In March 2026, Korean DeFi researcher and content creator DeFi Farmer Mr. Jo sat down with the Grvt CEO, Hong Yea, for a live interview. Original interview recap was published in Korean. This article adapts his findings for an English audience.

When you look at perp DEXs today, the same pattern repeats itself. A project distributes points, drives traffic with an airdrop, liquidity surges, and then the moment incentives stop, that liquidity disappears just as quickly. Users come for the rewards. Projects mistake those numbers for real growth. Then the rewards stop, and not much remains.

Going into this interview, Grvt looked like more of the same. A decentralized exchange on ZKSync, perpetuals trading, a points season, a TGE. Textbook perp DEX. That was the assumption.

It did not hold up for long.

Growth First, Then Structure

Early Grvt was quite different from what it is today. The team initially built with compliance infrastructure as the starting point, targeting traditional finance users from day one. The results were slow. Acquisition costs were higher, onboarding friction was real, and the capital already moving in permissionless markets was not waiting around.

The team made a decision: focus on growth first. Remove friction. Compete for capital on its own terms. After that pivot, traffic picked up quickly.

What matters here is not that Grvt walked away from structural thinking. It changed the sequence. Capture capital first. Build sustainable infrastructure around it. That ordering reveals something about how the team approaches decisions.

The Question Behind the Product

The sharpest moment of the interview came early. Most exchange teams are asking one question: how do we generate more trading volume?

Grvt was asking something different: how do we make money work longer and harder?

It sounds like a small distinction. But it is not. It changes what you build entirely.

In traditional finance, money performs one function at a time. You put it in a savings account and it earns interest, but you cannot trade with it simultaneously. You want to trade, you withdraw. You want to invest elsewhere, you move funds to another account. Money does one job, then the next.

DeFi is not structurally different. Deposit into a yield vault and you cannot trade with the same capital. Trade on margin and you give up the yield. The money moves between functions rather than performing them in parallel.

Grvt is building toward a different model. Deposited assets are treated as collateral. That collateral stays in place while you trade, earn yield, and eventually spend — all from the same position simultaneously. One asset, operating across multiple layers at once.

That is why describing Grvt as an exchange misses what it is actually building. The team describes it as a capital productivity platform. The core idea is simple: make the same one dollar do more work.

Privacy Is Not a Feature. It Is the Foundation.

The infrastructure that makes this model possible is not flashy, but it is load-bearing in a real way.

On a standard public blockchain, every position is visible. Large trades can be anticipated and targeted. Specific liquidation thresholds become public knowledge. Structural weaknesses in a yield strategy become exploitable the moment they appear. These are not hypothetical risks. They have played out repeatedly across DeFi.

But the more immediate issue is something simpler: payments. When every transaction is onchain and visible, even routine financial activity becomes exposed. Salaries, business transfers, fund movements. In that environment, financial privacy is not a preference. It is a prerequisite for institutional participation.

Grvt built its architecture for this reason. Running on ZKSync Validium, it uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify state correctness without publishing transaction data to Ethereum. This is what allows Grvt to support both fast trading and private payments on the same system.

Privacy is not a setting you toggle. It is built into the rails.

Real Yield From Real Activity

Grvt's vault products make the team's direction concrete.

Onchain vaults hold assets in the user's own wallet throughout. No custodial exposure. Yield is generated from trading activity and market structure on the platform itself.

The GLP product works differently. It is built around arbitrage strategies across external exchanges. Some funds move outside the platform as part of this strategy, but custody is separated at the structural level. Market makers including Optiver participate in this setup. The yield here combines DeFi infrastructure with traditional finance liquidity strategies.

Current returns sit in the 4 to 12% range for standard vault products and around 15% for GLP. These are not incentive distributions. They reflect actual market activity.

RWA Expansion: Structure Before Scale

Grvt already lists U.S. equities, gold, and silver alongside crypto perpetuals. Korean equities and crude oil are in preparation.

The team is deliberately pacing that expansion. With real world assets, listing an instrument is the easy part. Building the liquidity and liquidation infrastructure around it is the hard part. Gap risk between market close and open is difficult enough in traditional finance. Onchain, it is more severe and harder to contain.

Grvt has chosen to get the structure right before adding more assets. That prioritization is consistent across most of the team's decisions: the plumbing first, then the product surface.

The TGE Is Designed the Same Way

Perp DEXs almost always face the same problem following the airdrop. Incentive capital leaves when incentives end. Grvt is fully aware of this.

The approach here is to build institutional demand before the token launches, design buybacks from protocol revenue rather than token emissions, and secure exchange listings to support liquidity after the airdrop concludes. The goal is capital that remains on the platform not because it is rewarded to stay, but because the platform is the best place for it to work.

The Payments Layer: Yield While Spending

The clearest signal of where Grvt is heading is the payments infrastructure it is building. Onramp, offramp, P2P transfers, and card integration are all in development.

The idea is straightforward in principle but unusual in practice. In traditional finance, the moment you spend money, it stops earning. Most crypto card products also require moving assets into a separate spending balance before use, which means giving up any yield in the meantime.

Grvt takes a different approach. Deposited assets remain as collateral. A lock is placed on the relevant amount only at the point of payment approval. Until that moment, and again after it resolves, the capital continues earning.

You keep earning yield while you spend.

This is the clearest expression of the capital productivity model. It is not just about trading more efficiently. It is about changing how money moves through a financial life.

What the Interview Changed

Going in, the assumption was that Grvt was a solid perp DEX that would face the same post-incentive challenges as everyone else in the space. That framing was not entirely wrong. But it was incomplete.

The team is not primarily competing on trade volume. It is competing on capital retention. The question is not who generates more activity. It is who builds an environment where capital stays and keeps working.

Exchange competition is already mature. What matters now is not who can produce more trades, but who can hold capital on the platform for longer. From that perspective, Grvt's approach starts from a fairly fundamental place.

Why should money only be allowed to do one thing at a time?

Grvt is building the answer.

Start trading on Grvt → grvt.io

Trading involves risk. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.