Insights
Converge: Tech Specification & Roadmap
5 Min Read
Converge is building toward the most ambitious goal in crypto today: the onboarding of billions of dollars of institutional capital onchain to bring the convergence of RWAs and DeFi. To achieve this outcome, Converge needs an equally ambitious tech and infrastructure roadmap.
Approaching Converge from a technology-first perspective enables us to natively support a wide range of financial applications and build for multiple user types—all on top of Ethena and Securitize products. Combined, Ethena and Securitize jointly boast nearly $10B in TVL/AUM, which positions Converge to become one of the largest blockchain networks in production.
Converge will provide institutional-grade infrastructure and enable the tokenization of RWAs at scale for the world’s largest financial institutions, driving broader adoption and more practical onchain finance with a close integration of RWAs and DeFi.
We’re excited to work closely with Arbitrum and Celestia to bring Converge to life, pushing EVM performance to the edge of what’s possible.
Converge will be designed to solve for three core outcomes:
Converge will achieve performance through an optimized Conduit G2 sequencer, first-to-market tech stack improvements with Arbitrum and Celestia, low friction user experience with USDe and USDtb as native gas tokens & ERC-7702, and additional security guarantees with the Converge Validator Network (CVN) that will be built on staked ENA (sENA).
Converge will push the boundaries of what level of throughput is possible on EVM-based networks in collaboration with Arbitrum, Celestia, and Conduit.
Converge will achieve performance through a custom G2 sequencer implementation for an Arbitrum-powered chain with Celestia underneath. We expect best-in-class throughput powered by the sequencer, Arbitrum, and alt-DA with the ability to maintain 100 Mgas/s with minimal latency.
Over the course of 2025, we will scale Converge’s performance by 10x and achieve one gigagas (or more) in potential throughput.
We will achieve this by implementing a coordinated set of innovations across the full stack:
This is a deep systems challenge that touches consensus, execution, storage, and infrastructure. But we’re confident in the roadmap – and excited for what this unlocks: a blockchain with the scale and responsiveness of a modern cloud backend, but running fully onchain.
We’ll be sharing benchmarks, dev tools, and migration guides as these improvements roll out. If you’re building high-performance onchain apps, we’d love to hear from you.
Arbitrum One has proven itself as one of the most performant networks, driven by Offchain Labs and other contributing parties’ first principles approach taken into its development. Converge will inherit the secure and performant nature of Arbitrum One via the Arbitrum Orbit stack, and will be on the frontier of innovation for Arbitrum development.
To achieve extreme performance, Converge and Ethereal will go to production with Celestia underneath. Last year, Celestia published a scaling roadmap to 1GB blocks, throughput enough to fit many Visa networks running in parallel. Celestia recently released Mamo-1, a public testnet with 128MB blocks and 21.33MB/s of permissionless throughput. Later this year, Mamo-1 will make Celestia the most performant network for permissionless data availability, building on a track record of operating nearly 30 chains since its Mainnet launched in late 2023.
From inception, Converge will be highly performant, but we aspire for it to be even faster and cheaper to accommodate onchain financial applications and a diverse set of users. Our team will continuously focus on updating the platform to constantly evolve and improve for its users.
The Converge Validator Network (CVN) will serve as a foundational layer of security, governance, and economic alignment for the Converge chain, powered by staked ENA.
The CVN reinforces the safety of funds on the network without compromising decentralization or liveness.
Unlike traditional validator sets that solely focus on consensus or data availability, the CVN is purpose-built to address the unique security and coordination challenges of Converge, particularly fast finality to provide instant withdrawals via native bridge, safer block validation, MEV resistance and upgrade safety.
At the core of its functionality, the CVN will act as a security council with discretionary authority to intervene in scenarios that threaten user funds or network integrity. One such example is the ability to throttle or block malicious cross-chain messages relayed via LayerZero's Decentralized Verification Networks (DVNs), effectively acting as a backstop against bridge-based exploits.
Beyond this, the CVN may also coordinate protocol-level circuit breakers, either chain-wide or contract-specific, to pause activity in the face of oracle manipulation, critical contract bugs, or economic anomalies. In extreme scenarios, the CVN could dispute finality or coordinate community signaling around fork choice, adding an additional layer of protection for users and developers building on Converge.
These reactive powers will be balanced with preventive responsibilities. The CVN is expected to review high-impact governance proposals, apply safety timelocks to sensitive upgrades, and coordinate fast or emergency upgrades with ecosystem contributors when needed.
To participate in the CVN, validators must stake Ethena’s governance token, ENA. ENA stakers, both operators and users who delegate, will be eligible to earn a share of protocol transaction fees, in addition to other potential rewards distributed by the Converge ecosystem.
The CVN will be introduced shortly after the Converge mainnet launch, with detailed specifications, validator selection criteria, and operational procedures to be released later in Q2 closer to mainnet.
Utilizing Converge as a developer or user is permissionless out of the box. Anybody can bridge USDe or other assets to the network and use permissionless applications, and any developer can deploy smart contracts as they please.
Permissioning is involved on an app-by-app basis and for RWAs, where certain applications and smart contract functionalities are held to whitelisted parties. This will be decided at the application or asset issuer layer; no permissioning will come top down from Converge validators or contributors, nor is that feasible within the launch spec for the network.
Converge will support two distinct application types operating in parallel:
Converge will support the development of permissionless and permissioned net-new applications built on top of Ethena and Securitize assets, which will drive net new use cases and financial products to expand the userbase of onchain finance. Namely, Ethereal, Ethena’s incubated perpetuals DEX that will settle down to Converge, along with other apps in the “Ethena Network.”
We acknowledge Ethena’s roots and relationships, hence permissionless EVM applications like Aave, Pendle, and Morpho being set to launch their institutional products on Converge. Though we also respect that there are naturally counterparties who seek more guardrails when it comes to onchain interaction, evidenced by the inherently permissioned nature of Securitize’s tokenized RWA assets and Ethena’s upcoming iUSDe.
Converge notably will be supported by all major infrastructure and developer tooling to afford developers best-in-class support in the deployment and maintenance of their applications.
This technical base empowers Ethereal to be highly performant from day one. High performance trading venues have and will continue to be the most popular and most profitable products in crypto markets.
To ensure that Ethereal can maintain high levels of performance at all times, Ethereal will sit on top of its own blockspace, but post proofs down to Converge. Other applications that need their own blockspace can also deploy their own networks that settle down to Converge.
Ethereal will feature CEX-level throughput and latency through optimistic matching pre-confirmations while keeping an onchain exchange engine. This ensures that executing trades on Ethereal is not fully reliant on onchain blocktimes, but instead sits on a highly-optimized custom sequencer that can handle significant trading load while maintaining uptime.
Ethereal expects to achieve 1+ million orders per second and 2,000+ onchain trades per second based on current specifications.
Ethereal has begun to progressively roll out its testnet to eligible power users, and will soon be releasing more information about its team, go to market, and roadmap. Follow Ethereal’s socials for more detail!
The Converge developer testnet and technical documentation will be rolled out in the coming weeks, first to infrastructure partners, then later to application developers. Official mainnet will come in the months after that.
We’re excited to be joined on Converge with some of the most premier application developers including Aave Labs, Morpho, Pendle, Maple, Ethereal, as announced in our launch post. Other major app builders and asset issuers have also signed up to deploy on Converge day one, with more partnerships to be announced in the near future.
We would like to continue to invite developers who want to build with Ethena and Securitize and on top of assets like iUSDe and BUIDL to reach out here.
Keep in touch with the Converge, Ethena, and Securitize social media channels to stay on top of the latest.
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