Pirex
Liquid wrappers for vote-locked governance tokens in the Curve and Convex ecosystem (pxCVX), later extended to GMX.
Overview
Pirex, part of the Redacted ecosystem, offered liquid staking wrappers, auto-compounders and yield futures. Its first wrapper, pxCVX, made vote-locked Convex liquid: users could hold a tradable token instead of locked vlCVX, and sell their future bribes and votes for upfront liquidity. Pirex GMX then brought the same idea to GMX, with liquid wrappers for staked GMX and staked GLP issued as pxGMX and pxGLP.
Data Subsystems did backend and frontend development. In January 2023, pirex.io was a statically exported Next.js app built with Mantine. It opened on a terminal-style landing page showing total locked CVX and total value, with a prompt to type 'help', and a Launch app link into the product: Easy, Standard and Expert modes, a redemptions area, and terms and privacy pages.
In Easy Mode, yield from staked GMX and GLP compounded automatically into more pxGMX or pxGLP; in Standard Mode it was paid out as pxGMX and pxGLP for the user to claim. The pirex.io domain now redirects to Llama Airforce, where pxCVX lives on with deposits, redemptions, a Curve pool swap and claims for future rewards.
The shipped front end says what it was built from. Pirex ran on Next.js and React with Mantine over Emotion for the interface, and the Web3 layer is the familiar pairing: wallet connection through RainbowKit on top of wagmi, with connectors for injected wallets and MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase Wallet, Ledger, Trust and Brave; chain calls through viem and ethers; Alchemy and Infura as RPC providers so the app does not depend on a single node; CoinGecko for prices; zustand holding client state; Yup validating the forms where a user commits funds.
What was built
- Terminal-style landing page with live protocol figures (total locked CVX and total value) and a command prompt.
- Easy Mode screens, where staking yield compounds automatically into more of the wrapped token.
- Standard Mode screens with a dedicated redemptions section for turning wrapped tokens back into the underlying asset.
- An Expert Mode section alongside Easy and Standard, each mode organized as a set of tabs.
Stack
Frontend
- Next.js
- Static export of the site and app, with tabbed routes for each mode and for redemptions
- React
- UI layer of the Next.js app, from the terminal landing to the mode screens
- Mantine
- Component library, present in the archived January 2023 markup
- Mantine + Emotion
- Component library and styling for the app interface
- zustand
- Client state for the wrapper, staking and redemption flows
- Yup
- Validation on the forms that move funds
Web3
- Convex vlCVX
- The vote-locked position that pxCVX wraps into a liquid token
- GMX and GLP staking
- Staked positions wrapped by Pirex GMX as pxGMX and pxGLP
Web3
- wagmi + viem
- Accounts, connectors, reads and writes against the contracts
- RainbowKit
- Wallet connection and account UI
- WalletConnect and wallet connectors
- Injected and MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase Wallet, Ledger, Trust and Brave
- ethers.js
- Contract interaction alongside viem
- Alchemy + Infura
- RPC providers, so the app is not tied to one node
- CoinGecko
- Price data behind the displayed values
Engineering highlights
The app was organized as three mode-based route trees, Easy, Standard and Expert, each with tabbed screens, plus a separate redemptions area under Standard.
The product outlived its site: pxCVX still runs inside Llama Airforce, and pirex.io redirects there.