How CVEX Slashed Costs 80% and Gave Traders Tighter Spreads with Conduit

CVEX is revolutionizing crypto derivatives with an onchain options DEX that drastically reduces fees compared to perpetuals — all without sacrificing trustlessness. 

Running a fully onchain options DEX isn’t easy – and as CVEX found, it’s virtually impossible on a shared blockchain. The team quickly faced scalability challenges and ballooning onchain costs as their platform grew. There was only one way to overcome these hurdles: Partner with Conduit to build a high-performance rollup.

Since launching its own chain in April 2025, CVEX has seen its onchain costs decrease by 80%. Equally important: By teaming up with Conduit, CVEX gained a partner with the rollup expertise to customize CVEX’s Arbitrum Orbit chain to meet the unique demands of the CVEX platform. 

Keep reading to learn how we worked with CVEX to do this and how its new build enables CVEX to be the go-to destination for onchain options traders.

The CVEX rollup tech stack

Framework: Arbitrum Orbit

Settlement layer: Arbitrum One

Data availability: Arbitrum AnyTrust

Gas token: CVXG

Overcoming scaling barriers: Why CVEX needed a rollup

CVEX is saving traders a fortune by putting dated options onchain. Whereas perpetuals require traders to pay constant funding fees that can eat up to half of profits, CVEX charges traders just 0.003% per position – a game changer for trading performance. 

However, CVEX’s innovative platform quickly ran into scaling barriers in its first iteration running on Arbitrum One’s shared blockchain infrastructure. 

One barrier: Smart contract size limits. As a fully onchain options DEX, the CVEX protocol was made up of more than 70 smart contracts. But Arbitrum One has a built-in cap of 24 kb for smart contract storage size (the same limit as Ethereum mainnet), which limited CVEX’s ability to build. “We were spending a ton of engineering hours just on smart contract size optimization,” said CVEX Head of Product Vitaliy Siomochkin. “Optimizing one contract could easily be a two-week sprint for two or three devs.” 

Even worse was what the limit meant for CVEX’s future. “At our growth rate, we’d soon face managing hundreds of contracts, creating an unmanageable mess,” said Siomochkin. The smart contracts powering CVEX’s core order estimation and creation functionalities were also already at the 24 kb capacity, which severely hampered the team’s ability to add new features in the future. “We were basically stuck with what we had.” 

Escalating gas costs were another scaling problem. CVEX compensated market makers for their gas costs, an expense that could balloon during busy periods on Arbitrum One. Between that, oracle calls, and the many contract-to-contract calls between CVEX’s own smart contracts, gas costs reached as high as $50,000 per month. “The burn wasn’t sustainable,” said Vitaliy. “We were hitting our threshold of how often market makers could post orders.” 

It was clear that CVEX had reached the limits of what it could achieve on a shared blockchain. In order to enable high-frequency, low-fee options trading and build a full suite of derivatives products, CVEX would need its own chain.

Tailoring the CVEX rollup for high-performance trading

The CVEX team knew it couldn’t make due with a vanilla deployment of a popular rollup framework. CVEX needed a bespoke chain customized for their unique architecture in order to fully solve its scaling problems. And that meant they needed to partner with a team who knew rollups inside and out. “We were looking for a battle-tested rollup platform that had actually built highly-customized chains,” said Vitaliy. “Conduit was the only one we trusted could deliver what we needed.” 

From there, Conduit and CVEX collaborated to build the perfect chain for a fully onchain options DEX. 

New chain, same Arbitrum tech

CVEX stayed in the Arbitrum ecosystem and used their Orbit rollup framework to build its new chain. “We were already using Stylus to write smart contracts in Rust,” said Vitaliy. “Plus, we knew that Arbitrum Orbit allows for the most customization, so it was an easy decision.” 

Arbitrum’s “Your chain, your rules” ethos makes it a desirable choice for complex apps that need heavy customization. But fully taking advantage of that and implementing customizations successfully takes rollup expertise like Conduit’s.

4x larger smart contracts make CVEX more efficient

One such customization was to change Arbitrum Orbit’s default smart contract size limit from 24 kb to 96 kb – a 4x increase. “This was the first and most important thing we needed to do,” said Vitaliy. CVEX could now fit code for more product operations into fewer and fewer smart contracts, cutting down on the number of contract-to-contract calls the app had to make. This, along with the general savings of elminating shared blockchain gas costs in favor of cheaper rollup DA costs, means CVEX is now paying just $3,000 to $4,000 per month onchain. “Keep in mind, it’s not a one-to-one comparison either – we’re doing much more onchain than we were before building our own chain,” said Vitaliy. 

CVEX engineers also have more time to build now that they don’t need to spend hours per week optimizing smart contract sizes. 

Speed improvements: Lower transaction latency and fast deposits + withdrawals

Conduit also made two key improvements to the default Arbitrum Orbit stack to increase the CVEX app’s speed in ways that benefit traders.

The first was to increase CVEX’s speed above the Orbit default, moving the fastest-possible block time down to 10 milliseconds. So far, this has brought CVEX’s average time to finalize a single trade from four seconds to under one second, with room for more speed if necessary. “The number one thing you’re afraid of as a futures trader is the latency arbitrage,” said Vitaliy. “Lower latency is a huge value add for our users.” 

Another speed-focused UX improvement Conduit made was to enable faster finality for CVEX transactions, enabling faster withdrawals and deposits than is possible on Orbit’s default settings. With faster finality, CVEX users can withdraw in 15 minutes, versus the one-hour default on other Orbit chains. This significantly boosts user experience and protects against potential fund loss from Arbitrum One reorgs. 

Custom gas tokens protect CVEX’s chain

Finally, Conduit also helped CVEX take advantage of Arbitrum Orbit’s support for custom gas tokens. CVEX rollup users pay for gas in the CVEX Gas Token (CVXG), a USDC-pegged token designed only for gas payments. CVEX took this measure to protect the chain from potential bad actors. “We can do permissioning around CVXG and control who’s able to transact on CVEX and deploy contracts. This lets us stay protected from malicious transactions and DDOS attempts, while keeping transaction fees extremely low,” said Vitaliy, noting also that users can still trade permissionlessly on CVEX by submitting trades on Arbitrum One. 

CVEX’s custom gas token implementation is another great example of how developers can tap into the greater customizability of rollups. CVEX now has the perfect mix of decentralization and permissioning, with enough protection to ensure bad actors can’t attack the chain, but enough openness to let non-permissioned users interact with the protocol via the settlement layer. 

Final results: Lower costs, tighter spreads, more trading on CVEX

CVEX’s switch from shared blockspace to dedicated rollup has been a resounding success. The more efficient setup enabled on a rollup enables CVEX to reduce its monthly onchain costs by 80%, while processing more activity and accommodating more functionalities than it had as a protocol on Arbitrum One. Engineers are saving hundreds of hours per new feature now that they don’t need to spend time optimizing every smart contract to stay under the 24 kb size limit. 

And most importantly, these changes are making CVEX better for users. Market makers can now post orders three times more often than previously, which keeps prices more up to date and gives traders tighter spreads. The ability to trade more efficiently and make more money has already led to growth for CVEX. “We’re definitely seeing more prop traders come to the platform,” said Vitaliy. “Everyone wants tighter spreads.” 

It’s all possible thanks to deep collaboration between the Conduit and CVEX teams, even on a short timeline. “We wanted our mainnet up and running in four weeks, and Conduit delivered for us, which we really appreciated,” said Vitaliy. “Overall, I would recommend Conduit to anyone launching their own rollup. They’re the only provider we saw with real experience launching highly-customized chains, and they’re a great team to work with.”

Want help scaling your DEX? Contact Conduit here.