Convex 0.7.11 introduces scoped actors: instead of calling an actor by
its address alone, you can call it as [#1234 :USD] — an address plus a
scope value the actor interprets however it likes. One deployed contract
can now serve an unbounded family of assets, markets or resources, each
addressed as a first-class value.
Convex 0.7.10 starts landing arbitrary-precision integers, native in the CVM. Multiply two enormous numbers and you get the right answer. Not a wrapped answer, not a reverted transaction, not a number shaved to fit a 256-bit word. The right answer.
Smart contracts on most platforms share a basic limitation: they can't wake themselves up. Code runs only when a transaction arrives — so every vesting schedule, auction deadline and recurring payment in DeFi depends on some off-chain bot remembering to send a transaction at the right moment. Entire "keeper network" services exist purely to send those transactions on time.
Convex has a scheduler in the protocol itself. Code can be registered to execute at a future timestamp, and the network will run it. No bot, no keeper, no external trigger.
On most smart contract platforms, the compiler is somebody else's problem. You write Solidity, run a toolchain on your laptop, and submit the resulting bytecode to the chain. The chain never sees your source code. Convex works differently: the compiler is part of the CVM. Submit source, and it is expanded and compiled on-chain, in consensus, metered by juice like any other computation.
Convex 0.7.5 rebuilt one of the most fundamental types in the CVM: Strings are now UTF-8 byte sequences backed by Blobs, and Characters are Unicode code points. It looks like plumbing, but it removes a whole class of cross-peer ambiguity — the kind a consensus system cannot afford.
Every public blockchain has a slow-motion problem called state growth. Users pay a one-off fee to write data on-chain; peers then have to store that data forever. The person creating the cost and the people bearing it are different people, which is how you get chains where full nodes need terabytes of storage and the situation only ever gets worse.
Convex has a mechanism we've not seen anywhere else: memory accounting. On-chain memory is an allowance you hold, spend, and get back when you delete things.
Blockchain folklore says you can't have floating point in consensus. Ethereum has no floats. Most chains follow suit, and everyone does token maths with painful fixed-point workarounds as a result. Convex 0.7.2 takes a different position: the CVM supports IEEE 754 double-precision floats, in consensus, deterministically. The folklore is wrong — but it's wrong in an interesting way.
Ask someone their Bitcoin or Ethereum address and they'll read you a hash of a public key. The key is the identity. Lose the key, lose the account. Want a new key? That's a new account — move everything, update everyone.
Convex doesn't work that way. A Convex account address is just a number, and the key attached to it is replaceable.