Venus (XVS)

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Historical price evolution of Venus

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Venus Protocol (XVS) was launched in October 2020 on the Binance Smart Chain (now BNB Chain) by a team led by Joselito Lizarondo, CEO and founder of Swipe, a crypto debit card issuing company with Visa. The protocol combined the algorithmic lending mechanisms of Compound with the stablecoin minting of MakerDAO in a unified system. The XVS token distribution did not include pre-mining for founders or developers: 20% was distributed to Binance Launchpool participants, 1% to BSC grants, and the remaining 79% to liquidity providers over four years. The protocol was audited by CertiK in December 2020.

In May 2021, Venus reached its historical TVL peak with approximately 15,000 million USD. However, that same month it suffered a price manipulation attack on the XVS token on Binance that caused its price to rise from 80 to 145 USD in three hours, generating more than 200 million USD in liquidations and approximately 95 million USD in bad debt for the protocol.

The protocol continued to face challenges related to oracle manipulation and market events. In May 2022, the Terra-LUNA collapse left Venus with approximately 14 million USD in bad debt when the Chainlink price feed for LUNA hit zero. In November 2022, the Venus DAO presented the V4 upgrade proposal with three areas of improvement: risk management, isolated pools for higher-risk tokens and improvement of the governance system.

Oracle manipulation attacks continued in the following years. In December 2023, an attacker exploited Venus's dependence on the Binance oracle for the snBNB asset, manipulating its price to borrow approximately 274,000 USD in assets, covered by Venus with treasury funds. In February 2024, a similar attack on wUSDM generated approximately 900,000 USD in bad debt. In February 2025, an exploit in the Venus deployment on zkSync generated more than 700,000 USD in bad debt.

In September 2025, a phishing attack compromised the account of a user with large positions, leading Venus to pause the protocol preventively. The user's positions were liquidated to recover funds, with related losses of approximately 13.5-27 million USD. That same month, Bithumb removed XVS from its delisting watchlist following governance improvements. In December 2025, Venus launched the "One-Click Looping" function to simplify leverage strategies.

The most significant attack occurred on 15th March 2026, when an attacker who had accumulated over 9 months 84% of the supply of the Thena (THE) token using funds from Tornado Cash, manipulated its on-chain price taking advantage of TWAP oracle delays to borrow approximately 15 million USD in BTC, BNB and CAKE. The final bad debt for Venus was approximately 2.15 million USD, whilst the attacker lost approximately 4.7 million USD in net on-chain terms. Venus paused the affected markets and reviewed collateral parameters. At that time, the protocol's TVL was approximately 1,400 million USD, and the accumulated bad debt since 2021 exceeded 112 million USD. That same month, Venus launched a dashboard update with compact view and better health factor visibility.

Venus operates as an algorithmic money market protocol built primarily on BNB Chain, although since 2023 it also functions on Ethereum, Arbitrum and zkSync. The system combines two main functionalities: algorithmic lending inspired by Compound and stablecoin minting similar to MakerDAO. Users who act as lenders deposit their assets in liquidity pools and receive in exchange vTokens (such as vBNB or vUSDT) that accumulate interest automatically and can be utilised as collateral within the system. On the other hand, borrowers must provide overcollateralised collateral according to the specific Collateral Factor of each asset, which ranges between 40% and 75% of the borrowed value. When the collateralisation ratio falls below the established minimum, external liquidators can intervene to liquidate the position, receiving a commission as an incentive for maintaining system stability.

Interest rates for both loans and deposits are adjusted algorithmically in real time based on the utilisation rate of each individual pool: the greater the demand for loans in relation to available liquidity, the higher the interest rate for borrowers and the higher the yield for lenders. Additionally, Venus allows users to mint VAI, its synthetic stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, utilising up to 50% of the remaining collateral value of their deposits. The protocol incorporates Venus Prime, a non-transferable soulbound token introduced in version V4 that grants additional yields through the Qualified Value distribution system. Protocol governance lies with holders of the XVS token, who can propose and vote on changes to risk parameters, listing of new assets and protocol improvements, whilst XVS stakers in the Venus Vault receive 20% of the protocol's quarterly income through XVS token buybacks.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.