Can I provide liquidity to Curve pools through Convex just to earn trading fees without using cvxCRV staking or vlCVX bribe income? Does the infrastructure neutrality principle apply here?

This question applies the infrastructure neutrality principle that CoinStudy has used in analyses of Raydium, Arcus, and other multi-product platforms to Convex Finance, and it deserves a precise answer because the principle is real and its limits are equally real.

The infrastructure neutrality principle holds that when a platform provides neutral infrastructure for routing or executing transactions, the platform's own compliance classification does not automatically make every individual transaction on it impermissible. CoinStudy applied this when ruling that spot swapping of halal-classified tokens on Raydium's AMM is closer to permissible even though Raydium as a platform is Haram due to its perpetual futures product. The neutral infrastructure layer, the spot swap mechanism, was assessed separately from the prohibited products built on the same platform.

The question is whether providing liquidity to Curve pools through Convex is analogous to Raydium spot swapping. To answer this requires examining what specifically happens when you provide liquidity through Convex versus directly through Curve.

When you provide liquidity directly to Curve Finance on a halal-assessed pool, you earn trading fees from genuine spot exchange of assets in that pool. If the pool involves genuinely permissible assets and the trading fees are service income from facilitating genuine exchange, the base activity is closer to permissible at the individual transaction level pending Curve Finance's own individual assessment.

When you provide liquidity through Convex rather than directly, two specific differences arise that break the infrastructure neutrality argument.

The first difference is the 17% performance fee that Convex automatically extracts from all CRV rewards earned by your liquidity position. This fee does not go to a general protocol treasury for genuine operational services. It flows to cvxCRV stakers and vlCVX holders as capital-proportional income on their locked positions. By providing liquidity through Convex you are not using neutral infrastructure. You are actively funding the capital-for-yield income streams that trigger Convex's Guaranteed Interest red-line failure. Every unit of liquidity you provide through Convex generates performance fees that flow to locked capital holders as prohibited income. Your participation directly funds the mechanism that CoinStudy has identified as impermissible.

The second difference is the boosted CRV rewards themselves. Convex's aggregated veCRV position provides liquidity providers with significantly higher CRV rewards than they would earn providing liquidity directly to Curve. These boosted rewards come from Convex's governance power extracted from permanently locked veCRV positions, and the extraction mechanism involves the same prohibited capital-lock structures analyzed in Q&A 2. The boosted rewards you receive are generated through the system of permanent CRV locks and synthetic cvxCRV instruments that CoinStudy has identified as impermissible.

The infrastructure neutrality principle applies when a platform provides genuinely neutral routing without requiring the user to participate in or benefit from prohibited mechanisms. In Convex's case the liquidity provision through the platform is not neutral. It automatically involves both the extraction of performance fees funding prohibited capital-for-yield income and the receipt of boosted rewards generated through prohibited synthetic lock mechanisms. These are not peripheral features you can opt out of while using Convex's routing. They are inherent to how liquidity provision through Convex operates.

The practical guidance for Muslim investors who want to provide liquidity to genuine stablecoin or permissible asset pools on Curve Finance is to do so directly through Curve Finance rather than through Convex, pending CoinStudy's individual assessment of Curve Finance's own compliance profile. Providing liquidity through Curve directly avoids the Convex-specific prohibited mechanisms of the performance fee distribution and boosted reward structure. Curve Finance itself requires individual assessment of its own stablecoin pool compositions, LST pool components, and governance mechanisms before a clear permissibility ruling can be issued.

The short answer to your specific question is no. The infrastructure neutrality principle does not apply to Convex liquidity provision because the Convex layer between you and Curve is not neutral infrastructure. It is a system that automatically routes a portion of your earned rewards to prohibited capital-for-yield income recipients and provides you with boosted returns generated through prohibited synthetic lock mechanisms. Both of these features are inherent to using Convex rather than being avoidable products you can decline.

Read detail analysis of Convex Finance here:
Is Convex Finance Halal ?