The vote-escrow machine
CRV emissions pay the liquidity providers who make Curve’s stable-swap pools deep. Locking CRV — for up to years — converts it into voting power over WHICH pools those emissions favor. Since deep liquidity is existential for any stablecoin issuer, protocols pay lockers for their votes. The result is a genuine secondary market: emissions are payroll, and the right to direct payroll became the asset.
What locking does to the float
Vote-escrow removes a large share of CRV from circulation for long, known durations — a policy-shaped float like DOT’s bonded majority, but opt-in and mercenary. The tradable float is the residue that nobody found worth locking, which colors every rally: strength recruits lockers, weakness releases them on a schedule.
Inflation with a job is still inflation
The system works while bribe yield and pool revenue outrun emissions. When incentive demand thins, the payroll keeps printing and the flywheel runs in reverse — the recurring lesson of who earns the fees applied to the token that prints them.
Reading it
Lock ratio and bribe volumes are the fundamentals; funding and open interest read the leverage. CRV episodes also cluster around large collateralized positions — known overhangs, watchable in advance.