DeFi is maturing into its second spring: DeFi 2.0, and chain-level integrated perp DEXs are the gateway and critical joint to unite all things onchain – unifying liquidity, integrating financial activities, removing the friction of siloed protocols and chains. 

The Dawn of DeFi’s Second Spring

The first DeFi boom in 2020 had innovators like Uniswap, Curve, dYdX revolutionizing liquidity through AMMs and on-chain composability, proving that liquidity could be programmed. AMMs were perfect for DeFi’s bootstrap phase: simple and permissionless; allowed tokens to trade before market makers existed. But simplicity came at a cost: inefficiency – slippage, impermanent loss, and limited control made AMMs suboptimal for professionals and institutions. The DeFi 2.0 DEXs represent a different design logic. Instead of static liquidity curves, they use real-time order books powered by low-latency chains. The top ranking ones now are Hyperliquid, Lighter, EdgeX, Grvt, and so on, according to DefilLama.

As DeFi’s ambitions expanded from experimental to practical for both institutional and retail users, and on-chain infrastructures significantly improved – especially the rise of L2s, rollups, and next-generation bridging has restored the composability that early DeFi lost to fragmentation. These advancements allow assets, liquidity, and smart contracts to move seamlessly across ecosystems, turning once-isolated chains into an interconnected onchain economy where DeFi applications can truly build on top of each other and operate smoothly.

If Uniswap was DeFi’s proof of concept for decentralized liquidity, this new generation is its proof of scalability and deep liquidity even onchain.

The ZK Renaissance: DeFi’s Indispensable Key

Hyperliquid has emerged as the most fierce and unstoppable force in on-chain finance, elevating the entire space to new levels. Even Binance had to respond with its own backed DEX Aster to stem the bleeding, as Hyperliquid captured an estimated 10–14% of Binance’s trading volume by August 2025. Some say it poses an existential threat to Binance itself.

However, there’s one caveat: full transparency can’t scale. 

When large positions are exposed, “whales” get hunted, discouraging institutional players from integrating with fully transparent on-chain systems. That’s why institutions such as Deutsche Bank have explored ZK-proof-based chain ZKsync, aiming to leverage the advantages of public blockchains without compromising privacy and compliance.

The Ethereum Foundation’s recent creation of the Privacy and Scaling Explorations cluster underscores just how central this issue has become to the future of on-chain finance. As the Foundation put it:

“A system without privacy will push institutions and users elsewhere, undermining the very mission that brought Ethereum into existence. If Ethereum fails to build privacy, it fails to protect the people who rely on it.”

This is exactly what Grvt has believed in and been built around since day one. The collapse of FTX made it clear that transparency must exist on-chain, but complete transparency also introduces risks to positions and traders. ZK proofs offer the perfect middle ground: they allow all activities like trades, liquidations, and balances to be verified and sent to Ethereum L1 as cryptographic proofs, without disclosing sensitive alpha information. Whenever funds move between wallets, Grvt performs EIP-712 signature validation on-chain. Every fund transfer is on-chain; every transfer is signed.

When ZK technology had its moment in 2023, the sector didn’t scale widely. But now, the technology itself has advanced, DeFi infrastructures have matured, and ZKsync has emerged as the leading player in the space, serving as the backbone of a trustless, private, and globally scalable digital economy.

Chain-Level Perp DEXs and Interoperability

To bring DeFi 2.0 to its full fruition, innovation cannot remain confined to the application layer. The next leap forward must occur at the chain level, where perp DEXs are deeply integrated into the blockchain infrastructure itself. Only then can decentralized finance truly evolve into a system capable of supporting sophisticated financial instruments,and seamless cross-protocol integrations.

App-level rollups and isolated DEX deployments have taken DeFi far, but their silos limit scalability, composability, and liquidity efficiency. Chain-level perp DEXs, on the other hand, expand the very foundation of the blockchain, embedding market infrastructure directly into the protocol layer. This unlocks an entirely new dimension of on-chain finance – one where liquidity, collateral, and execution can flow frictionlessly across ecosystems. It’s no longer only about trading, it’s about engineering a new layer of financial interoperability.

At TOKEN2049 Singapore this year, one of the most dominant themes was the oneness of DeFi: the idea that yield, trading, and liquidity should converge into a cohesive, interoperable ecosystem. Panels and side conversations revolved around a shared challenge: how can DeFi unify fragmented liquidity pools, scale trading activity to institutional levels, and ensure yield opportunities remain composable across chains?

As the space matures, yield battles, cross-chain liquidity aggregation, and trading at scale have become key to the DeFi 2.0 discourse. The future belongs to architectures that integrate at the chain level, where security, interoperability, and performance can coexist natively.

Grvt × ZKsync: Pioneering the Privacy-Centric DeFi Marketplace

The joint-force of Grvt and ZKsync represents a new benchmark and global blueprint for the DeFi 2.0 infrastructure. Together, they are building a chain-level, ZK-powered perpetual marketplace designed to unify liquidity across the entire DeFi.

Through ZKsync’s interoperability solution that’s coming up soon, Grvt becomes part of a global ZK marketplace where assets, collateral, and liquidity can move seamlessly across ecosystems – most importantly, with privacy. This architecture bridges the gap between retail accessibility and institutional-grade security, offering the best of both worlds:

• ZK-Powered Privacy: Confidentiality for institutional participants without compromising the transparency that defines DeFi.
• Interchain Liquidity: Unified access to deep liquidity across multiple DeFi protocols, reducing slippage and improving capital efficiency.
• Trustless Scalability: A fully verifiable environment powered by zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring integrity even at massive scale.
• Retail Reach: Bringing high-performance, privacy-preserving financial infrastructure directly to everyday traders and users.

The newly launched Atlas upgrade on ZKsync makes incorruptible finance real-time:

• 15K+ TPS sequencer
• 1-second ZK finality via Airbender
• $0.0001 proving cost per transfer

ZK technology, chain-level integration, and unified liquidity are converging to transform DeFi from an experiment into a lively marketplace that all can participate in, and Grvt is leading the charge in this race.