Curve Finance, a decentralized exchange liquidity pool that has been garnering a lot of attention since its launch in January 2020. It is built on Ethereum and designed for the efficient trading of stablecoins and Bitcoin.
Egorov obtained his degrees from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and is a physicist and scientist by profession. He also worked on quantum computing and cryptography during his time at the university. He chose ultra-cold atoms as a subject for his post-doctoral studies and won the bronze medal at the International Physics Olympiad in 2003.
He is also the co-founder and former chief technology officer of NuCypher, a data protection and encryption layer for big data platforms such as Apache Kafka, Spark and Hadoop. By using proxy re-encryption, NuCypher secures big data infrastructures against security failures.
Before starting NuCypher, Egorov worked at LinkedIn, where he built infrastructure tools and addressed the company’s scaling challenges. According to Egorov, his time at LinkedIn helped him gain the experience he needed to run the technology side of the companies he founded.
Curve Finance started the year on a great note with the announcement in February that it would be partnering with Equilibrium’s Polkadot parachain The plan was to integrate a Substrate-based version of Curve on the parachain — Substrate being Polkadot’s blockchain-building framework. The full integration went live in October 2021, with Equilibrium launching the official implementation of the automated market maker, known as Epsilon.
The year also saw Curve Finance’s CRV token become a speculative vehicle amid the memecoin craze in late 2021. CRV’s performance was attributed to its tokenomics, as well as the rapid growth of yield optimization products on Curve Finance.
Meanwhile, NuCypher updated its community toward the end of 2021 regarding upcoming developments such as its integration of DKG Alice into NuCypher v2, updates to its browser version and its merger with Threshold Network.
The start of 2022 saw even more protocols integrating Curve in what has become widely known as the “Curve Wars” — referring to various protocols competing to provide the highest CRV rewards to their users on Curve Finance. These “wars,” however, are continuously driving increased buying pressure for CRV.
An ecosystem around Curve is gradually emerging, with the increase in investors driving the demand for the platform even higher. So, it seems that 2022 will be another great year for Curve and Egorov. The platform saw a record-breaking day in January during which transaction daily volumes reached $3.2 billion. It’s safe to assume that if the year becomes a fruitful one for crypto, many new records will be made.
The company is also slated to release several new products and updates this year. With Egorov at the helm, it appears Curve Finance is going into 2022 guns blazing.
NuCypher, meanwhile, has announced “an exciting new prospect” for its future as it pursues interoperability, starting with the team working on a Polkadot bridge. The project is called “NuLink” and is being funded by a grant from the Web3 Foundation.
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