Building the next standard in crypto trading requires more than speed and innovation. It demands a team that has seen institutional systems succeed, and watched crypto-native platforms fail, from the inside.

The Grvt leadership team brings together decades of experience from top-tier investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, tech giants like Meta, and major regional banks like DBS. We are not just building an exchange; we are building an institutional-grade platform designed to protect and grow your wealth.

Here is the team behind Grvt.

Hong Yea: Co-Founder & CEO

Hong Yea leads Grvt with a vision forged in the fires of traditional finance. Before co-founding Grvt in 2022, Hong spent over a decade in TradFi markets, serving as an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and a trader at Credit Suisse.

His deep expertise in institutional risk management and trading infrastructure is the bedrock of Grvt's philosophy. Witnessing the collapse of centralized entities like FTX, Hong recognized the urgent need for a "private-first" self-custodial venue, one that offers the seamless experience of a CEX but with the settlement security of a DEX. At Grvt, Hong drives the overall strategy, product vision, and go-to-market execution, ensuring that every feature we build serves the goal of capital efficiency and trust.

Aaron Ong: Co-Founder & CTO

Building a high-performance exchange on-chain requires world-class engineering. Aaron Ong, our CTO, brings precisely that. Formerly a Tech Lead at Meta, Aaron led critical data privacy framework initiatives for one of the world's largest data handlers.

At Grvt, Aaron is the architect behind our hybrid model. He oversees the integration of ZKsync's Atlas technology and Validium, ensuring that our off-chain matching engine runs with sub-millisecond latency while settling securely on-chain. His background in privacy engineering is central to our promise: providing a trading environment where your data is protected, and your assets are always in your control.

Matthew Quek: Co-Founder & COO

Rounding out the founding trio is Matthew Quek, who ensures that Grvt operates with the reliability of a major financial institution. Matthew previously led the Blockchain & Payments team at DBS Bank in Singapore and worked on government-scale systems at GovTech.

His unique blend of experience, spanning strict financial compliance, government-level system architecture, and blockchain innovation, is vital as Grvt expands globally. Matthew oversees our operations, ensuring that as we scale, we maintain the highest standards of regulatory compliance and operational integrity.

United by a Shared Realization

This team converged from three distinct sectors, traditional finance, big tech, and regulated banking, around a shared frustration. Each had seen, firsthand, how the current exchange paradigm forces a trade-off: security or liquidity, control or ease.

Their combined experience became the blueprint for a new category: the onchain brokerage. Grvt is not an incremental improvement. It is a rebuilt foundation, combining institutional risk management, big-tech privacy architecture, and bank-grade operations into a single platform designed to do what no exchange has done: pay you.

Backed by the Best

Our team's vision is supported by leading investors and partners who share our commitment to building a safer crypto ecosystem. Grvt has raised a total of $34M (at a $540M valuation) from top-tier backers including Matrix Partners, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Further and the ZKsync Foundation. We also partner strategically with Ampersan to ensure deep, professional-grade liquidity from day one.

Building the "Exchange Designed to Pay You"

Most exchanges profit from their users. Grvt was built to profit with them. Our One Balance thesis is simple: every dollar you deposit should work for you, not just as margin for your next trade, but as capital that actively earns yield.

By unifying margin and yield into a single balance, we are eliminating the forced choice between putting your capital to work and keeping it ready to trade. No lockups, no switching between accounts, no opportunity cost.

This is the team committed to that vision. We are building the exchange designed to pay you, safely, transparently, and efficiently.