Michael Egorov is a physicist, software engineer and decentralized-finance entrepreneur best known for founding Curve Finance, one of the largest liquidity protocols in DeFi. He introduced the StableSwap design in a whitepaper published on November 10, 2019, creating an automated market maker optimized for assets expected to trade at similar values, such as stablecoins. Curve launched in early 2020 and developed into major DeFi infrastructure for stablecoin and pegged-asset trading. Before Curve, Egorov co-founded NuCypher in 2015, a privacy-preserving encryption infrastructure project built on proxy re-encryption, where he served as CTO. He holds a PhD in Physics from Swinburne University of Technology, where his research focused on Bose-Einstein condensates, and previously worked as a software engineer at LinkedIn. In 2025, Egorov launched Yield Basis, a newer protocol exploring more capital-efficient yield generation for Bitcoin and other assets. His crypto-industry relevance comes from designing specialized AMM infrastructure and building DeFi liquidity, lending and stablecoin systems rather than creating a blockchain protocol or cryptocurrency from scratch.

About Michael Egorov
Projects Founded
- Curve Finance
- Yield Basis
- NuCypher
Career Timeline
Key Contributions
StableSwap
Designed the StableSwap AMM model optimized for efficient swaps among similarly priced assets, reducing slippage for stablecoin and pegged-asset trading.
Curve Finance
Founded one of DeFi's major liquidity protocols, launched in 2020, focused originally on stablecoins and pegged assets and now operating across multiple networks.
Curve DAO
Helped build the governance and incentive system around the CRV token and vote-escrow mechanics introduced in August 2020.
crvUSD & Lending
Expanded Curve from swaps into stablecoin issuance and lending infrastructure through crvUSD, the LLAMMA mechanism and LlamaLend markets.
Yield Basis
Founded a newer protocol exploring more efficient yield generation for Bitcoin and other assets, designed to mitigate impermanent loss for liquidity providers.
Cryptography
Previously co-founded NuCypher and worked on privacy-preserving decentralized encryption infrastructure based on proxy re-encryption.
Sources & References
- https://curve.finance
- https://berkeley-defi.github.io/assets/material/StableSwap.pdf
- https://news.curve.finance
- https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/09/26/curve-finance-founder-michael-egorov-launches-bitcoin-yield-protocol
- https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/27/curve-founder-pitches-market-based-fix-for-usd700k-bad-debt-in-contrast-to-aave-bailout
- https://messari.io/report/crossing-the-threshold-of-decentralized-m-and-a
- https://www.dlapiper.com/en/news/2025/01/dla-piper-secures-litigation-win-for-curve-defi-developer-michael-egorov
- https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/116853533.html
- https://thedefiant.io/news/defi/curve-finance-founder-michael-egorov-suffers-massive-liquidations
- https://www.llamarisk.com/research/curve-pool-reentrancy-exploit-postmortem
- https://gov.curve.finance/t/funding-proposal-for-swiss-stake-ag-the-company-building-curve/10204
- https://iq.wiki/wiki/michael-egorov
- https://ch.linkedin.com/in/michael-egorov




































