Year-in-Review: Convex Turns 1!

Convex Finance
5 min readMay 17, 2022

Though it feels like a lot longer, one year has passed since the launch of Convex Finance. Let’s highlight some statistics on the growth of the protocol since last May!

Over 31,000 individual wallets have interacted with Convex, and Convex has captured, on average, approximately 100% of all CRV emissions over the last year!

Convex recently passed 200M CRV locked!
Whitelisted DAO’s locked CRV tokens (and “Other” independent CRV lockers)

CVX lockers continue to grow. Over 80% of circulating CVX tokens are vote-locked at the time of this writing. CVX lockers get to participate in governance and gauge-weight votes, and receive additional protocol fees.

Note the “un-lockening” in March 2022; CVX locks continued higher afterwards!

Aligned incentives for other DAOs and Convex means CVX distribution continues to expand. Continuing decentralized governance power is a net positive for the protocol!

DAO-owned CVX continues to grow

Convex protocol fees and rewards are distributed to ecosystem participants. Curve LPs, cvxCRV stakers, and CVX stakers/lockers all benefit from the Convex protocol’s continued success. Incentives are designed to be aligned between all participants. External incentives to CVX gauge-weight voters (via Votium or other avenues) are not included in these figures, an additional ~195M so far!

Fees + reward distribution to Convex users.

Convex Community

The growth and success of Convex is bolstered by its strong community. Huge thanks to early contributors who had faith in the protocol during the early days.

Whether it’s providing tooling, education, or exposure, Convex has had significant community member contributions. We wanted to give shout-outs to some standout community members.

CurveCap

With near-daily updates, CurveCap provides significant value to the Curve and Convex ecosystem. A lot can happen in 24 hours, but the important bits are always captured in CurveCaps updates. Follow CurveCap and consider subscribing to the Substack as well to stay ahead of the Curve!

LazyGuac

There are lots of questions for newcomers to Curve and Convex, with multi-faceted and potentially complex answers. Lazyguac has created llama.college, a one-stop-shop for all your questions regarding the ecosystem. It also contains useful links to helpful videos, articles, and resources.

CryptoRiskTeam

As Curve grows, additional pools and gauges are being proposed and added at an ever-increasing rate. The CryptoRiskTeam was created in order to evaluate proposed pools, and offer insights to individuals who may be less technical, or simply not have the time/resources to fully vet before voting.

MarcoV

MarcoV’s DuneAnalytics dashboard continues to provide value, allowing users to glean information regarding CVX tokenomics, locked CRV tokens, revenue figures, and more.

https://dune.com/Marcov/Convex-Finance

DefiDividends

DefiDividends contributes tooling to Curve and Convex. They’ve launched DAOCVX.com, illustrating DAO-owned CVX tokens and analytics behind them. They’ve also created v2pools.com, which provides insights into Curve’s v2 pools.

DAOCVX.com

Additionally, significant supporters on Twitter keep the conversation around Convex alive and thriving. Convex appreciates the effort and insights provided by our loudest supporters on social media. Some special shout-outs:

Protocol Integrations

Convex launched with the goal of being a “DeFi-Lego”, allowing other protocols permissionless and seamless integration where possible. This benefits Convex and DeFi in general, as we’ve seen many instances of integration and additional layers of complexity added to Convex building blocks. We wanted to give shout-outs to some standout protocols that have contributed significant value to Convex and the ecosystem as whole.

Votium

votium.app

A standout in this category is Votium. Created by early Convex community members @0xtommygenesis and @itsrabas, Votium changed the landscape of vlCVX voting, opening up a marketplace to rent out voting power. Protocols are able to incentivize vlCVX holders to vote for their pools in Curve gauge-weight votes, which tends to drive deeper liquidity. Votium has brought significant value-add to the Convex ecosystem!

LLama.Airforce

llama.airforce

A one stop shop for all things Curve+Convex, LLama.Airforce is a powerhouse of analytical tools. Created by early Convex community members @0xAlunara and Benny, LLama.Airforce hosts a suite of tools to help make sense of an otherwise complicated landscape of Curve pools, Convex votes, Votium incentives, and more.

Additionally, with the creation of the Union, smaller vlCVX voters have an opportunity for gas-optimized earnings. Users can opt to join the Union to convert their earned incentive tokens into cvxCRV, and potentially earn additional cvxCRV via auto-compounding in the process.

Convex Community Subgraph

While not a protocol itself, the creation of the Convex Community Subgraph has significantly reduced friction for other contributors to add value. Thank you to the creators for empowering others with open-source tooling!

https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph/convex-community/curve-pools

https://github.com/convex-community/convex-subgraph

Additional Protocols

Many thanks to all protocols who’ve integrated Convex in some way, shape, or form. We don’t want to miss anyone; if your protocol was mistakenly left off this list, please reach out!

In no particular order….

Special thanks to the team at Curve Finance for their continued support throughout the first year of Convex Finance, as well as the Curve.fi community for supporting Convex!

And special thanks to the team at Frax Finance for being Convex Finance’s newest partner integration!

On the horizon…

Before you leave, a quick look at what’s next…

  • Continued expansion of new Curve pools
  • Support for boosted pools on side-chains / L2’s!
  • Further expansion of the Frax ecosystem
  • Frax gauge-weight voting for vlCVX holders
  • Exploring new opportunities!

Onward.

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