Convex Finance

Convex Finance is a DeFi protocol that allows Curve liquidity providers to earn a share of trading fees on Curve without staking liquidity there. Instead, LPs can stake with Convex and receive boosted CRV and liquidity mining rewards. This provides CRV stakers with better capital efficiency and positions Convex Finance as an important player in the Curve wars .

Convex has entered a competitive race to obtain as much control as possible of the Curve Finance stablecoin exchange. The more CRV tokens a protocol has, the more influence it has over interest rates on Curve , which is the largest DEX in the world by TVL . Consequently, the “Curve wars” are an ongoing race for influence over what is probably the most important protocol in DeFi .

Convex Finance was developed by a team of anonymous developers. However, unlike many shitcoins , Convex Finance is considered one of the most important and influential protocols in decentralized finance and thus a fairly low-risk investment.

Convex Finance plays a key role in the Curve wars thanks to its unique incentive structure. Its sole use case is to accumulate as much TVL as possible to achieve the protocol’s goal of controlling as big a stake of Curve Finance as it can. In other words, Convex Finance targets only CRV holders and Curve liquidity providers and does so in two ways:

Curve Finance issues veCRV (vote-escrowed CRV) for staked CRV that liquidity providers receive as a reward. In short, veCRV are time-locked CRV tokens with boosted voting power and rewards, which are both a function of the lock-up period of the underlying CRV. You can read more about veCRV here . CRV rewards can go as high as 2.5X of the initial rewards, but the higher the liquidity deposited, the more difficult it is to attain the maximum rewards.

Put differently, it is nearly impossible for any one party to stake enough liquidity to attain the maximum boost, which is where Convex Finance comes in. Convex acts as a cartel that pools the assets of individual stakers and benefits from their aggregated liquidity. Even low-level investors can stake their Curve Finance LPs with Convex and receive boosted rewards that would otherwise not be attainable. They receive:

Furthermore, you can stake your CRV tokens and receive cvxCRV to receive:

CVX has a total supply of 100 million CVX according to the following distribution:

cvxCRV are minted at a 1:1 ratio for every CRV staked. CVX tokens can be used to participate in proposals in the Convex Finance protocol.

Convex was audited by MixBytes, and the results can be found here . Its treasury is secured by a 3 of 5 multisig consisting of the following parties:

However, a bug in one of the smart contracts at the beginning of March 2022 forced the team to re-deploy the vote-locking contract and caused a price drop in CVX.

CVX is available on Binance , OKX , Bitget , Mandala Exchange , and Hotcoin Global .