Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve Finance deployed its highly anticipated native stablecoin called crvUSD on the Ethereum mainnet Wednesday afternoon.

Blockchain data on Etherscan shows that the contract has minted a total of $20 million in crvUSD tokens in five transactions within five minutes.

The protocol’s governance token CRV has jumped up to 97 cents on the news, and is up 7% for the day, according to CoinDesk data.

The deployment marks a major milestone for rolling out Curve’s long-awaited stablecoin to the public. Curve, one of the largest decentralized marketplaces focusing on stablecoins with some $5 billion of assets on the protocol, announced that last year it started developing its own dollar-pegged stablecoin.

Curve’s stablecoin will face heavy competition as a slew of rival DeFi protocols issue or are in the process of developing their own native stablecoin to attract users and increase activity at a time when crypto trading and lending is flagging.

(by Nick Baker)