Convex Intro

Convex is a high-performance platform for decentralised economic systems. It's open source and available for the whole world to use.

It delivers the true promise of Web3: flexibility and scalability far beyond the capabilities of traditional blockchains. In particular, it is supports high volume, interactive applications used directly by end users such as for mobile apps, payments and gaming.

Key Advantages

Convex is designed to give developers ultimate power to build the next generation of high performance decentralised applications for their users. Here's some highlights that may be of interest:

• Lightning fast consensus: The unique Convergent Proof of Stake (CPoS) algorithm is decentralised, leaderless, byzantine fault tolerant, offers front-running resistance and reaches consensus in milliseconds. This is the ultimate solution for realtime, interactive decentralised systems that need to offer a compelling user experience.
• True global state: Convex delivers blazing fast performance while still giving a developers a consistent global state. No shards, cross-chain transactions, roll-ups or other complications.
• Powerful virtual machine: The CVM has proven to be capable of a million transactions per second. Based on the lambda calculus and providing powerful immutable persistent data structures, it represents the next generation of decentralised virtual machine technology.
• One Line DeFi: Unique on-chain code libraries make it possible to do virtually DeFi operation in a simple, one-line transaction. Want to mint tokens? (@convex.fungible/mint MY_TOKEN 100000). Say goodbye to complex integration and deployment toolchains, this is the ideal ecosystem for simple dApp development.
• Strong Cryptography: Convex uses best in class, industry standard cryptography algorithms such as SHA3-256 for hashing and Ed25519 for digital signatures. You can rest safe in the knowledge that assets are secure against even the most powerful known cryptographic attacks.

Our Story

Convex was initially created by Mike Anderson, a technology veteran and long-time open source hacker. He started coding on an 8-bit Atari 800XL at the age of eight, represented the UK in the International Olympiad in Informatics and has been passionate about coding ever since.

During ten years of consulting experience at McKinsey & Company, he saw all the problems and inefficiencies of large centralised organisations (multi-national companies, governments, NGOs etc.) and knew there had to be a better way to organise our economies.

While working as a founding member and CTO at Ocean Protocol in 2018-2019, he saw the promise of decentralised systems to give power back to self-sovereign individuals, but also the need for a better base layer technology if such solutions were ever able to achieve mass adoption.

This led him to embark on a programme of research and create the Convex Foundation in 2020-2022, tackling multiple obstacles and design challenges to make Convex possible. Key inventions included:

• Convergent Proof of Stake: the world's fastest truly decentralised consensus algorithm for a global state machine. By operating as a CRDT instead of a blockchain, CPoS solves the traditional blockchain scalability trilemma. The keys ideas of CPoS are outlined in the Convex White Paper
• Lattice technology: by combining the concepts of mathematical join-semilattices with cryptography, it is possible to reinvent the concept of data structures for the decentralised world. The lattice is infinitely flexible: any kind of data, any kind of compute, any kind of access control, and kind of replication mechanism. The lattice supports both public on-chain operation (e.g. CPoS, the Convex CVM) and off-chain use cases (DLFS, private databases, media content etc.)
• Decentralised Code Execution: To offer full flexibility and power to developers, it was clear that Convex needed an execution engine for smart contracts and other autonomous decentralised programs. Existing solutions were inadequate, either due to poor performance, architectural limitations or inability to deal with the more powerful data structures required by The Lattice. The solution was to create a new kind of VM based on the lambda calculus to bring the best capabilities of functional programming to the decentralised world.

Convex has always been an open source project. Over the years many fantastic people have joined the project and made significant contributions. The primary venues for collaboration have been been on GitHub and on the Convex Community Discord

Thanks for all these great contributions, Convex has been fully functional and subjected to brutal testing throughout the Testnet phases in 2022-2024. It's been remarkably robust: nobody has ever managed to steal a single Convex Coin on testnet without access to a user's private key. We have thousands of lines of code dedicated to extensive automated testing. Some of our Testnet servers had uptime of over a year without issues.

We validated performance and scalability running early versions of Convex peers distributed all around the world in 2023 as part of the EU Next Generation Internet initiative, which proved global scale and stunning energy efficiency while still offering near-instant transaction finality.

We're now launching Protonet, the first live Convex network with real assets.

Why are we doing this?

We build Convex because it needs to exist in the world we want to see.

• Decentralised economies: We want open, inclusive, decentralised economies at global scale, free from centralised control and unnecessary middlemen. This can only occur with true self-sovereign control of data and assets backed by a powerful open protocol and technology implementation.
• Mass adoption: Getting the whole world to use decentralised applications will require realtime, interactive performance, low transaction costs and simple operation. Existing Blockchains are failing to deliver this. Convex isn't a blockchain, so we are able to offer a much more compelling solution for mass adoption.
• Free from vested interests: Convex is developed on open source principles and governed by the non-profit Convex Foundation. We aren't owned or dependent on money from VCs, ultra-rich power brokers or centralised organisations with vested interests. 100% of Convex coins are issued to those who bring value to the ecosystem, either via contributions of code and community efforts or by purchasing coins from the release curve (in which case funds are re-invested in the ecosystem)

For more on our motivations and principles, check out the Convex Manifesto