Forty years ago, a technological revolution changed the world of financial trading forever.

Trading in those days was a physical act. Then computer terminals began replacing the shouting on trading floors. In 1981, a trader named Michael Bloomberg was let go from Salomon Brothers. With $10 million in severance, he started a company with a single mission: make financial data transparent and instant. He succeeded.

The Bloomberg Terminal gave traders something they had never had, the ability to sit at a desk and watch market prices scroll in real time. Finance began its transformation from the privilege of the few into a standardized flow of information.

By the 1990s, the rise of the internet pushed this revolution to its peak, and the cost of serving customers fell off a cliff. Companies like E*Trade and Charles Schwab handed ordinary people the ability to place stock orders from their own homes, with commissions dropping from tens of dollars per trade to single digits. The barriers to finance had been fundamentally dismantled.

Now, forty years on, those same technological pioneers have themselves become the establishment. And a new disruptor is making its way from the crypto world into the mainstream, one that aims to change something even more fundamental than how we trade: capital efficiency.

The Trillion-Dollar Casino's Dilemma

In 2025, global crypto derivatives trading volume reached $85.7 trillion. The perpetual DEX market alone generated $7.9 trillion in volume. Of all the revenue produced by the entire crypto market that year, 15% came from this fast-spinning roulette wheel. Perpetual contracts are one of the most profitable businesses in the industry.

Grvt clawed its way out of this casino. Launched in January 2025, it accumulated $177 billion in total trading volume within just a few months, consistently ranking fifth to tenth globally among perpetual DEX platforms. Monthly trading volume growth hit 352% at its peak, with open interest growth reaching a staggering 1,601%.

At the capital table, it secured $34 million from top-tier investors including Hack VC, Delphi Ventures, Further Ventures, ZKSync, and EigenLayer.

But the casino itself is facing a crisis.

As everyone knows, the house usually wins. On-chain data shows that 86% of traders on Hyperliquid are losing money. A small group of winners devours the principal of the majority, and that is not a sustainable dynamic.

A product that reliably bleeds most of its users dry will inevitably bleed out its user base too. The casino needs a new story. Beyond speculation, there must be a genuine value anchor.

So all eyes turned to the tokenization of real-world assets, moving U.S. Treasuries, equities, commodities, and other tangible assets onto the blockchain, transforming them into 24/7 tradeable digital instruments. Wall Street's trillion-dollar giants like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have already rushed in. By the end of 2025, the total value of on-chain RWAs had surpassed $35 billion, with Boston Consulting Group projecting that figure to reach $16 trillion by 2030.

This migration is also rewriting the rules of perpetual contracts.

Hyperliquid launched its HIP-3 standard in October 2025, allowing anyone to deploy perpetual markets for any asset on its platform, gold, oil, equities, even geopolitical indices. Theoretically, anything can become a tradeable instrument.

In February 2026, Ondo Finance announced Ondo Perps, giving non-U.S. users direct access to perpetual contracts on stocks like Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. That same month, Kraken announced the world's first regulated tokenized stock perpetual contracts.

The direction is clear: perpetual contracts are evolving from a "crypto casino" into a genuine global asset allocation tool.

But there is a contradiction almost everyone is avoiding.

Existing perpetual contract platforms have a fatal flaw in capital efficiency: they only accept stablecoins as collateral. This means that if you hold tokenized Apple stock and want to hedge your risk or add leverage, you still need to set aside a separate pool of stablecoins as margin.

So who will build the underlying account infrastructure that can tie all these assets together?

From Goldman to On-Chain: The Answer from a Band of Rebels

Grvt's founder and CEO, Hong Yea, is someone who defected from the old world.

Before founding Grvt, he spent over a decade as an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and traded at Credit Suisse. Someone with that background knows exactly where traditional finance is most vulnerable. Around him, he assembled a team with similarly unconventional pedigrees: CTO Aaron Ong, formerly of Meta, where he architected data privacy frameworks; and COO Matthew Quek, who came from Singapore's DBS Bank and government technology sector, with years of deep experience in blockchain and payment systems.

This group didn't come together to build another Binance or Coinbase. What they wanted was to bring something that has existed on Wall Street for decades into the crypto world, the total logistics operation for maximum capital productivity.. 

Think about how the biggest hedge funds operate. Elite investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley provide their biggest clients such as Bridgewater, Renaissance Technologies with a full suite of services: trade execution, financing and lending, securities clearing, risk management. A hedge fund needs just one account to go long, go short, and apply leverage across global markets, switching between them seamlessly. Every dollar works as hard as possible.

That model, one account, every asset, maximum efficiency, doesn't exist in crypto yet.

Your Bitcoin is on Exchange A. Your Ethereum is in Wallet B. Your stablecoins are earning yield in Protocol C. If you want to use your Bitcoin as collateral to trade an Ethereum perpetual contract while still capturing stablecoin yield, sorry, you can't. You're forced to shuffle between three platforms, and every shuffle costs you: in fees, in time, and in returns you can see but can't reach.

Grvt calls this friction "capital drag." It is the core problem they are built to solve.

To put it plainly: Charles Schwab used the internet to tear down Wall Street's information barriers and let ordinary people buy stocks themselves. Robinhood used zero commissions to tear down trading barriers and let retail investors play with options. Grvt's ambition is to take that same principle and rebuild it from scratch for the on-chain world: capital should never sit idle. This is something no one has truly pulled off before.

Their solution, distilled to a single phrase, is called Unified Margin.

It's a concept that sounds simple but is extraordinarily difficult to execute. The idea is this: every asset you deposit into Grvt, Bitcoin, stablecoins, and eventually tokenized Treasuries and equities, lives in a single, unified balance. That balance does several things at once. It serves as trading collateral, letting you go long or short on perpetual contracts. Through integration with DeFi lending protocols, it automatically generates up to 11% annualized yield. And if the Bitcoin you've pledged as collateral appreciates, you still capture that upside.

Your money, finally, has learned to multitask.

Grvt is trying to compress trading, yield generation, and investing, actions that have always been fragmented across different platforms, into a single account, a single balance, a single interface. But there is an inherent tension here, because Grvt isn't just building a better exchange. Its ambition is a full-stack financial platform for users, which means it needs to simultaneously satisfy institutional-level risk management and compliance and deliver a frictionless user experience. Those two things, on the surface, seem to pull in opposite directions.

Grvt's answer is to embed "institutional-grade" into the foundational architecture of the product, rather than making it a separate barrier to entry. Its risk management system runs on dual tracks: a real-time risk engine off-chain, and automated liquidation mechanisms via smart contracts on-chain. Its strategy marketplace features a flagship strategy with a Sharpe ratio of 11.97, a number that most traditional hedge funds would struggle to match.

So is this beautiful vision technically feasible? And how does it address the trust problem that hangs over every centralized exchange?

Making Trust Computable

Grvt's answer is a hybrid model powered by zero-knowledge proofs.

Think of it as a bank with a blazing fast front counter and an absolutely impregnable vault. Trade orders are matched off-chain, on Grvt's own servers. There's no blockchain congestion, no exorbitant gas fees, and execution runs at sub-millisecond speeds, no different from placing an order on the NYSE. This is the CEX experience.

But every step involving asset movement and settlement must return to the chain, and it's completed inside a zero-knowledge proof system called Validium, a secure vault built on ZKSync technology. Through a mathematical method called zero-knowledge proof, Grvt can demonstrate to the entire world that every settlement is accurate and correct, without revealing any of your trading details. Your funds remain in your own wallet at all times. No one can touch them.

This combination of institutional-grade execution and on-chain self-custody is extraordinarily rare across the entire perpetual DEX landscape. Most DEXs choose one or the other: pure on-chain for decentralization, at the cost of compliance; or CEX-style for performance, at the cost of self-custody. Grvt chose the harder road, but also the wider one.

On the compliance front, it holds itself to regulatory-grade standards, undergoes continuous professional audits, and actively monitors compliance developments across major global jurisdictions, positioning itself for whatever regulatory landscape lies ahead.

Let the Flywheel Spin: The Aave Partnership and the 2026 Roadmap

In late February 2026, Grvt announced a partnership with Aave, the largest lending protocol in DeFi, with net deposits exceeding $40 billion and roughly 60% of the DeFi lending market. The core of this collaboration is embedding Aave's lending yields directly into Grvt users' trading collateral.

Stablecoins sitting in Grvt while waiting for trading opportunities are automatically routed to Aave to earn up to 11% annualized yield. When a user needs to open a position, the funds are instantly recalled from Aave and converted back into margin. The entire process is invisible to the user, no manual steps required.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov put it succinctly in the announcement: "Stablecoins that aren't earning yield represent an opportunity cost for traders." This partnership is designed to reduce that opportunity cost to zero.

This is the first critical gear in Grvt's 2026 roadmap, a four-layer compounding flywheel:

Layer One: Earn. The foundation is Unified Margin and prime brokerage lending. Grvt acts as a bridge between capital providers and traders, allowing traders to control positions with 20% of their own capital while borrowing the remaining 80% from the platform. The trader's own funds serve as a loss buffer,  and their capital is depleted first if losses occur. This mechanism creates a positive feedback loop between Earn and Trade: more traders generate more borrowing demand, which delivers higher yields to depositors.

Layer Two: Trade. Grvt will expand its perpetual contract offerings beyond crypto to include global equities, forex, and commodities. A spot market is also on the way, with professional market makers providing deep liquidity in the first phase, followed by a community-driven listing mechanism where anyone can stake capital to propose new trading pairs, with community votes determining which get listed.

Layer Three: Invest. Grvt will expand its strategy marketplace, allowing institutional fund managers, professional traders, and even AI algorithms to act as investment advisors within the platform. Users can allocate funds to these strategies and earn returns passively.

Layer Four: Pay. Connecting P2P payments and fiat on/off ramps so that users' crypto assets become as effortless to use as money in a regular bank account.

These four layers form an interlocking system. As Grvt describes its own logic: Unified Margin makes borrowing more efficient. More efficient borrowing 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 generate more borrowing demand. And the cycle begins again.

On March 12, 2026, Grvt disclosed the key details of its tokenomics, including the distribution, utility, and mechanisms of the $GRVT token. Holders of $GRVT will enjoy reduced fees across perpetual contracts, spot markets, and the payments layer, enhanced DeFi yield multipliers, a share of platform revenue, and priority access to new markets.

Closing

Forty years ago, a technological revolution shattered the information silos of Wall Street and rewrote the rules of finance. Forty years later, Grvt wants to use Unified Margin and a One Balance model to shatter the silos of capital itself.

The entry point is perpetual contracts, the highest-frequency, most unforgiving battlefield in crypto. The weapon is Unified Margin, targeting the chronic inefficiency of the fragmented capital. The foundation of trust is zero-knowledge proofs and self-custody. And the ultimate reach extends toward equities, forex, and commodities, the vast terrain of real-world assets.

This is no longer a story about trading coins. It's a story about assets. The future of finance doesn't belong to those who build more islands. It belongs to those who can connect all the islands into a continent.

Original Article (Chinese) Publish on BlockBeats