CLV is the native token of what was formerly known as Clover Finance, a layer 1, or base layer, blockchain optimized for porting cryptocurrencies across multiple chains, notably Ethereum and Polkadot. CLV is not to be confused with clover, a cryptocurrency that also trades under the ticker CLV.

CLV launched in July 2021 at $0.86. It hit its all-time high of $1.88 on August 17. CLV then spiraled downwards, sinking to $0.12 by June 2022. The coin’s market cap peaked at $272 million in November 2021 but had fallen to $33 million by June 2022.

CLV launched with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. The project sold 15% of its supply in three token sales on CoinList in April 2020. These tokens were not subject to any lockups. A private sale, which sold off another 2.5% of the tokens, was subject to an 18-month vesting period.

The founding team kept another 10%; the Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the protocol, kept another 12%. Early backers kept 10%, 7.5% of tokens were allocated to market the protocol, and a contributor's grant received 3%. A final 40% was used to incentivize people to use the ecosystem and rent space on Polkadot. All these tokens were subject to a 36-month vesting period.

The project is based on Substrate, the blockchain framework for multichain Polkadot applications. It bills itself as a multichain blockchain operating system: It allows smart contracts to store data on its blockchain and launch decentralized applications (dapps) by tapping its application programming interface (API).

CLV’s main advantage, according to a 2021 CoinDesk interview with Tekin Salimi, then a general partner at Polychain, is its cheap “two-way” peg between Bitcoin and Ethereum. This takes an amount of bitcoin and locks it in the Bitcoin blockchain while simultaneously unlocking an amount equivalent in value of ether on the Ethereum blockchain and vice versa. A Bitcoin-Ethereum bridge on a cheap blockchain could be valuable to investors who want to expose their bitcoin holdings to the wider world of decentralized finance (DeFi) without paying high “gas,” or transaction fees for using Ethereum.

The project’s web wallet, CLV Wallet, lets users connect to several public chains at once – think MetaMask, but without having to switch networks when investing in different blockchains.

CLV is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), meaning that developers can relaunch their projects on CLV with little extra effort.

The CLV token is used to pay for things on the CLV blockchain. In practice, that means validating transactions on CLV’s blockchain and deploying smart contracts or decentralized applications. Developers can request that their projects be funded by CLV’s treasury.

CLV, formerly Clover Finance, was founded in May 2020 by Singapore-based Norelle Ng, and Toronto-based Burak Keceli and Viven Kirby. Ng, a former head of client relations at Amber Group, joined as the operations lead. Keceli was the tech lead, and Kirby the project lead.

CLV’s mainnet launched in July 2021. According to LinkedIn, Kirby left in December 2021, and Keceli founded a new company, Bitmatrix, in January 2021. Ng remains in place at CLV, as of June 2022.

CLV counts Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research, Olaf Carlson Wee’s Polychain Capital and exchange and wallet provider Bitcoin.com among its backers.