Michael Egorov is a Russian-born physicist turned blockchain engineer, best known as the founder and CEO of Curve Finance, the decentralized exchange protocol specializing in low-slippage stablecoin and pegged-asset swaps. Before building Curve, he co-founded NuCypher, a blockchain-based cryptographic access-control network that later merged with the Keep Network to form Threshold Network. His academic background is in laser physics – he holds a PhD from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia – which informs his unusually rigorous approach to protocol mathematics and cryptographic design.
As a builder-turned-investor, Egorov occupies an uncommon position in DeFi: a founder whose personal capital and technical credibility carry weight across the ecosystem. His angel activity is modest in volume but strategically placed in early-stage DeFi infrastructure. Public information on his full investment portfolio is limited; the six investments attributed to him span DeFi primitives and adjacent tooling, with two deals where he took a lead role. He does not operate a formal fund and has not disclosed AUM.
Notable Investments
- Curve Finance – founder; the protocol at its peak managed over $20 billion in TVL and became foundational infrastructure for stablecoin liquidity across Ethereum and multiple L2 networks.
- NuCypher / Threshold Network – co-founder; the project pioneered proxy re-encryption for decentralized data sharing before merging into Threshold Network.
- Early DeFi primitives – Egorov has publicly discussed supporting nascent AMM and lending projects in 2020–2022, though specific deal names beyond his own ventures are not comprehensively documented in public sources.
Team
Egorov operates as an individual angel, not through a named investment vehicle. He is the sole decision-maker on deals attributed to him. His technical reputation – specifically his authorship of the StableSwap invariant and the veTokenomics model – gives him disproportionate influence when he backs a project publicly.
Recent Activity
The defining event of the past two years was the July 2023 Curve Finance exploit, where a reentrancy vulnerability in an older version of the Vyper compiler drained roughly $70 million from several Curve liquidity pools. The attack coincided with Egorov holding more than $100 million in CRV-collateralized loans across Aave, Fraxlend, Abracadabra, and Inverse Finance. To reduce liquidation risk, he conducted a series of OTC CRV sales to counterparties including Justin Sun, DWF Labs, and Wintermute – offloading tens of millions of dollars of tokens at a discount. The episode drew wide scrutiny of concentrated founder-token collateral risks in DeFi lending markets.
Since late 2023, Egorov has reduced his on-chain loan exposure and refocused on Curve's development roadmap, including the launch of Curve's native stablecoin crvUSD and the Llamalend isolated lending markets. His appetite for external angel deals in the current cycle appears measured. He remains one of the few DeFi founders whose protocol-level contributions and personal investment profile are genuinely intertwined – his endorsement of a project carries signal precisely because his reputation is staked alongside his capital.
