Curve competitor Saddle Finance declines

Saddle Finance was once regarded as a strong competitor to Curve, having raised $11.8 million in funding from several well-known investment institutions in 2021. However, the Saddle community recently proposed to cease operations and liquidate funds. Data shows that Saddle Finance's total locked value (TVL) has dwindled to only $3.68 million, while the market cap of its governance token $SDL has plummeted to $917,000.

One main difference between Saddle and Curve lies in the programming language used. Saddle uses Solidity, which helps it avoid the vulnerability attacks that Curve has suffered recently.

In January 2021, Saddle officially launched and announced that it had secured $4.3 million in seed funding. Before going live, several security agencies conducted audits on it. Although governance tokens have not yet been issued, the market widely expects that Saddle will issue tokens, which has brought a high level of attention to the project.

However, overly high expectations have also led to problems. In the early days after launch, the influx of a large number of liquidity providers caused an imbalance in the asset pool, resulting in significant slippage issues. Some users consequently suffered permanent losses.

In November 2021, Saddle issued governance tokens and launched liquidity mining rewards, airdropping a total of 15% of the tokens to users. By mid-2022, the $SDL tokens began to circulate. In addition, other related projects also provided rewards to Saddle's early liquidity providers.

On April 30, 2022, Saddle experienced a significant security incident. Its sUSDv2 pool was hacked, resulting in a loss of 11 million dollars. Although 3.8 million dollars were returned by white hat hackers, the incident severely undermined user confidence. Saddle's TVL fell sharply from 280 million dollars before the attack to 120 million dollars.

The subsequent collapse of UST further affected Saddle, with its TVL dropping again to $70 million and remaining sluggish.

Recently, the Saddle community proposed a liquidation plan. The main reasons include: the core team plans to stop working, potential security risks, and the treasury's value exceeding the token's market value. The proposal suggests distributing the remaining funds (mainly 1.545 million $ARB) to users based on their holdings of $SDL and veSDL.

Currently, most community members support the liquidation decision. However, there are still disputes regarding specific execution details, such as the weight distribution between $SDL and veSDL, and the choice of snapshot time.