Proposal to Renew Vyper's veFunder Gauge

Gauge Proposals
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Renew Vyper’s veFunder Gauge

Summary

In 2022, Curve DAO approved a new way to support Vyper development through CRV emissions. The original fundraising gauge has been a tremendous help in keeping Vyper funded and allowing the team to continue shipping major improvements to the language.

That gauge reached its 2,000,000 CRV cap at the beginning of 2026. We are asking the DAO to renew its support by adding a new Vyper fundraising gauge, also capped at 2,000,000 CRV.

The Fundraiser gauge is a way for willing veCRV holders to donate some of their voting power to direct CRV emissions to Vyper. It does not require a transfer from the Curve DAO treasury and does not divert protocol revenue or fees from veCRV holders. Vyper receives emissions only when veCRV voters voluntarily allocate gauge weight to it.

Accomplishments with funding from previous gauge

The previous veFunder gauge helped the project retain developers and continue improving the compiler, its security, its tooling, and the overall developer experience.

During this period, Vyper shipped major language improvements such as the module system introduced in Vyper 0.4.0.
This has allowed Curve devs to write much cleaner and reusable contracts, enabling more complexity without sacrificing readability.

But funding from the gauge was continuous and cumulative rather than limited to any single release. It allowed Vyper to pay for audits, improvements to the Venom backend, and, more recently, its efforts to fully formally verify the compiler.

Why now?

The period since the original gauge reached its cap has been extremely difficult from a funding perspective.

Programs to fund public goods have all either paused or wound down. Optimism has paused Retro Funding through the end of 2026, while some Arbitrum-funded programs are being formally wound down. We tried applying for grants outside of the ecosystem but with little success so far. The Ethereum Foundation has supported us with matching funding last year, but we have not received direct support this year. A new matching scheme, even if it were to materialize, would not work when there are simply no grants nor funding to apply to.

This funding crisis is visible throughout the ecosystem. Important infrastructure such as pyevm or web3py are being archived for lack of funding.

Vyper is a widely used programming language, Ethereum’s best chance at language diversity and the technical backbone that made Curve possible. But with zero prospect of funding for the near future, the project is in real danger of having to stop development. We hope Vyper will not be another project forced to shut down because the ecosystem depends on it without sustainably funding it.

What the renewed funding will support

The funding will primarily be used for developer salaries and the infrastructure required to continue improving the language and compiler.

Planned work includes continued development of abstract methods and dynamic-array support. More importantly, it will support the ongoing formal semantics and compiler-verification effort.
Formal verification will make it possible to verify future Curve contracts from the high level logic in Vyper all the way down to the bytecode deployed onchain.

A portion of the funding will also AI credits used to accelerate formalization, proof development, testing, and review.

Proposed gauge parameters

The new gauge has a maximum emissions cap of 2,000,000 CRV. The V2 design also allows the DAO to increase the cap through a new vote. This avoids another deployment/contract migration if the DAO decides to extend support in the future.

Conclusion

The first veFunder gauge was a key part of building a sustainable stream of funding for Vyper and helped deliver major improvements that Curve still benefits from today. The need for that support has not disappeared and the current bear market, along with the annihilation of public goods funding has made it more urgent.

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