One Balance to Rule Them All: Grvt's On-Chain Prime Broker Ambition

Forty years ago, the world of financial transactions was forever changed by a technological revolution.

In that era, transactions still relied on physical spaces. But soon, computer terminals began to replace the shouting in trading halls. In 1981, a trader named Michael Bloomberg was fired by Salomon Brothers, and with a $10 million severance package, he founded a company aimed at making financial data transparent and real-time. He succeeded.

The Bloomberg Terminal allowed traders to sit in an office for the first time, seeing real-time scrolling market quotes. Finance, once a privilege of the few, began to transform into a standardized flow of information.

By the 1990s, the proliferation of the internet brought this revolution to its peak, dramatically reducing the cost of serving clients. Companies like E*Trade and Charles Schwab allowed ordinary people to place stock orders from home for the first time, reducing trading commissions from tens of dollars per trade to single digits. The barrier to entry in finance was drastically lowered.

Fast forward forty years, the early technology pioneers have themselves become massive traditional powers. And a new disruptor is moving from the crypto world to the traditional world. This time, what it is set to change is something more fundamental than the transactions themselves — capital efficiency.

The Dilemma of the Trillion-Dollar Casino

By 2025, the global trading volume of crypto derivatives reached $85.7 trillion. The Perp DEX market alone generated $7.9 trillion in trading. In the total annual revenue generated by the entire cryptocurrency market, 15% came from this high-speed spinning wheel. Perpetual contracts are one of the most profitable businesses in this industry.

Grvt emerged in this casino. Launched in January 2025, in just a few months, the cumulative trading volume reached $177 billion, consistently ranking between fifth and tenth in the global Perp DEX trading volume rankings. Monthly trading volume growth rates once reached 352%, and the growth rate of open interest reached 1601%.

And at the capital table, it secured $34 million investments from top institutions such as Hack VC, Delphi Ventures, Further Ventures, ZKSync, and EigenLayer.

However, this casino itself is facing a crisis.

As the saying goes, the house always wins. On-chain data shows that on Hyperliquid, as high as 86% of traders are at a loss. A few winners eat up the capital of the majority, which is not a sustainable situation.

A product that causes the vast majority of users to consistently lose money will inevitably face continuous user churn. Casinos need a new narrative, beyond speculation, there must be a real value anchor.

As a result, everyone's attention turned to the tokenization of real-world assets. Bringing familiar and tangible assets such as US Treasuries, stocks, and commodities onto the chain, transforming them into 24/7 tradable digital tokens. Wall Street giants like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have also joined the race. By the end of 2025, the total size of on-chain RWAs had exceeded $35 billion. According to Boston Consulting Group's forecast, this number is expected to reach $160 trillion by 2030.

This migration has also changed the rules of the perpetual contract game.

In October 2025, Hyperliquid introduced the HIP-3 standard, allowing anyone to deploy perpetual contract markets for any asset on its platform. Assets such as gold, oil, stocks, and even geopolitical indices could theoretically become trading pairs.

In February 2026, Ondo Finance announced the launch of Ondo Perps, enabling non-US users to directly trade perpetual contracts for stocks like Apple, NVIDIA, and Tesla. Kraken also announced in the same month the launch of the world's first regulated tokenized stock perpetual contract.

This is a significant trend; perpetual contracts are evolving from a "crypto casino" into a genuine global asset allocation tool.

However, there is a contradiction that nearly everyone is avoiding.

Existing perpetual contract platforms have a fatal capital efficiency flaw: they only accept stablecoins as collateral. This means that if you hold tokenized Apple stocks and want to hedge risk or leverage, you still need to prepare an additional amount of stablecoin as collateral.

So, who will provide the underlying account system that can link all assets together?

From Goldman Sachs to On-Chain: The Answer of a Group of "Rebels"

Grvt's founder and CEO Hong Yea is one of those who have defected from the old world.

Before founding Grvt, he spent over a decade as an executive director at Goldman Sachs and also worked as a trader at Credit Suisse. Someone with this background can see through the flaws of traditional finance. He has gathered around him a group of similar background rebels: CTO Aaron Ong, from Meta, who was responsible for designing the data privacy framework; COO Matthew Quek from DBS Bank in Singapore and the government's tech sector, with extensive experience in blockchain and payment systems.

These individuals did not come together to recreate another Binance or Coinbase. What they want to do is bring something that has existed on Wall Street for decades to the crypto space. That something is called the "Prime Broker".

The Prime Broker is the overall logistics department for hedge funds. Top-tier investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley provide a full range of services to large clients like Bridgewater and Renaissance Technologies, including trade execution, financing, securities clearing, risk management, and more. Hedge funds only need one account to go long, go short, leverage up in global markets seamlessly. Every penny of their money operates efficiently.

Yet today's crypto world is extremely fragmented. Your Bitcoin is on Exchange A, Ethereum is in Wallet B, stablecoins are in Protocol C for yield farming. You want to use Bitcoin as collateral to trade Ethereum perpetual futures while also not missing out on stablecoin yields. Sorry, not possible. You have to hop back and forth between three platforms, and every switch is a capital loss, eroding fees, time costs, and intangible missed gains.

Grvt calls this erosion "Capital Drag". This is precisely the core pain point they aim to address.

In simpler terms, just as Charles Schwab used the internet to break down Wall Street's information barrier so ordinary people could buy stocks for the first time, and Robinhood eliminated trading barriers with zero commissions allowing retail investors to play with options, Grvt aims to be the next-generation custodian broker in the on-chain world. They seek to replicate the top-tier Prime Broker business of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on-chain, moving the capital efficiency tools only enjoyed by the highest echelon of hedge funds to the public. This is something that has never been truly achieved before.

Their solution, condensed into one term, is the "On-Chain Prime Broker". And the core weapon to achieve this goal is called "Unified Margin".

It's a concept that sounds simple but is extremely complex to implement. It means that all your assets held in Grvt, whether Bitcoin, stablecoins, or future tokenized US Treasuries and stocks, exist in a unified balance. The money in this balance can do several things at once—it can act as trading margin for both long and short positions in perpetual futures; it can automatically generate up to 11% annualized yield through integration with DeFi lending protocols; and even if the Bitcoin you collateralize rises in value, you can still benefit from the price increase.

Your money has finally learned the art of "multilocation cloning".

Grvt aims to consolidate the originally fragmented actions of trading, asset management, and investment into an account, a balance, and a single interface. However, here lies a challenge because Grvt is not just aiming to build a better exchange; its ambition is to create a full-stack financial platform for institutional-grade users. This means it needs to simultaneously meet institutional-level risk control and audit requirements while providing a seamless user experience, which seems contradictory.

The solution proposed by Grvt is to embed "institutional-grade" into the product's underlying architecture rather than as a standalone barrier. Its risk management system operates on a dual track: off-chain, there is a real-time risk engine, and on-chain, there is an automatic liquidation mechanism through smart contracts. The flagship strategies offered in its strategy marketplace boast an impressive Sharpe ratio of up to 11.97, a figure that even most traditional hedge funds find challenging to achieve.

So, this all sounds wonderful, but is it truly feasible technically? How does it address the trust issue that looms over all centralized exchanges?

Making Trust Computable

Grvt's answer is a hybrid model combined with zero-knowledge proofs. You can think of it as a bank where the front end operates at lightning speed while the back end remains absolutely secure. Your trade orders are matched on Grvt's in-house off-chain servers. Here, there is no blockchain congestion or high Gas fees; the speed can reach sub-millisecond levels, similar to placing an order on the NYSE. This is the experience of a CEX.

However, all steps involving asset transfer and settlement must revert to on-chain, completed in a zero-knowledge proof system called Validium. This serves as a safe based on ZKsync technology. Through zero-knowledge proofs, Grvt mathematically proves to the world that every settlement is accurate, without disclosing any details of your transaction. Your money always remains in your own wallet, untouchable by anyone else.

This combination of institutional-grade compliance and on-chain self-custody is extremely rare in the entire Perp DEX space. Most DEXs either take a purely on-chain approach, forsaking compliance, or follow the CEX path, giving up self-custody. Grvt has chosen a more challenging path, but also a broader one.

In terms of compliance, it holds itself to regulatory-grade standards, undergoes continuous professional audits to ensure the platform meets the same level of transparency and security as regulated entities, and actively monitors compliance developments in major jurisdictions worldwide to be well-prepared for the future.

Flywheel Launch: Aave Partnership and 2026 Roadmap

At the end of February 2026, Grvt announced a partnership with Aave. Aave, as the largest lending protocol in the DeFi world, with a net deposit size exceeding $400 billion, holds approximately 60% of the DeFi lending market share. The core of this partnership is to embed Aave's lending yield directly into Grvt users' trading collateral. The stablecoin you hold in Grvt will automatically be routed to Aave while waiting for a trading opportunity, earning up to an 11% annualized yield. When you need to open a position, this money will be immediately withdrawn from Aave and become your collateral. The entire process is completely transparent to the user, requiring no manual operation.

In this collaboration announcement, Aave's founder, Stani Kulechov, stated, "A stablecoin that does not earn yield is an opportunity cost for traders." This partnership aims to reduce this opportunity cost to zero.

This is the first key gear of Grvt's 2026 roadmap. The entire roadmap is divided into four layers, resembling a compounding flywheel:

The first layer is Earn. The core is unified collateral and prime broker lending. Grvt has built a bridge connecting liquidity providers and traders. The platform allows traders to use 20% of their own funds to leverage 80% platform borrowing. At the same time, the system sets the trader's own funds as a safety cushion. In the event of a loss, the trader's own money is lost first. This mechanism allows Earn and Trade to form a positive feedback loop. More traders create more borrowing demand, bringing higher returns to depositors.

The second layer is Trade. Grvt will expand the underlying assets of perpetual contracts from cryptocurrencies to global stocks, forex, and commodities. Additionally, it will launch a spot market. In the first stage, professional market makers will provide deep liquidity, followed by a community-driven listing mechanism. Anyone can pledge funds to propose new trading pairs, and the community votes on whether to list them.

The third layer is Invest. Grvt will expand its strategy marketplace, allowing institutional fund managers, professional traders, and even AI algorithms to become platform financial advisors. Users can entrust their funds to these strategies and enjoy the returns.

The fourth layer is Pay. Bridging P2P payments and fiat on/off-ramps, allowing users to use their crypto assets as conveniently as money in a regular bank account.

These four layers form an interlocking system. Grvt describes this logic as follows: unified collateral makes lending more efficient, lending makes deposits more productive, more productive deposits attract more capital, more capital deepens liquidity, deeper liquidity improves execution quality, better execution attracts more traders, more traders create more borrowing demand.

On March 12, 2026, Grvt disclosed the key details of the tokenomics, including the $GRVT token's distribution, use cases, and allocation mechanism. Holders of $GRVT will enjoy lower fees on perpetual contracts, spot markets, and the payment layer, receive higher yield bonuses in DeFi, and gain platform revenue sharing and priority access to new markets.

Conclusion

Forty years ago, a technological revolution shattered the island of information and reshaped Wall Street. Forty years later, Grvt aims to break the island of capital using an on-chain prime brokerage model.

Starting from the highest-frequency and most brutal battleground of perpetual contracts, solving the inefficiency of capital with cross-margin, addressing trust issues with zero-knowledge proofs and self-custody, and finally reaching out to stocks, forex, and commodities, these broader real-world assets.

This is no longer a story about speculation but a narrative about assets. The future of finance does not belong to those who build more islands but to the bridgers who can connect all islands into one continent.