A brief history
Curve DAO was founded by Michael Egorov and launched in 2020. Curve is an Automated market maker (AMM) platform with many similarities to Uniswap and Balancer. Curve differentiates itself through its liquidity pools which are made up of similarly behaving assets like stablecoins or wrapped versions of assets such as tBTC. Having these stablecoin specialized liquidity pools allows Curve to use more efficient algorithms, thus lowering the levels of fees and slippage. By focusing on stablecoins, Curve allows investors to avoid more volatile crypto assets while still earning high-interest rates from lending protocols. Because assets in the Curve pool are stable to each other in price, trading between them causes minimal volatility compared to other AMM liquidity pools, thereby also minimizing impermanent loss- an AMM phenomenon in which liquidity providers suffer a loss in token value relative to the market value of that token from volatility in a liquidity pool.

CRV in practice
Currently, CRV has three main uses: voting, staking and boosting. Those three things will require you to vote-lock your CRV and acquire veCRV. First, one of the main incentives for holding CRV is the ability to boost your rewards on provided liquidity. Vote locking CRV allows you to acquire voting power to participate in the DAO and earn a boost of up to 2.5x on the liquidity you are providing on Curve. Once CRV holders vote-lock their veCRV, they can start voting on various DAO proposals and pool parameters. VeCRV stands for vote escrowed $CRV- basically, they are CRV tokens that are vote locked in the Curve DAO. Additionally, CRV can be staked to receive trading fees from the Curve protocol. Following a community-led proposal in September of 2020, a 50% admin fee was implemented on all trading fees. Those fees are collected and used to buy 3CRV, the LP token for the TriPool, which are then distributed to veCRV holders.