The Multichain Vote Escrow System is a core component of Curvance DAO governance and incentive design, enabling holders to actively participate in the protocol’s development direction and benefit from multiple revenue streams across chains. By locking CVE tokens for veCVE, users gain governance power that extends across Curvance’s multichain ecosystem.
Curvance's veCVE contracts freeze all state-changing operations (creation/compounding on locks, unlocking, combining locks, etc.) 12 hours prior and 12 hours after an epoch. If, for some reason, fees are not distributed to a chain, state change operations will remain halted until rewards are resolved, preventing double spending or loss of rewards.
One of the unique features of Curvance’s multichain vote-escrow system is the ability for veCVE holders to participate in governance across chains seamlessly. Through the CVE Gauge System, veCVE holders can direct emissions and influence incentives on any supported chain, allowing for a highly flexible and powerful governance model.
Migrating Locks Across Chains: veCVE holders can migrate their locks to integrated chains, allowing them to access chain-specific incentives. This feature gives users flexibility and enhances the protocol's network reach, attracting liquidity and activity to targeted chains.
Multichain Fee Distribution: veCVE holders receive fees generated across all integrated chains, regardless of where their lock is held. This is a key innovation compared to traditional vote escrow models, which limit users to receiving fees and exercising voting power solely on the chain where their tokens are locked.
Each chain reports its veCVE-locked balances at the end of each epoch, allowing the Messaging Hub to calculate and distribute protocol rewards (paid in USDC) across all supported chains. Rewards on the source chain become instantly available, while rewards for other chains are bridged through the cross-messaging system. Rewards are made available in the Reward Manager on each chain.
The Multichain Vote Escrow system is more than just a governance mechanism—it is a comprehensive structure for aligning user incentives, facilitating cross-chain incentives, and reinforcing Curvance’s mission of building a multichain DeFi ecosystem. By empowering veCVE holders with voting power and shared fee distributions across chains, Curvance incentivizes meaningful, long-term engagement and growth throughout its ecosystem.
The Curvance Multichain Gauge is a system designed to build on the traditional vote-escrow model by enabling cross-chain voting and reward distribution, a feature unavailable in most gauges that limit governance participation to a single chain.
Cross-Chain Gauge Emission Voting: Users can lock CVE across all supported chains, enabling them to vote for native gauge emissions regardless of their lock location. This system allows for flexible and robust liquidity strategies.
Reward Distribution Across Chains: CVE token lockers can receive pro-rata protocol fees generated across all integrated chains. As a result, this allows veCVE holders to benefit from fees generated across the entire Curvance ecosystem, regardless of the blockchain their lock is located.
Cross-Chain Lock Bridging: Users can burn and mint their veCVE locks to move them from chain to chain, where pro-rata chain rewards are available, driving volume and TVL to a particular chain.
How the Multichain Gauge Works
Using Snapshot’s gasless voting system, voting occurs during biweekly epochs. Once an epoch concludes, votes are aggregated and processed on onchain.
Snapshot is a decentralized platform that facilitates governance in decentralized applications and protocols. Its gasless system allows users to participate in voting and decision-making processes without needing to pay gas fees, making participation more accessible and user-friendly.
Votes are frozen 12 hours prior to and 12 hours after an epoch by locking all state changes to veCVE locks, preventing vote double-spending. Read more in Multichain Vote Escrow.
Emissions remaining for an epoch are queried across all chains simultaneously via Wormhole's CCQ, validating the efficacy of the aggregated voting data. Once validated, emission data is updated on the source chain, and remote chain emission data is relayed via Wormhole's standard relayer to each chain. Gauge Rewards are made available in the Gauge Manager on each chain.
Curvance’s multichain gauge introduces a unified, chain-agnostic vote-escrow system that reduces gas costs, promotes deep liquidity, and enables efficient fee generation across multiple chains with minimal maintenance. This design empowers users to lock CVE on any chain, vote for any pool, and share in protocol fees equally, enhancing governance flexibility and ecosystem growth.
For a visual overview of the cross-chain communication system, please see the diagram below.
Wormhole is a pivotal technology that supports the Curvance protocol's multichain approach by enabling seamless communication across EVM and non-EVM blockchains. Through Wormhole, the protocol can overcome composability and scalability limitations, allowing the Curvance protocol to operate efficiently on multiple chains.
At the core of Wormhole’s architecture is the Guardian Network, a decentralized validator network that verifies and signs cross-chain data transfers, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of each transaction. Wormhole’s Cross-chain querying and Standard Relayers streamline the process by automating data reads and transfers between chains, making it simpler and more cost-effective for developers to build multichain applications.
The Curvance protocol utilizes Wormhole’s technology to power the Multichain Fee System and Multichain Vote Escrow system, bringing greater scalability and interoperability to the Curvance ecosystem.
For an in-depth explanation of Wormhole’s technology, visit the Wormhole Docs.
The Cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP) facilitates Curvance's multichain fee distribution system, by enabling zero slippage value transfer between EVM and non-EVM chains.
USDC is burned on the source chain: Using an app, a user initiates a transfer of USDC from one blockchain to another, and specifies the recipient wallet address on the destination chain. The app facilitates a burn of the specified amount of USDC on the source chain.
A signed attestation is fetched from Circle: Circle observes and attests to the burn event on the source chain. The app requests the attestation from Circle, which provides authorization to mint the specified amount of USDC on the destination chain.
USDC is minted on the destination chain: The app uses the attestation to trigger the minting of USDC. The specified amount of USDC is minted on the destination chain and sent to the recipient wallet address.
CCTP's value proposition is increased when combined with the aforementioned Wormhole tech stack. Allowing Curvance to facilitate value transfer and information transfer simultaneously between chains. Curvance utilizes CCTP to power our Multichain fee system, bringing greater scalability and interoperability to the Curvance ecosystem.
For an in-depth explanation of CCTP, visit the Circle Docs.
