Finance is moving onchain. So are users.

Settlement, custody, and issuance are cheaper, faster, and programmable onchain. Every major asset issuer, from BlackRock to Apollo, is issuing tokenized funds onchain. At the same time, global equities — including Tesla, Nvidia, Hynix — are being tokenized and brought onto public ledgers for the first time. The supply is onchain. The capital is onchain. But there is no storefront connecting them for the people already here. In particular, tokenized funds sit behind six-figure minimums with no retail distribution without a venue with real depth to trade them. And the users who want both are arriving fast: fiat on-ramps, stablecoin payroll, card off-ramps, and neobank integrations are collapsing the friction between bank accounts and wallets.

These users want what anyone wants from their money: earn steady yield on what they have, invest in trusted funds and let it compound, and trade global markets when opportunities appear. Most want some combination of all three, and none of them want their capital sitting idle between decisions.

Today they get none of it in one place. Savings sit in bank deposits or DeFi at 2–4%. Institutional investments are gated by $100K–$1M minimums and 6–48 month lockups. Tokenized stocks are listed on a handful of venues with thin liquidity and no hedging infrastructure underneath. And even when you can access these assets, they remain siloed. The composability that should make onchain finance powerful is still missing.  For example, you can’t use a tokenized treasury as margin or earn yield on your equity position while holding it.

Grvt brings together what today lives in separate places, earning, investing, and trading global markets with every position composable as collateral on crypto rails. This is what we are building, and this letter explains why.

The Products Are Here. The Access Isn’t.

Every major institutional name has arrived onchain. BlackRock, Apollo, Franklin Templeton, Janus Henderson and many more. The shelf that wealth clients have trusted for decades is now on a public ledger: $24 billion in tokenized RWAs on Ethereum today, up from $5 billion eighteen months ago. Boston Consulting Group projects that figure will reach $16 trillion by 2030.

The supply is here. The challenge is making it accessible, liquid, and productive for the people already onchain.

BlackRock BUIDL requires $5M and qualified purchaser status. Apollo ACRED requires $50K and accreditation. On Grvt, similar institutional-grade yield, State Street, Mirae Asset, Baillie Gifford, Apollo, will be available from $1 with no accreditation. When a trading opportunity appears, capital doesn’t have to be unwound from yield positions just to act on it.

Over $321 billion sits in stablecoins onchain today, held for trading, hedging, savings, remittances, and most of it earns nothing. Right now the choices are: park in a stablecoin at 4%, participate in fragmented lending protocols, or take 100x leverage on a perpetual. There is very little in between. For most users, building a real portfolio onchain still means converting back to fiat or stitching together multiple protocols across different chains.

Why Yield Alone Isn’t Enough

When we surveyed users on what would actually move their capital, 60% chose a trusted vault at 8% over an unknown one at 11%. The yield number matters less than the credibility behind it. Users are not simply chasing the highest return. They also want immediate liquidity, and confidence they can exit when needed.

That insight changes the competitive landscape. Infrastructure companies like Centrifuge, Securitize, and Superstate are making tokenized funds freely transferable and tradable on secondary markets. Any onchain venue will soon be able to list a tokenized BlackRock or Apollo product. Yield alone is commoditizing. But accessibility, and liquidity are not. For retail users, what matters is what the asset can do once it lands on a platform, whether it earns, whether it’s liquid, and whether it can work as collateral across the rest of their portfolio.

Grvt’s moat is composability paired with accessibility, institutional assets that are productive from a single balance, liquid at all times, and open from $1.

The platform that wins onchain wealth management will be the one that turns every asset into working collateral, usable across everything at once.

What We Spent Three Years Building

We started from the hardest problem.

A perpetual DEX requires institutional matching speed, real time risk management across thousands of simultaneous positions, settlement provable to Ethereum without a trusted intermediary, and user custody maintained throughout.

We built a matching engine running at institutional-grade speed [confirm exact TPS/latency with Aaron], co-designed with Ampersan, a team of former institutional market makers who are also Grvt equity partners. Underneath sits ZK Atlas, our settlement layer, which proves every position to Ethereum while keeping assets in user custody throughout.

The system has been running in production for over 480 days.

We discovered that trading paired with yield is a very strong retention and acquisition lever. When we launched Earn on Equity, enabling trading collateral to earn up to 11% APY while remaining tradable, referral conversion rose from 7% to 45%. TVL grew 5x, retention doubled, and the $1M+ volume cohort expanded 16x. Distribution spend dropped too.

Users most sensitive to capital efficiency are also the highest-value users. Composability self-selects for them. They come in for yield, stay because their capital works as margin, and refer others because the experience matches how they already manage money. When your vault position doubles as trading margin, you never have to choose between earning and acting. A macro event hits, you trade on it immediately, and your yield keeps compounding underneath. That’s why users stay. And that’s why asset issuers want to be on Grvt, capital that’s productive in multiple ways at once doesn’t leave when markets get volatile. So, we decided that every new product we ship, fixed yield or branded investments, is composable from day one. Each one brings in more users and keeps the best ones around longer. 

The perpetual DEX was always the first building block, the hardest one.

The liquidity infrastructure we built for crypto perpetuals is now expanding to tokenized stocks and RWA markets.

From day one, running a perp DEX at institutional speed required us to solve orderbook depth and liquidity. We built GLP, our liquidity infrastructure that could provide tight, continuous spreads on every pair we list. Expanding that same infrastructure to hundreds of tokenized equities means adopting an enhanced hedging model: what we call a synthetic brokerage flow where GLP hedges directly through traditional finance venues, similar to how Tradfi retail brokerages operate today. This is already in the works, building across both spot and perpetual markets. The liquidity for tokenized stocks will be routed through the same global markets these assets already trade on.

We built the rails for crypto first, starting from crypto perps, expanding to crypto spot, and now extending to tokenized equities and RWA products, learning from our experience along the way as the market evolves, all on top of the same technology. The matching engine handles the speed. The GLP infrastructure handles the liquidity. And the composability engine makes every asset productive the moment it lands on the platform.

How It Works in Practice

Composability is the core architecture of Grvt. Everything below is what it produces when paired with the right assets. 

Curated RWA vaults. Live in June through Plume and Centrifuge. Every deposit earns by default: a base vault backed by institutional RWA assets delivers around 3.5% APY, so capital is never idle before a user makes an active choice. Alongside it, separate curated vaults each hold a distinct pool of institutional assets independently reviewed for asset quality, redemption mechanics, and onchain transparency, including:

●     BlackRock AAA CLO exposure at around 4.6% APY,
●     Janus Henderson treasuries at around 3.3% APY,
●     BlackOperal credit at around 12% APY,

Accessible from $1, no accreditation required, no lockups. 

Stackable yield. The vault earns its blended institutional yield. That is the first layer. Because the vault token is composable on Grvt, it simultaneously serves as margin collateral while it keeps earning. That is the second layer. A user with $50,000 in the vault earns the blended RWA return on the full position and can trade against it as collateral without unwinding. On Grvt, the same asset earns yield, serves as trading collateral, and trades on secondary markets for instant liquidity, all at the same time.

Instant liquidity. Vault tokens trade on Grvt's internal secondary market with institutional market makers. No redemption windows. No multi day settlement delays. If a user wants liquidity, they sell.

Multi asset trading. The same collateral layer powers crypto perpetuals, tokenized equities, and commodities including gold, silver, and oil. Vault tokens serve as margin across the system. Capital moves once and works everywhere.

Tokenized stock liquidity. Grvt lists 43 equity perps pairs today, with hundreds more tokenized stocks in the near-term pipeline. Each pair is backed by real hedging depth, GLP’s synthetic broker model will route through traditional finance venues, to offer tradfi level liquidity on tokenized.

One balance. Earning, investing, and trading are three views of the same capital. One deposit, no transfers, every dollar doing every job at once.

Where We Are Headed

When we launched the composable yield experiment on the perp DEX, our highest-value users told usthrough their behavior that they wanted their money working at all times. At the same time, institutional products from BlackRock, Apollo, and others arrived onchain in tokenized form, looking for retail distribution. The demand from our users and the supply of institutional products showed up at the same time. That is why we are building the wealth layer on top of our trading infrastructure.

What makes Grvt different is that optionality is built into the product itself. Your yield accumulates by default. Your vault positions double as trading margin. You don’t have to choose between earning and acting, the same dollar does both. We believe this is what retail investors will come to expect, and that platforms still forcing users to choose will lose them.

RWA vaults launch in June. Equity trading is live with 43 pairs today and hundreds more tokenized stocks across both perps and spot in the near-term pipeline. The mobile app is live and the wealth experience is coming to it next. Every new product we add strengthens the rest, more assets bring more users, more users bring deeper liquidity, and the whole system compounds. 

Before Schwab, buying a stock meant calling a broker and paying $50 per trade. Schwab cut that to $5 and built discount brokerage as a category ,suddenly millions of people could invest directly. Before Robinhood, you still needed a desktop and a funded brokerage account. Robinhood put zero-fee trading on a phone and a generation started investing for the first time. Neither company invented the underlying assets. They changed who could access them, how fast, and at what cost. The behavior followed, and the category was named after the fact.

We think onchain wealth management is the same kind of shift. The institutional products already exist onchain. What’s missing is a platform that makes them composable, liquid, and accessible from $1, in user custody, without intermediaries deciding when capital can move. We are building for a future where someone in Jakarta, Seoul, or São Paulo holds the same institutional assets as a family office anywhere in the world. From $1. With instant liquidity. While earning and trading on the same balance.

If you have been with us through the perpetual DEX chapter, thank you. The next pieces are already shipping. Stay close.

Follow @grvt_io for what ships next. 

Hong Yea, Cofounder and CEO of Grvt

Grvt, a self-custodial onchain wealth platform, today announced a partnership with Plume to bring institutional-grade real world asset yield into its users' portfolios through three upcoming RWA yield products: the Base Yield Fund, the Balanced Fund and the Opportunistic Fund, each designed to serve different risk appetites and return profiles.

The partnership comes as tokenized assets are drawing renewed attention across both crypto and traditional finance. Cryptonews recently reported that the SEC is preparing an “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks, which could give platforms a clearer path to offering blockchain-based equity products under a lighter regulatory framework.

That momentum is also showing up in wider market sentiment, with a recent CryptosRus market snapshot citing Bitwise data that showed tokenized RWAs at $1.43 billion onchain, up 26% over 30 days, with $3 billion in monthly transfer volume.

Recent market data from RWA.xyz shows more than $33.63 billion in distributed real-world asset value onchain, with more than 796,389 RWA holders and over $348 billion in represented asset value across the sector.

Grvt’s integration with Plume is designed to bring that market momentum into a simpler user experience, allowing users to access tokenized yield products directly from the same self-custodial balance they already use to trade on the platform.

All three products will be integrated directly into the Grvt platform, allowing users to access institutional-grade yield opportunities from the same self-custodial balance they already trade from, without moving assets across separate apps, accounts, or custody layers.

While sophisticated financial instruments are available through traditional brokerage platforms, access is often limited by brokerage onboarding requirements, regional restrictions for non-U.S. participants, and capital fragmentation across separate custody and investment platforms. Access to the strategies underlying the Opportunistic Fund is more limited still, typically reserved for institutional allocators through regulatory and minimum-allocation thresholds. For many crypto-native users, gaining exposure to these strategies through traditional channels can involve significant operational and structural complexity.

This integration removes it. The funds will be accessible inside Grvt's tokenized RWA investment products, with no brokerage account or fragmentation of capital across platforms.

The partnership marks Grvt's first integration with a network purpose-built for open finance, the next evolution of real-world assets onchain, where tokenized instruments become composable, yield-generating building blocks. It is also the latest step in Grvt's build out of an onchain wealth platform, where trading capital and invested capital live under one composable balance.

Why Open Finance, why Plume

While tokenization brought real world assets onchain, the larger opportunity lies in making them more usable across onchain financial markets. Plume was built specifically for that transition, and the partnership aligns closely with Grvt's vision for a composable onchain wealth platform.

Through Plume’s Nest architecture, an institutional fixed income strategy backed by one of the most recognized names in global asset management can exist alongside DeFi-native yield sources within the same yield layer. Over time, these assets can also serve as productive collateral within Grvt’s unified one balance design. The complexity remains under the hood. What the user experiences is a single self-custodial balance that earns, invests, and trades simultaneously.

For Grvt, that is what open finance unlocks: not just access to real world yield, but the ability to weave institutional-grade yield, into a composable wealth platform without breaking the self-custody model users expect from a DEX. 

"Trading is where Grvt started. Wealth is where we are expanding," said Hong Yea, Co-founder and CEO of Grvt. "Plume was built around the idea that real world assets should not just sit onchain as wrappers, but actually plug into how onchain markets work. That is the same conviction behind Grvt's wealth platform. We want every dollar of collateral to be productive, every yield source to be transparent, and users to never have to trade self custody for performance. Bringing this onchain through a Balanced Fund anchored by BlackRock CLOA, alongside other tokenized funds backing an Opportunistic Fund across structured credit and bond strategy, is exactly what that looks like in practice."

"Plume makes real world assets usable inside onchain markets, not just visible within them. We are making them a viable earning mechanism.," said Ryan Wen, Head of Strategy & Operations at Plume. "Now, Grvt users gain exposure to institutional-grade yield through the same wallet they trade from, with no compromise to self-custody. This is the open financial future we’re working towards.” 

What changes for users

For Grvt users, the experience remains simple and streamlined, with complexity abstracted away beneath the surface. A single opt-in continues to cover all current and future yield sources within Grvt’s tokenized RWA investment products, withdrawals remain instant under normal conditions, and users can view their yield exposure at any time.

What changes is the infrastructure behind that opt-in. Through this integration, yield from a Plume Nest vault becomes part of the same yield layer users already access, connected to the same self-custodial wallet they already use on Grvt, with no additional brokerage accounts or custody handoffs required.

About Grvt

Grvt is building a self-custodial onchain wealth platform on ZKSync. The platform combines perpetuals trading across crypto, equities, commodities, and ETFs with a multi-source yield layer, all under a single composable balance where every dollar earns, invests, and trades simultaneously. Backed by Further Ventures, Hack VC, Delphi Digital, Matrix Partners, 500 Global, ZKsync, Grvt has processed over $300 billion in trading volume and continues expanding its global presence across key financial and crypto markets worldwide.

About Plume Network

Plume is the Institutional Open Finance platform, serving more than half of all real-world asset holders. It brings institutional assets out of closed financial systems into open, programmable, globally accessible markets. Nest, Plume’s flagship asset management protocol, opens institutional assets from Apollo, WisdomTree, Hamilton Lane, and other leading firms to global investors through compliant, non-custodial vaults. Backed by Apollo Global Management, Galaxy Digital, and Brevan Howard, Plume has over $350 million in distributed asset value, SEC transfer-agent registration via Kimber Transfer Agency LLC.

Read full press release on Cointelegraph

Disclaimer: Crypto and digital assets carry high risks. This content is not a distribution of, or an offer or solicitation to provide, financial services or products, nor a representation as to their suitability or legality for you. Grvt is not a regulated entity and your funds are not subject to regulatory protection. Before making any decision based on this content, please seek financial and legal advice, and carefully review Grvt's Risk Disclosure and Disclaimer in full.

Partnership marks Grvt’s expansion from perpetual exchange to onchain wealth platform, giving users access to institutional-grade yield opportunities through a self-custodial experience.

[Panama], May 14, 2026 — Grvt, a self-custodial onchain trading and wealth platform, today announced an integration of Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund into its earn products. The integration will give Grvt users access to the yield generated by an onchain fund managed by Janus Henderson, one of the world's largest asset managers.

The partnership is the first in a series of integrations that mark Grvt's expansion from a perpetual trading venue into a composable wealth platform where users can earn, invest, and trade from a single balance.

What changes for users

Through this integration, Grvt plans to bring yield opportunities powered by institutional-grade Treasury strategies into its Earn products, making them available inside the same self-custodial environment users already use to trade.

For users, this means access to a more capital-efficient experience: balances can be deployed into yield-generating opportunities while remaining connected to Grvt’s broader trading and wealth platform. Rather than moving capital across separate apps, custodians, or accounts, users will be able to access yield and trading from a unified platform experience, with participation available from as little as $1.

The integration is designed to make institutional-grade yield strategies easier to access and more useful inside onchain markets, subject to Grvt’s product structure, risk framework, and collateral rules.

Why this matters

Traditional finance solved capital productivity decades ago, for institutions. Prime brokerages have long offered unified margin, enabling a single pool of collateral to support trading, lending, and yield generation simultaneously. But that architecture has always required centralized custody and intermediated trust. Retail investors have never had access to it.

Grvt is building a self-custodial alternative designed for both retail and institutional users. The Centrifuge integration is an early example of how tokenized real-world asset infrastructure can support more capital-efficient onchain financial products within a self-custodial environment.

"After a decade in capital markets, one friction has remained constant: investors are forced to separate trading capital from invested capital," said Hong Yea, Co-founder and CEO of Grvt. "Blockchains change that. Through composable onchain infrastructure, users no longer have to choose between earning yield and staying active in the market. With Centrifuge, we are bringing yield generated by institutional-grade onchain credit strategies into Grvt’s Earn products, creating a more connected experience across earning, investing, and trading."

"Tokenizing real-world assets was an important first step. The next phase is making those assets more usable across onchain markets," said Anil Sood, CSO of Centrifuge. "When a tokenized credit position can generate yield while also being used as trading collateral, all through self-custodial infrastructure, it begins to unlock new forms of capital efficiency. That is what this integration aims to enable."

Rollout

The integration will begin with yield generated by JTRSY supporting Grvt’s Earn products. Grvt and Centrifuge expect to expand the collaboration over time, with additional products and strategies sourced through Centrifuge to be evaluated for future inclusion.

New products will be added in phases, subject to Grvt’s risk review and product requirements, including standards for asset quality, redemption mechanics, and onchain transparency. Additional RWA-backed yield strategies are expected to follow throughout 2026.

About Grvt

Grvt is building a self-custodial onchain wealth platform on ZKSync. The platform combines perpetuals trading across crypto, equities, commodities, and ETFs with a multi-source yield layer, all under a single composable balance where every dollar earns, invests, and trades simultaneously. Grvt has processed over $300 billion in trading volume and continues expanding its global presence across key financial and crypto markets worldwide.

Disclaimer: Crypto and digital assets carry high risks. This content is not a distribution of, or an offer or solicitation to provide, financial services or products, nor a representation as to their suitability or legality for you. Grvt is not a regulated entity and your funds are not subject to regulatory protection. Before making any decision based on this content, please seek financial and legal advice, and carefully review Grvt's Risk Disclosure and Disclaimer in full.

The last few months have been a stress test for on chain finance. Drift Protocol, Kelp DAO, and several legacy DeFi protocols all faced incidents that rippled across the ecosystem. Users are asking a more fundamental question than usual: are my on chain assets actually safe?

To unpack that, Grvt invited four veteran DeFi researchers and our own blockchain lead, Haoze, into a live community AMA. The goal was simple. Move past the headlines and give listeners a usable framework for judging where their capital sits.

The original AMA was conducted in Mandarin Chinese and drew 12.7k listeners.

You can listen to the full session here. This recap is a translated and paraphrased summary of the key takeaways for our wider audience. The full replay in the original language will be posted on our official channels.

Host and Guests

• Jade, Content & PR at Grvt
• Haoze, blockchain engineer at Grvt
• Cody, DeFi writer with firsthand experience surviving on chain exploits
• Rocky, cofounder of Blue Ocean Capital, a Web3 secondary market fund
• On-Chain Daren, on chain power user since 2018
• TraderS, eight years across exchanges, macro, and DeFi

Where Your Money Actually Goes on Grvt

The AMA opened with the most basic question users have but rarely get answered clearly: when I deposit, where does my money live?

Haoze walked through the full path on Ethereum.

When you deposit USDT, the funds enter the ZKSync bridge and are mirrored to Grvt's Layer 2 network. Inside that L2, every contract that touches user capital is constrained by smart contract logic. Every action affecting funds requires the user's wallet signature. Grvt cannot extract those funds. This is structurally different from a centralized exchange, where deposits move under the platform's name.

Trading itself happens in a hybrid architecture. Order matching and risk checks run off chain for performance. Settlement happens on chain through ZK proofs, which compress the L2's state and verify it on Ethereum. The funds themselves never leave the bridge or the L2 contracts. Only state changes.

The yield layer sits on top of this. A portion of L2 capital can be deployed into approved DeFi protocols to earn returns, governed by the L2 and Ethereum contracts working together. Grvt acts as a manager in that flow, never a custodian.

Withdrawals settle the same way. Every step is auditable on chain.

Spotlight: How Grvt Handled the Kelp DAO Incident

This was the segment most listeners came for, and the one we want to surface clearly.

When the Kelp DAO exploit broke, Grvt's response was triggered through a designed safeguard. The yield layer was built with circuit breakers that allow capital to be recalled to Grvt's L2 contracts. That mechanism activated immediately, hours before any liquidity issues emerged in the affected pools.

Outcome: no user funds lost. No withdrawal delays.

To be clear on why this worked, the architecture matters. Capital flows through a DeFi Vault contract on Ethereum with strict directional rules baked in. The L2 contract can only release funds to that vault. The vault can only deposit into approved protocols or bridge back to the L2. Grvt manages the system. It does not custody the assets.

Haoze also broke down the root cause for listeners. The attack did not originate in Aave itself. The entry point was rsETH, a liquid restaking token, whose cross chain bridge through LayerZero was configured to require only a single validator signature. That allowed the attacker to forge a message and drain reserves. Aave had no bug of its own. But anything integrated with the affected collateral was exposed.

The lesson Haoze drew: auditing your own smart contracts is necessary but never sufficient. Every upstream dependency, including what collateral a protocol accepts and how robust its price feeds are, deserves the same scrutiny.

What's Next for the Grvt Yield Layer

Two directions came out of this experience.

Diversification across lending protocols. Aave will remain under observation and will not be re entered until conditions are clearly stable. In parallel, Grvt is evaluating other battle proven lending protocols to spread yield sources across the ecosystem. Each candidate must clear the same due diligence bar: independent audits, operational history, behavior under past stress events, and quality of accepted collateral.

Acceleration on RWA integration. Tokenized US Treasuries and money market funds are coming to the yield layer. These are anchored to traditional finance, which means their yield and safety profile is structurally decoupled from on chain volatility events like a bridge exploit or a stablecoin depeg. One non negotiable filter: any RWA partner must use a bankruptcy remote structure, where assets are held by an independent SPV and legally separated from the issuer's balance sheet.

What Our Guests Look For in a Safer Platform

Across four very different DeFi resumes, the answers converged on a short list.

Self custody as the baseline. Every guest brought this up. After FTX, "not your keys, not your coins" stopped being a slogan. Cody noted that Grvt extends self custody with extra layers, including 2FA address whitelisting and a ZK based settlement model. Rocky emphasized that Grvt's funds sitting inside ZKSync smart contracts means even the project itself cannot move user keys.

Simple beats clever. Cody recommended that newer users start with mechanically simple protocols. The more modules a protocol stacks, including borrowing, liquidity provision, complex yield primitives, the more attack surface it creates. He referenced the Juice incident, where the exploit came not from contract math but from a supply chain attack on a developer's signing environment.

Transparency without becoming a target. Rocky raised an angle that often gets missed. Full transparency cuts both ways. Hyperliquid traders have repeatedly been hunted because their positions and liquidation prices are visible, citing the Popcat squeeze and the Jelly incident. Privacy at the trading layer is itself a security feature.

The team's safety culture. This came up from every guest. Look at how the team treats audit feedback. Look at how they respond when something goes wrong. A team that ships fast and patches slowly is a yellow flag. A team that documents and responds is a green flag.

Operational hygiene. Cody shared his own setup. A dedicated machine for signing only. No GitHub pulls or dependency installs on it. URLs from bookmarks, never from search results. Cold wallets are necessary but not sufficient. Trezor was breached because the surrounding device was compromised.

How Grvt Approaches Risk Control

Haoze ran through the three biggest categories of attacks the industry has seen and how Grvt mitigates each.

Contract vulnerabilities. Every contract Grvt deploys, including the L2 contracts, the bridge proxies, and the DeFi Vault, goes through external audit before deployment. Grvt works with Spearbit. Beyond that, the most sensitive contracts run on a private chain where transactions enter only after risk engine approval. The team designs and builds as if those contracts were on a public chain anyway, so even a perimeter breach does not allow asset extraction.

Oracle and economic attacks. This is the Popcat and Jelly category. The defense is upstream of the attack itself. Grvt is conservative about which markets list, prioritizing assets with deep liquidity and large market caps where price manipulation is prohibitively expensive. Beyond listing, position size limits, paid in or out limits, and conservative margin parameters all reduce the surface for these games.

Bridge risk. The exploit pattern most listeners are worried about right now. Haoze drew an important distinction. Grvt's bridge is the ZKSync canonical bridge, a trustless bridge. To release funds, the L2 must produce a valid ZK proof of state transition. There is no validator signature threshold to game. This is fundamentally different from multisig bridges like LayerZero or Wormhole, where security is based on trust assumptions about a small set of signers. The cryptographic guarantee is what gives the model its strength.

DeFi's Trust Crisis: Headwind or Cleansing Tide?

The guests were asked whether DeFi is losing its credibility.

Rocky framed the moment as a tide pulling out, exposing what should not have been there in the first place. Lower quality protocols are getting pruned. The survivors will integrate higher standards on transparency, self custody, privacy, and increasingly compliance. RWA and institutional participation are pulling the next phase of DeFi toward more mature infrastructure.

Cody pointed to two trends he expects over the next two years. Industry level safety baselines on things like cross chain validator counts, time locks, and large transfer caps. And clearer regulatory pathways that allow compliant DeFi to inherit some of TradFi's risk control culture without losing on chain composability.

On Chain Daren made the simplest point. Every cycle has incidents. Don't avoid the space. Avoid the bad operators inside it.

TraderS closed this segment with the operational view: when something goes wrong, what matters is the team's reaction. Teams that locate the problem fast, stop the bleeding, communicate clearly, and make users whole are the ones that earn long term trust.

Haoze's view, speaking as a builder, was that the recent incidents are operational and risk control failures, not structural failures of DeFi itself. The composability and permissionless nature of DeFi are double edged. They amplify both efficiency and contagion. But every pressure event in this industry, from Luna to Wormhole to Drift, has historically pushed the surviving infrastructure to be more professional, more transparent, and more resilient. He expects the same here.

On AI and Quantum: Real or Headline?

The final question was forward looking.

The consensus across the panel: real, but not a panic.

On AI, the threat surface is shifting from contract logic to supply chain attacks and operational compromise. The defense is also shifting. AI is being used on the white hat side for continuous auditing, anomaly detection, and automated circuit breakers. Attackers and defenders both get smarter. The protocols that invest in defense in depth, including pause mechanisms, time locks, and governance hardening, will be the ones that hold up.

On quantum, the relevant attack vector is the elliptic curve signature scheme that secures most public chains today. The Ethereum Foundation has a post quantum security working group, and account abstraction is opening pathways to support quantum safe signature schemes when they are needed. Migration is a multi year engineering project, not a tomorrow morning event. And as several guests noted, even in a worst case scenario, social consensus can recover the network by migrating to a new signature scheme.

Closing

The throughline of the AMA was simple. On chain safety is not a slogan. It is a stack of decisions across architecture, risk controls, operational hygiene, and team culture. Every layer in that stack either earns trust or burns it.

Grvt's design choices, including self custody throughout, a trustless ZK bridge, the DeFi Vault structure for the yield layer, and the circuit breakers that activated during the Kelp DAO incident, are how we approach that stack. Recent events are a reminder that the work is never finished. They are also a reminder that the structural advantages of well designed DeFi are real.

Thanks to Cody, Rocky, On Chain Daren, and TraderS Daoren for joining us. Thanks to everyone who tuned in.

If a question came up during the session that you want to dig deeper into, send it to the community and we will cover it in a follow up.

Further Reading

• Is Grvt Safe?
• Grvt's Security Stack
• Is Perp DEX Safe?
• Self Custody Explained

Trade with privacy and self custody on Grvt. Open the exchange.

For most of crypto's history, market making has been a closed game. The desks that quote prices on perp DEXes, capturing spreads, funding, and liquidation flow, have been institutional teams running their own infrastructure, with returns flowing to a handful of partners. Retail liquidity providers, by contrast, have been handed pool tokens that look like passive yield but quietly carry the directional risk of an entire asset basket.

Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP) is built differently. It's a delta-neutral, community-owned market-making strategy that pipes professional-grade yield directly to depositors, with no performance fees and no profit share to a strategy manager.

This article explains what GLP is, how it generates returns, and how it compares to the other major liquidity products in the space, Hyperliquid's HLP, GMX's GLP, and Jupiter's JLP.

What is Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP)?

Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP) is a delta-neutral market-making strategy that runs on Grvt's privacy-first, capital-productive DEX. Users deposit USDT, the strategy provides liquidity across Grvt's perpetual markets, and yield flows back to depositors on a transparent, smart-contract-managed schedule.

Three things make GLP distinct:

It's strategy-based, not pool-based. Most "LP tokens" in DeFi are claims on a basket of crypto assets. GLP isn't. It's a vault that runs an actual trading strategy designed and managed by professionals, closer to investing in a quant fund than to depositing into an AMM.

It's delta-neutral by design. The strategy is constructed to neutralize directional exposure. Returns come from market-making spreads and funding flows, not from being long or short any underlying asset.

There are no performance fees and no management fees. Most institutional strategies charge 2-and-20 or some variant of carry. GLP doesn't. All yield is distributed directly to GLP participants.

The strategy is run in partnership with a veteran global trading team with over 40 years of combined market-making and risk-management experience. Over a six-month live trading period, GLP produced a Sharpe ratio of 7.6, a measure of risk-adjusted return that, for context, would put it well above what most traditional hedge funds publish.

How GLP differs from typical "LP tokens”

The most important thing to understand about Grvt's GLP is what it isn't. It is not a basket of tokens packaged into a single LP claim. It is not a passive AMM share. It is not a counterparty position taking the other side of every trade on the exchange.

Almost every other "LP" or "vault" product in perp DEX land falls into one of two buckets:

1. Pool-based LP tokens that hold a basket of crypto assets and earn fees as traders open leveraged positions against the pool. GMX's GLV (the successor to GMX's deprecated GLP) and Jupiter's JLP both work this way. The yield comes with full price exposure to the underlying basket.
2. Protocol vaults that run market-making and liquidation strategies on behalf of the protocol. Hyperliquid's HLP is the canonical example. These tend to be more market-neutral but vary in transparency about strategy.

Grvt's GLP is closer to the second bucket but with some defining features: it's explicitly delta-neutral, the strategy team is named and accountable, the fee structure is zero, and the vault is governed by smart contracts rather than protocol-controlled wallets.

GLP vs HLP vs GLV vs JLP: a side-by-side comparison

Here's how the four products compare across the dimensions LPs care about most. Note: GMX's older GLP was retired in the GMX V2 migration; the active GMX LP product today is GLV (GMX Liquidity Vaults), so that's what we benchmark against.

How GLP works

When you deposit into GLP, your USDT is allocated to a smart-contract vault that funds a market-making book on Grvt. The professional trading team operates the strategy: quoting two-sided liquidity across Grvt's perpetual markets, hedging exposure, and managing risk in real time. Yield generated by the book is settled on-chain and distributed back to depositors, proportionate to their share of the vault.

The architecture has a few important properties:

• Smart-contract-based access control. Deposits, performance settlement, and redemptions are governed by code, not a custodian. The trading team can execute the strategy but cannot redirect or withhold yield.
• Automated settlement. Performance is calculated and distributed automatically, so participants don't need to claim, restake, or rebalance.
• Trustless redemptions. When you request a withdrawal, the contract handles unwinding your share of the position. Funds typically arrive within 2 to 7 days, which is the strategy's redemption window.
• No fee leakage. No performance fees, no management fees, no profit-sharing layer between the strategy and you.

There are tier-based investment limits, how much you can allocate to GLP depends on your lifetime trading volume on Grvt, and a few rules around how GLP allocation interacts with your overall account equity. The full details live in the GLP help center article, which is the canonical reference for caps, redemption mechanics, and account-state edge cases. We won't reproduce them here.

APYs fluctuate with market conditions and trading volume. Figures reflect publicly reported numbers at the time of writing always check live dashboards before deploying capital.

Choosing between them

The four products serve different mandates, and the risk you're being paid for is meaningfully different in each case:

• If you want concentrated exposure to ETH or BTC plus trading-fee yield, GMX's GLV is the cleanest expression. Pick the WETH-USDC or BTC-USDC vault depending on which asset you want beta to.
• If you want broader basket exposure with a SOL tilt and trader-fee yield on top, Jupiter's JLP fits. What's worth noting is that investors are effectively long ~45% SOL.
• If you want diversified protocol-level yield with mild market-neutrality, Hyperliquid's HLP is the established option, with the caveat of the rolling 4-day lockup and APR that has compressed as TVL has grown.
• If you want pure market-making yield with zero asset exposure, no fees, and a named professional team running the strategy, Grvt's GLP is purpose-built for that.

These are not interchangeable products dressed in different branding. GLV and JLP are bets on a basket. HLP is a protocol vault running mixed strategies. GLP is a delta-neutral trading book. Pick the one whose risk profile you actually want.

Investing in GLP

To invest, head to "Invest" on Grvt and select the Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP) strategy. Enter the amount you'd like to allocate and confirm. Your position starts earning from the next settlement cycle, and the contract handles all distributions automatically.

A few practical notes:

• Investment limits are tiered by your lifetime trading volume on Grvt. Higher tiers unlock both a higher percentage allocation of your account equity and a higher absolute USDT cap.
• Redemptions take 2 to 7 days from the time of request.
• Funds invested in GLP still count toward your TVL and continue earning Grvt points.

For the full set of tier limits, redemption mechanics, equity rules, and how GLP allocation interacts with withdrawals and transfers, the canonical reference is the GLP help center article — read it before you invest, especially if you plan to manage allocation across tier changes.

Ready to put your USDT to work? Invest in GLP on Grvt →

Read more about Grvt Strategies.

GLP is an investment product. Like any market-making strategy, it carries risk. Past performance, including the strategy's six-month Sharpe ratio of 7.6, is not a guarantee of future returns. Review the strategy's philosophy, risk management, and historical performance carefully before depositing.

Grvt is opening up our spot market on testnet, and we want you in the lab with us before mainnet.

Until now, Grvt has been known for perpetuals across both crypto native pairs and tokenized real world assets, alongside our yield layer. Spot trading completes the picture. With it, every dollar of collateral on Grvt can move freely between holding, earning, and trading without leaving the venue.

Now we are inviting the community to test it, break it, and tell us where it bends.

Why spot trading matters for Grvt

Spot is not just another product line. It is the building block that moves Grvt beyond a perp dex and toward our long term vision: a full on-chain wealth platform where users hold, earn, and trade every major asset class in one unified account. A perp DEX optimizes for leveraged exposure and hedging. A yield layer optimizes for productive idle capital. A spot market optimizes for ownership. When all three sit on Grvt’s One Balance, capital becomes far more useful and productive. 

Why testing matters before TGE

Spot will go live on mainnet around TGE, which is also when $GRVT will list on the Grvt spot market. So we want that experience to be precise, fast, and dependable from minute one. Order books, settlement, balance updates, deposits, withdrawals, and the full lifecycle of a spot trade need to behave correctly.

That is what testnet is for. Every order you place, every edge case you surface, every weird state we can fix now is one less issue at launch.

How to test the Grvt spot market on testnet

You can start in minutes. No real funds required.

1. Go to testnet.grvt.io 
   1. Existing Grvt users: sign in with your account
   2. New users: create an account with your email and wallet, complete the quick onboarding
2. Claim testnet USDT from the faucet inside the app.
3. Open the Spot tab and select a market.
4. Place a limit order and a market order on each side.
5. Cancel an open order and modify another to confirm the order book updates correctly.
6. Move balances between Spot and Perp to verify the unified account behavior.
7. If something feels off, capture a screenshot and note the timestamp.

Submit feedback in the dedicated spot testnet channel on our Discord. Stay tuned for the announcement and we will share the channel link there. Tell us what you tried, what you expected, and what actually happened. Reproducible reports get prioritized.

What we are watching for

The features we most want pressure tested:

Order matching accuracy across thin and thick books. Latency on order placement and cancellation. Correct balance accounting when funds are moved between Spot and Perp. Edge cases on partial fills, self trade prevention, and post only orders. UI clarity for someone seeing a Grvt spot screen for the first time.

If you trade size, trade size on testnet. If you run scripts against our API, point them at the testnet endpoints. The harder you push, the more useful your feedback is.

The road ahead

We’re building Grvt to become the wealth platform of the onchain era, an open, self-custodial home where capital earn, trade, invest and pay in one place. And spot is an important building block in Grvt’s 2026 roadmap.

As we’re building toward this vision every day, and we’d love for you to be part of it.

Start testing Grvt Spot Markets now.

Building wealth in crypto is not just about having capital. It is about knowing how to navigate fast-moving, complex markets. Perpetual futures, macro rotations, market-neutral strategies, and risk management all require deep expertise, constant monitoring, and strong execution. For most users, accessing these opportunities is difficult not because the products are unavailable, but because the knowledge barrier is too high.

Traditional finance solves this by giving investors access to professional fund managers, but that model is often closed off to institutions and high-net-worth individuals. DeFi made markets more accessible by removing centralized gatekeepers, yet most vaults still leave users to evaluate anonymous managers and unclear strategies on their own. Grvt Strategies, also known as Grvt Vaults, were built to bridge this gap, giving users access to verified professional traders and funds through transparent, on-chain strategies while keeping funds self-custodial and protected by protocol-enforced rules.

What Are Grvt Strategies (Vaults)?

Grvt Strategies are on-chain investment vaults that allow users to allocate capital into professionally managed trading strategies.

Each strategy is operated by a verified manager, either an individual trader, a professional fund, or an experienced investment team, who actively manages positions on behalf of investors. These strategies can range from directional crypto trading to market-neutral yield strategies, macro positioning, or diversified multi-asset approaches.

When an investor deposits USDT into a strategy, they receive strategy shares that represent their ownership in that vault. The value of these shares changes based on the strategy’s net asset value (NAV), meaning investors participate directly in the performance of the strategy.

Managers control execution, but they cannot withdraw investor funds or move assets outside the protocol. Capital remains inside Grvt’s infrastructure, with rules enforced on-chain rather than through trust alone.

Traditional DeFi Vaults vs Grvt Strategies

DeFi vaults solved an important problem by removing the need to trust centralized custodians. Funds could be deployed through smart contracts instead of relying on centralized platforms to hold assets. But for serious investors and professional managers, traditional DeFi vaults still fall short in two important ways: transparency without protection, and access without trust.

Public Transparency vs Protected Strategy Edge

Most DeFi vaults expose strategy logic and live positions in real time. While transparency is valuable, full visibility can remove the competitive advantage of skilled traders. Professional managers rely on timing, execution quality, and confidentiality. If every position is instantly visible on-chain, the strategy’s edge can disappear quickly.

Grvt Strategies take a different approach. Positions are updated with a four-hour delay, giving investors visibility into how capital is being deployed while protecting the manager’s execution edge. This creates a better balance between transparency and performance.

Anonymous Managers vs Verified Operators

Many DeFi vaults are effectively anonymous. Users may be asked to allocate significant capital without knowing who is behind the strategy, what their track record looks like, or whether they have the expertise to manage risk responsibly.

On Grvt, every strategy manager is verified before being allowed to launch a vault. Investors are not allocating capital to anonymous addresses. They are backing real operators with accountability and aligned incentives.

How Grvt Vaults Work

The investment process is designed to be simple.

Step 1: Choose a Strategy

Users browse available strategies based on manager profile, performance history, fee structure, and investment approach.

Step 2: Allocate USDT

Once a strategy is selected, investors deposit USDT into the vault.

Step 3: Receive Strategy Shares

In return, investors receive shares representing their ownership. These shares are minted based on the current share price of the strategy.

Step 4: Track Performance

As the manager trades and the strategy performs, share value increases or decreases accordingly.

Management fees and performance fees are handled through the vault structure, aligning manager incentives with investor outcomes.

Step 5: Redeem When Ready

When investors choose to exit, shares are redeemed for USDT according to the strategy’s redemption window and protocol rules.

For full details on redemption periods, fees, and strategy mechanics, users should refer to the Grvt Help Center.

What Strategies Are Available on Grvt Today?

Grvt Strategies is designed to support a wide range of managed investment approaches, from directional trading to market-neutral yield generation. The flagship live strategy available on Grvt is the Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP) strategy.

Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP)

GLP is a community-owned, delta-neutral market-making strategy designed to deliver stable and consistent returns for liquidity providers. Unlike traditional liquidity pools or AMM vaults that expose users to directional market risk, GLP focuses on capturing spread and funding opportunities while maintaining minimal net directional exposure  .

The strategy is managed in partnership with a veteran global trading team with more than 40 years of combined market-making and risk management experience. Over a six-month live trading period, the strategy reported a Sharpe ratio of 7.6, reflecting strong risk-adjusted performance. Notably, there are no performance or profit-sharing fees for strategy managers — all yield is distributed directly to GLP participants  .

This makes GLP particularly attractive for users looking for a more stable, professional strategy that does not rely on directional market bets.

Explore GLP

Community Strategies

Beyond GLP, Grvt Strategies supports a range of community-managed vaults operated by verified individual traders, professional funds, and investment teams. Each manager is verified before launching, giving investors confidence they are backing operators with accountability and track records.

Community strategies span diverse approaches:

• RoboNet — Systematic AI-driven long/short portfolio across BTC, ETH, and SOL perps， powered by Allora's AI Model Coordination Network.
• AllDefi Quant — Systematic algorithmic trading strategy targeting consistent yield on crypto perpetuals through quant-driven execution.
• Rogue Traders — High-conviction managed crypto trading vault with full on-chain self-custody and transparent positioning.
• Kang — Cross-exchange arbitrage strategy capturing pricing inefficiencies with professional execution and on-chain transparency.

Explore more Grvt Community Strategies

The diversity of available strategies means investors are not limited to a single investment style. Whether seeking stable returns like GLP, directional exposure, arbitrage opportunities, or AI-driven automation, users can choose strategies that match their risk profile and investment goals.

Risks and What Investors Should Know

Like any investment product, Grvt Strategies involve risk.

Strategy share prices can decline if the manager takes losses. Higher returns often come with higher volatility, and past performance does not guarantee future results.

Redemption timing also matters. During the redemption period, positions may continue to fluctuate before funds are released. Investors should understand each strategy’s minimum and maximum redemption periods before allocating capital.

Choosing the right manager is equally important. Verification improves trust, but investors should still evaluate strategy style, risk profile, and alignment before investing.

Grvt provides the infrastructure for better investing decisions but strategy selection still matters.

Grvt Strategies Platform Additional Terms and Risk Disclosure Statement

Frequently Asked Questions

Can managers access investor funds directly?

No. Managers can execute trades within the strategy, but they cannot transfer or withdraw investor assets.

How do redemptions work?

Investors redeem by returning strategy shares in exchange for USDT. Each strategy has its own redemption periods and processing rules. If a redemption is not completed within the maximum redemption window, the protocol can automatically enforce it.

Learn More

Grvt Strategies are designed to make professional investing more accessible, transparent, and aligned.

They combine the security of self-custody with the efficiency of managed capital, giving users a better way to participate in high-quality strategies without relying on traditional gatekeepers.

For detailed guides on strategy setup, fee structures, and redemption mechanics, visit the Grvt Help Center.

Explore more Grvt Community Strategies

RWA perps went from a curiosity to a category in under a year. At the start of 2025, essentially 100% of perpetual open interest on decentralized exchanges was in crypto pairs. By Q1 2026, a significant portion of perp open interest was concentrated in real-world assets, gold, Tesla, EWY, WTI. Traders who used to rotate between BTC, ETH and altcoin perps are now hedging gold volatility, shorting Korean equity ETFs, and levering up on oil, all from the same self-custodial wallet.

That shift has created a new question: if you want leveraged, 24/7, onchain exposure to traditional markets, which venue should you actually use? This guide compares the best decentralized exchange for perps on RWAs in 2026, with a close look at Grvt, a capital-productive, privacy-first perp DEX built on the ZKSync stack that has emerged as one of the deepest, broadest RWA perp books.

What Are Perps on RWAs

A perpetual future on a real-world asset is a funding-rate contract that tracks the price of something that exists offchain, a stock, an ETF, a commodity, a currency pair, an index. It's settled in stablecoins (USDC or USDT), trades 24/7, and never expires. You don't hold the underlying asset. You hold a synthetic position against it.

The appeal is simple. Tokenized RWAs are growing fast. BlackRock's BUIDL, Ondo's tokenized stocks, and a wave of tokenized assets have pushed the tokenization market past $30B. But spot tokenized assets are still fragmented by geography, broker, and regulation. Perpetuals are not. A perp on Tesla is just a contract, and a well-designed perp DEX can list a new market in days.

The result: perp DEXs are scaling RWA exposure faster than the underlying tokenization layer. For most traders, a perp is the cleanest way to get onchain access to a stock, an index, or a commodity.

The RWA Perp Markets Are Available Today

RWA perps as a category has been available on major trading venues, but the available market list is still much shorter than native crypto assets. Using Grvt's live book as a reference (one of the broadest RWA perp lists on any decentralized venue today), here's what you can actually trade:

Explore RWA Perp Markets on Grvt

Across all categories, Grvt supports 30+ RWA perp markets from a single account, with the RWA list expanding toward forex pairs and broader global equities over 2026.

Three things are worth understanding before trading any of these:

• They're synthetic, not delivery contracts. You're trading a perp that tracks the underlying price, settled in USDT. You never receive Tesla shares or gold bars.
• Funding rates move with the underlying calendar. US equity perps typically see funding pressure around the US open and close, and around scheduled earnings. Commodity funding moves with inventory reports and OPEC meetings.
• Weekend and holiday behavior varies. Quality venues publish oracle handling clearly; always check before holding size through a market close.

What separates a good RWA perp DEX from a bad one

Choosing the best decentralized exchange for perps on RWAs isn't the same as choosing a crypto perp DEX. A few things matter more:

1. Breadth of RWA markets. Crypto traders are used to hundreds of pairs. RWA depth is still uneven. Some venues list two commodities and call it a day. The best platforms offer commodities, equities, and ETFs from a single account.
2. Oracle quality and uptime. RWAs trade on external markets that close on weekends and holidays. A perp DEX needs reliable price feeds and clear weekend/holiday handling, or funding rates drift and liquidations get messy.
3. Execution speed and cost. RWA moves are often smaller than crypto moves. If your execution adds 15 bps in slippage, your edge is gone. Matching-engine latency and maker/taker fees matter more than in crypto.
4. Capital efficiency. If your collateral only sits as margin, you're leaving yield on the table. The best venues let the same dollar earn while it backs your position.
5. Privacy at the settlement layer. On transparent perp chains, every position is a public broadcast, and size gets front-run. The best RWA venues prove solvency onchain without leaking the book.

With those criteria in mind, here's how the main venues compare.

The Leading RWA Perp DEXs in 2026

Grvt: Trade RWA Perps and Earn Up to 11% Yield

Grvt is a privacy-first perp DEX with CEX-grade matching and ZK onchain settlement. Trades execute in under a millisecond, with horizontal scaling capable of hundreds of thousands of orders per second. Settlement and custody stay onchain.

On the RWA side, Grvt has one of the most complete market lists of any perp DEX. Live RWA perps include:

• Commodities: gold (XAU), silver (XAG), crude oil (WTI), natural gas
• Single-name equities: Tesla, Amazon, Robinhood, and a global equity list
• Index ETFs: EWJ (iShares MSCI Japan), EWY (iShares MSCI South Korea)
• 30+ total markets across RWAs from one account

What makes Grvt stand out for RWA traders specifically isn't just the list. It's how the collateral works. Grvt's ONE Balance is a single programmable balance that serves as margin and earns yield at the same time. USDT sitting in your margin account can earn up to ~11% while it backs a short on EWY. You are not choosing between "capital at work" and "capital at risk."

Since its January 2025 mainnet launch, Grvt has processed more than $280B in cumulative volume and consistently sits inside the top 5 perp DEXs globally.

Ostium: the RWA-first specialist

Ostium is the clearest pure-play competitor, built on Arbitrum. It offers exposure across commodities, FX, equity indices, and macro products, and has amassed over $50B in cumulative trading volume with the majority concentrated in RWA pairs.

Ostium’s core strength is focus. It was built from day one around macro and real-world asset trading, and that specialization is reflected in the product experience, market depth, and user positioning.

Its limitation is breadth. Crypto pairs represent a smaller share of the platform, and its collateral model is more traditional: margin remains idle capital rather than productive capital, with no default yield generation. For traders looking for a single venue to manage both crypto and RWA exposure, that becomes a meaningful trade-off.

Lighter. Zero-fee Trading

Lighter's pitch is simple: zero maker and taker fees on perps. For high-frequency strategies and size-heavy books where every basis point compounds, that's a meaningful hook, and it's earned Lighter a loyal active-trader base in 2025.

The nuance worth understanding: zero-fee doesn't mean zero-cost. With no fee revenue to subsidize market makers, the cost typically shows up in the spread, wider bid/ask than you'll see on a maker-rebate venue. For casual clickers the math can still win. For anyone running VWAP-sized orders or tight-edge strategies, it pays to compare the effective cost against a paid venue before assuming zero-fee is cheaper.

Why Grvt wins for RWA perps specifically

Three things drive Grvt's position at the top of the list for RWA traders:

Market coverage from one account. A gold hedger, an equity-factor trader, and a Korea macro trader (via EWY) can all operate from the same balance. That's rare onchain and genuinely valuable when you run multiple strategies.

Collateral that works while it waits. RWAs often involve holding positions through closed market hours or weekends. With ONE Balance, your margin earns yield through those idle periods rather than sitting idle. Over a quarter, that compounds into real returns for active desks.

Privacy that scales with size. On transparent perp chains, a size position is a public broadcast and the whole point of trading size is not broadcasting it. Grvt's keeps order flow private while still proving solvency onchain. For desks used to the discretion of a prime broker, it's the closest thing onchain trading offers.

How to start trading RWA perps on Grvt

1. Connect a self-custodial wallet at grvt.io and complete the onchain account setup.
2. Deposit USDT to your funding account.
3. Open the markets view and filter to RWA, you'll see XAU, XAG, WTI, EWJ, EWY, single-name equities, and the rest of the list.
4. Size your position, set leverage, and place the order.
5. Monitor funding.

If you're new to the category, Grvt's guide on how to trade RWA perps walks through a first trade end-to-end.

Key Takeaways

The best decentralized exchange for perps on RWAs in 2026 depends on what you want: Ostium if you want a pure RWA specialist, Lighter if zero-fee trading matters. For traders who want the wide RWA coverage, institutional-grade execution, and collateral that works while it backs position, Grvt is the clearest choice.

Ready to trade? Open a Grvt account and start trading RWA perps →

Crypto custody is the single most important concept in decentralized finance and also one of the least understood. It defines who has the right to move your assets. Not who is named on the account, not what the app shows as the balance. Who can actually sign the transaction.

Users have paid expensive tuition to learn the answer the hard way. Mt Gox, Celsius, and FTX collapsed and took customer funds with them. Bybit survived its 1.5 billion dollar Lazarus Group hack in early 2025, but only because its balance sheet could absorb the loss. Every one of these events revealed the same truth: funds deposited to a custodian are only as safe as the custodian's solvency and security on any given day. The stakes are now higher. Billions of dollars of tokenized stocks, gold, treasuries, and ETFs have moved onchain in the last two years. Custody of those assets runs through the same mechanics as custody of BTC or ETH. If you do not understand the model, you do not own what you think you own.

This guide explains what crypto custody is, the two custody models every trader operates under, why tokenized real world assets have raised the stakes, and how newer exchange architectures let you hold the keys and still trade at speed.

What Is Crypto Custody?

Crypto custody is the right to move a digital asset. That right is encoded in a private key. Whoever holds the key owns the asset. Everything else is paperwork.

A private key is a long, randomly generated string of characters that acts as the signing authority for a wallet. When you want to send funds, your wallet uses the key to produce a cryptographic signature that proves the transaction was authorized by the keyholder. The blockchain verifies the signature and updates the ledger. No signature, no transfer. That is why the key is the asset. Keys are typically backed up as a seed phrase, a 12 or 24 word sequence that can regenerate the key on any device.

There are two ways to hold a key. A custodial model puts the key in the hands of a third party, typically an exchange, or a qualified custodian. A self custody model leaves the key on your own device.

How Exchange Custody Fails

Exchange custody fails in three predictable ways.

Operational failure. The exchange gets hacked. Bybit, one of the strongest centralized exchanges in the world, lost roughly 1.5 billion dollars of Ethereum in early 2025 when the Lazarus Group compromised a cold wallet signing flow. Bybit absorbed the loss and stayed operational. The point is that users had no say in the outcome. They were creditors betting on Bybit's balance sheet. A weaker exchange in the same position would have failed.

Corporate failure. The exchange misuses customer funds. FTX loaned customer deposits to Alameda Research. When Alameda lost the bets, there was nothing left to return. Celsius ran the same playbook on the lending side.

Regulatory or policy failure. An exchange freezes withdrawals under court order or internal risk policy. The reason does not matter to a trader who cannot exit. If the withdraw function lives with someone else, custody lives with someone else.

Every one of these failures shares a root cause. Users deposited to an address the exchange controlled. The keys left their possession. Everything downstream is a consequence of that single handoff.

Self Custody vs Exchange Custody

A self custody crypto wallet holds the private key on your device. MetaMask, Ledger, Trezor, Rabby, and dozens of others all fit the category. You control a seed phrase that regenerates the keys on any hardware.

When you sign a transaction, the wallet signs locally and broadcasts to the network. No one else touches the key. If you lose the device, the seed restores access. If you lose the seed, the funds are gone. Full control means full responsibility.

The tradeoff traders historically accepted for exchange custody was speed. Centralized exchanges were faster, deeper, and offered derivatives that fully onchain DEXs could not match. That tradeoff has closed. The question today is not whether self custody is possible for active trading. It is whether your venue supports it.

Crypto Custody for Tokenized Real World Assets

Tokenized real world assets are the reason crypto custody conversations sound different in 2026 than they did in 2022. Tokenized treasuries, tokenized equities, tokenized gold, and tokenized ETFs now move between wallets the same way stablecoins do. BlackRock BUIDL, Ondo OUSG, and dozens of tokenized equity products have made the onchain RWA market real.

The custody problem doubles for these assets. There are two things to hold: the underlying real world asset, and the token that represents onchain exposure to it. Traditional brokerage custody handles the first. Crypto custody handles the second. A token sitting in an exchange wallet is still subject to every failure mode above, even if the underlying treasury is held by a regulated custodian in Delaware.

For traders, the custody question looks different in spot versus perps.

Spot. If you hold a tokenized equity, ETF, or commodity directly, custody of the token is custody of the position. The NVDA exposure, gold exposure, or Korean equity ETF exposure sits in a wallet, and whoever controls the wallet controls the exposure. An exchange that holds those tokens on your behalf is an exchange that can lose them.

Perps. When you trade perpetuals on crypto or on tokenized RWAs, you do not hold the underlying. You hold collateral (typically USDT or another stable asset) and an open position against it. Custody shifts to the margin. If the centralized exchange holds your collateral, you are still a creditor for the full value of that deposit, exactly the same failure mode covered earlier.

Across spot, CEX perps, and perp DEX trading, the question is the same: am I in custody of the assets that define my exposure, or is someone else holding them. If you are holding tokenized equities, tokenized gold, or tokenized ETFs onchain in spot, or running perps on any of them, the venue's custody model is the first variable in your risk stack.

Trading Without Giving Up Custody

The old model forced a choice. Trade fast on a centralized exchange and accept custody risk. Trade safely on a fully onchain DEX and accept latency. Newer architectures dissolve that tradeoff.

Grvt uses a hybrid architecture. Order matching runs offchain for CEX level speed. Settlement runs onchain through audited smart contracts. User collateral is governed by those contracts, not by Grvt as a company.

On Grvt, a deposit is not a transfer of custody. It is a signed authorization for specific audited contracts to settle trades on your behalf. The keys stay with you.

Before You Deposit Anywhere

Whether you are evaluating Grvt or any other venue, five questions will tell you everything:

1. Who controls the private key to the wallet my funds land in
2. Can the platform freeze my withdrawals unilaterally
3. Are the settlement contracts audited, and by whom
4. If this venue went offline tomorrow, could I recover my funds
5. Is there a public, onchain way to verify solvency at any moment

If the answers point back to the platform rather than to verifiable, audited code, you are using a custodian.

The Bottom Line

Crypto custody is not a niche preference anymore. It is the default posture for anyone who watched a custodial venue collapse, and it is the only posture that makes sense for the tokenized asset economy now forming onchain. The tradeoff between safety and speed has been engineered away. You can trade perps, spot, and tokenized real world assets without your keys ever leaving your wallet.

That is what Grvt is built for.

Start trading on Grvt without giving up custody →

Read More

1. Is Perp Dex Safe?
2. Inside Grvt's Security Stack
3. How to Trade RWA Perps

Is Grvt safe? Perp trading on decentralized exchanges is one of the fastest growing corners of crypto, but DeFi as a whole is still early in its lifecycle. Exploits and hacks still happen often enough that no honest operator can wave them off. Asking whether an exchange is safe before you deposit a single dollar is not paranoid. It is the correct first move.

This article walks through the Grvt security model in full. Where user funds live. What the trust boundary actually is. How Grvt differs from other decentralized exchanges and from centralized exchanges. And what happens in the specific scenarios that have wiped out retail and institutional traders over the last five years: exchange insolvency, key phishing, wallet provider exploits, and hostile liquidations.

By the end you should be able to answer the question yourself, with evidence, not marketing.

What "Safe" Actually Means for a Crypto Exchange

"Safe" is three separate questions bundled into one word.

Custody risk. Who holds your funds while you trade. On a centralized exchange the answer is the exchange, for every dollar, at all times. On Grvt the picture is more precise. Funds sitting in your funding account are in a self custody wallet that you control directly. When you open a position, the margin backing that position is held by an audited smart contract, not by Grvt as an operator. In both states, Grvt itself is never the custodian.

Smart contract risk. Smart contract risk depends entirely on what the smart contract is actually doing.

• On an AMM style DEX, the contract holds the liquidity pool, runs the pricing curve, and executes trades. The surface area is large because almost everything happens on chain.
• On a CLOB perp DEX like Grvt, order matching runs off chain and the smart contract handles a narrower set of functions: custody of position margin, settlement of executed trades, deposits, withdrawals, and verification of liquidation conditions.
• Less code on chain means a smaller attack surface, but the code that is on chain still needs to be audited carefully. What varies across exchanges is how audited the contracts are, how exposed they are to the public internet, and what else has to fail before a bug becomes a theft.

Operational risk. The matching engine goes down. The backend is compromised. An oracle misbehaves. A liquidation engine closes a position at the wrong price. These are less visible than hacks but they are the most common cause of real trader losses.

Every honest answer to "is a dex safe" has to address all three. Grvt's architecture is built so that each of these failure modes is either contained, proven out mathematically, audited by a credible third party, or rendered inert by self custody.

The Grvt Trust Boundary

Grvt's trust boundary extends to four components:

1. Ethereum. The base layer. Identical trust assumption to every DeFi protocol.
2. ZKSync L1 smart contracts (including the bridge). ZKSync has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in TVL since March 2023. State correctness on Grvt is proven cryptographically through ZK Validium, which means transitions are provable math.
3. Grvt L2 smart contracts. These have been audited by Spearbit DAO, putting the security posture in line with other audited DeFi protocols running on ZKSync.
4. User private keys. The same assumption as every self custody protocol. Your private keys are the exclusive authority for moving your funds, meaning no one can move them without your keys.

Trust in Ethereum and trust in your own keys are identical across Grvt and every other DeFi protocol. The extra components, ZKSync L1 contracts and Grvt L2 contracts, are under public audit and sit on proven infrastructure. When all four are secure, funds cannot be compromised. That is the baseline.

Grvt then layers additional security on top of this baseline. That is where the model actually pulls ahead.

The Grvt Layered Security Model

The Grvt L2 chain is a fully private chain. The public cannot send transactions directly to it. All user requests are routed through Grvt's backend infrastructure, and that backend is the only permissioned entity allowed to execute transactions against the L2 smart contracts.

Why this matters: on a standard DEX, the smart contracts are exposed directly to the public internet. If a vulnerability exists, anyone can exploit it as soon as they find it. On Grvt, an attacker who finds a vulnerability in the L2 smart contracts still has to compromise the Grvt backend to reach them. Two independent security layers, each with its own defenses, must fail in sequence for an exploit to land.

This is the web2 defense pattern that has kept well run centralized exchanges from being drained through smart contract style exploits for years, applied on top of a self custody web3 base. The combination elevates the fund security posture above what is standard at either DEXs or CEXs in isolation.

What Happens If the Grvt Backend Is Compromised

No system is unbreachable. Here is what actually happens if an attacker compromises the Grvt backend.

A backend compromise opens three threat categories:

Exposing L2 smart contract vulnerabilities. Smart contracts are designed with the assumption of full public accessibility, meaning they are expected to remain secure even if backend access controls are compromised. In the worst case, an attacker gains the access needed to send transactions directly to the L2 contracts. The security guarantee then devolves to whatever the smart contracts prove on their own. That is the same posture every other DEX operates under every single day. Hyperliquid and Uniswap, for example, both run with their smart contracts directly exposed to the public chain at all times. It is a credible security model that has held up under significant TVL. Grvt's downside risk is identical to the normal operating security of peer DEXs.

Compromise of user trading data. Trading activity that was private becomes visible. Most DEXs publish this data openly as a baseline, so the resulting posture is standard for the category. It is a privacy loss, not a funds loss.

Denial of service. A backend compromise would primarily result in a denial-of-service condition, where users are temporarily unable to trade until the issue is resolved. As GRVT relies on backend infrastructure for order management and execution, availability depends on these services, but user funds remain secured at the smart contract level.

What does not happen, even in a severe compromise, is the wipeout scenario familiar from centralized exchange failures. On a CEX, a backend compromise or an insolvency event can result in all customer funds being lost. On Grvt, the backend is never in the fund custody path. It orchestrates. It does not hold.

User Private Key Compromise: Grvt's Four Line Defense

The most common form of crypto theft is not protocol exploits or exchange hacks. It is users being phished or socially engineered into signing away their funds. Grvt's security model takes this seriously and applies four separate protective controls.

1. User Login and 2FA

Here is how a typical phishing attack works across DeFi:

1. Attacker spins up a fake site that imitates a well known DEX.
2. Attacker runs a fake urgent downtime notice prompting users to withdraw their funds.
3. User signs a withdrawal signature to what they think is their own wallet.
4. Attacker replays the signature on the real site to drain the account.

On Grvt, submitting a signature requires the user to also be logged in, optionally with 2FA. Even if a signature is phished, the attacker also needs login credentials and the 2FA factor. Credentials are still phishable. 2FA is much harder. This is not bulletproof, but it is a meaningful friction layer that most DeFi apps simply do not have.

2. On-Chain RBAC

Role based access control (RBAC), enforced on chain. Every user on an institutional account has a specific set of permissions. If a trader is fully compromised, credentials, 2FA, and signatures included, the attacker still cannot take an action the trader did not have permission to take.

This is the point where Grvt's security posture outruns most DEXs. On a typical DEX, any key that can sign can do anything. On Grvt, permissions are granular and enforced by Ethereum itself. A firm can issue a trader a key scoped to trading a specific sub account, and nothing else. Phishing that trader does not expose the firm's withdrawal authority.

3. Multi-Sig Approvals (Institutional Accounts Only)

Privileged operations require a configured quorum of account administrators to sign off. These privileged operations include:

• Onboarding or removing an administrator
• Onboarding or removing a withdrawal wallet
• Onboarding or removing a transfer account
• Changing the multi sig threshold itself

Even if an attacker fully compromises an administrator, they cannot push funds to a wallet that has not been whitelisted, and whitelisting a new wallet itself requires a quorum signature. This is the third line of defense, and it is the one that stops the most damaging class of attacks before they land.

Thresholds are configurable. Institutions can set 2 of 3, 2 of 5, 3 of 5, or any other combination that fits their internal risk posture. Single signature flows are also valid where usability outweighs the marginal risk.

4. Data Privacy as a Security Factor

Data privacy is usually underrated. Most attacks against compromised users rely on the attacker also knowing the structure and identifiers of the target account. On a fully transparent DEX, that information is public by design. Sub account IDs, position sizes, and counterparty patterns are all visible on chain, which gives an attacker holding a stolen signature everything they need to construct a profitable exploit path.

On Grvt, sub account IDs are private to the users inside an institution and are never exposed to L1 Ethereum. Trade signatures must match the exact sub account ID, and an attacker with a stolen signature but no view into the firm's account structure has nothing to point that signature at. The attack surface simply is not available.

Data privacy is not usually counted as a security control. On Grvt it is.

Wallet Provider Compromise: The Scenario Most Exchanges Ignore

What happens if your wallet infrastructure itself is compromised? A zero day in Metamask. A breach at Fireblocks. A supply chain attack on a browser extension. These are real events that have happened in the last few years.

On most DEXs, a leaked private key is game over. An attacker with your key has full authority over your funds.

On Grvt, the four layer defense above still applies. Even with your private key in hand, an attacker still needs login credentials, 2FA, the right role permissions, and the right multi-sig approvals. And if the action they want to take is a withdrawal to a non whitelisted wallet, they are blocked at the contract level.

Grvt is structured so that a compromise of your wallet provider does not automatically mean a compromise of your Grvt funds. That is a property few other exchanges, centralized or decentralized, can claim.

On-Chain RBAC for Institutions

Institutional admins onboard users with specific permissions, either at the account level or the sub account level. This looks similar to what mature centralized exchanges offer, with one critical difference: on Grvt, these permissions are secured by Ethereum.

Only admin who created the account, or admins they have appointed, can onboard new users. Not even Grvt itself can add users to your institutional account. The permission set is enforced on chain, which means Grvt operators cannot override or bypass it.

Each user's permissions can be as narrow as the institution needs. This limits both the blast radius of internal mistakes and the blast radius of external compromise. If a junior trader is phished, the permissions they never had cannot be stolen from them.

Liquidation Constraints: Self Custody That Survives Liquidation

Liquidation is the place where self custody tends to break down on most exchanges. Even on a DEX, the liquidation engine typically gets unrestricted authority over your account to close out risk. That trust window is where mistakes and abuses tend to happen.

On Grvt, the smart contracts constrain what the exchange operator can do during a liquidation:

• The backend must verify that the account is actually liquidatable before the transaction is ever submitted to the smart contract
• Only under verified liquidation conditions (as specified in the smart contract) can Grvt close risky positions
• Grvt is not allowed to increase your risk
• Grvt is not allowed to withdraw from, transfer from, or onboard users on your account under any condition

This is a narrow, proven authority rather than a blanket one. A trader can evaluate the risk of liquidation without also having to trust the honesty of a closeout desk. The math either shows the account is liquidatable or it does not.

Session Keys: Security You Can Actually Configure

Signing every single trade is high friction. Most DEXs solve this with session keys, but the implementations vary widely. Grvt's session keys are designed with security first, not UX first.

A Grvt session key cannot withdraw, transfer, or move your funds. It trades. It expires. It has a configurable notional limit. If it is compromised, the worst case is bounded trading activity during a finite window, not fund theft.

How Grvt Compares

Here is the short version for anyone deciding where to deposit.

Against that backdrop, the platform sits at $451M in open interest and ranks among the top five perp DEXs on DefiLlama's 30 day leaderboard. That is a non trivial weight of capital choosing this security model.

FAQ

Is Grvt a non custodial exchange? Yes. Funds remain in user controlled addresses. Grvt never takes custody. Matching happens off chain for speed, settlement happens on chain for proof, and custody is preserved throughout.

Who audits Grvt's smart contracts? Grvt's smart contracts have been audited by Spearbit DAO, putting the posture in line with other audited DeFi protocols running on ZKSync.

Can Grvt steal my funds? No. The smart contract architecture does not grant Grvt the authority to withdraw, transfer, or onboard users on your account. This is enforced on chain, not by policy.

What happens to my funds if Grvt goes offline? A backend outage would temporarily prevent new transactions. Funds remain in user controlled addresses the entire time. 

Is Grvt safe for institutional trading? The on chain RBAC, multi sig approvals, and granular permission model are built for institutional use. An institutional account's admin controls are enforced by Ethereum itself, not by Grvt's internal policy, which means Grvt operators cannot override or bypass them.

How does Grvt differ from a CEX like Binance or a DEX like dYdX on security? Against a CEX: funds are self custody on Grvt, which removes the insolvency and seizure risks that define CEX failure modes. Against a DEX: Grvt adds a private L2 backend layer, on chain RBAC, and multi sig, which means a smart contract vulnerability alone is not enough to drain funds. On top of that, Grvt is privacy first by design. Positions, sub account IDs, and counterparty details that are fully public on transparent DEXs remain private on Grvt, removing the reconnaissance data that most targeted attacks against traders depend on.

Trade on a Perp DEX Built for Capital Safety

If you have read this far, the question is not really "is Grvt safe." It is "is the security model I am trading under actually defensible against the failure modes that have historically cost traders their money." On Grvt, the answer is architectural, not aspirational.

Start trading on Grvt

Related reading:

• Is Perp Dex Safe
• What Are Crypto Liquidations

If you've spent any time on a crypto trading platform, you've probably noticed that most of the volume isn't in spot markets. It's in perpetual futures. On any given day, perpetual futures across major venues trade at multiples of spot volume. And yet for many traders, how they actually work remains murky.

This guide breaks down what perpetual futures are, how the mechanics function under the hood, and what you need to understand before you open your first position. Whether you're coming from spot trading, traditional futures, or you're just starting to explore what are perps in crypto and why they dominate trading volume, this is the right starting point.

What "perpetual" actually means in trading

A perpetual futures contract is a derivative instrument that lets you speculate on the price of an asset, long or short, without ever having to take delivery of it or roll your position into a new contract. The defining feature is right there in the name: it has no expiry date.

Standard futures contracts (the kind traded on CME for commodities or equity indices) always have a settlement date. When that date arrives, the contract expires and you either take delivery of the underlying asset or settle in cash. If you want to maintain exposure, you have to "roll" into the next contract — which costs money and creates friction.

Perpetual futures remove that entirely. You can hold a position for hours, days, or months. There's no calendar forcing your hand.

The theoretical groundwork was laid by economist Robert Shiller, best known for Irrational Exuberance, who proposed the idea of perpetual futures as a way to create continuous, no-expiry exposure to an underlying asset. BitMEX took that concept and built the first working implementation in crypto, launching it in 2016. It's since become the dominant derivatives product in the space, and the terms perpetual futures and perpetual swaps are used interchangeably across the industry. They refer to the same thing.

How perpetual futures work

The no-expiry design creates an obvious problem: without a settlement date, what stops the perpetual futures price from drifting far away from the actual spot price of the underlying asset? The answer is the funding rate.

The funding rate mechanism

The funding rate is a periodic payment exchanged directly between traders holding long and short positions. It's the mechanism that keeps the perpetual price anchored to spot.

Here's how it works in practice:

• When the perpetual price is trading above spot, longs pay shorts. This creates a cost for buyers, which discourages buying pressure and pushes the price back toward spot.
• When the perpetual price is trading below spot, shorts pay longs. This discourages short sellers and pulls the price back up.

Funding is typically settled every 8 hours, though this varies by exchange. The rate itself is calculated based on the difference between the perpetual price and the spot index price, plus an interest rate component.

For longer-term position holders, funding rate costs accumulate and can significantly eat into returns — particularly in strongly trending markets where one side of the book consistently pays. This is one of the most underappreciated costs in crypto derivatives trading.

Leverage and margin

Perpetual futures are margined instruments — you don't pay the full notional value of a position upfront. Instead, you post a fraction of it as collateral (your margin), and the exchange provides the rest as leverage.

Two margin figures matter:

• Initial margin: The minimum collateral required to open a position. At 10x leverage, this is 10% of the notional value.
• Maintenance margin: The minimum collateral required to keep a position open. If your account equity falls below this threshold, your position is liquidated.

Liquidation happens automatically and immediately. There's no phone call, no grace period. When your margin is exhausted, the exchange closes your position — and depending on market conditions, slippage in the liquidation can push your loss beyond your initial margin if the exchange doesn't have adequate insurance fund coverage.

Use leverage with clear position sizing logic. The math is straightforward: a 10x leveraged position is liquidated if the price moves 10% against you (before fees). At 20x, that's 5%.

Mark price vs last price

Most exchanges, including Grvt, calculate liquidations based on mark price, not last traded price. Mark price is derived from spot index prices across multiple venues, dampened to prevent manipulation.

This distinction matters because last price can be temporarily moved by a large order or thin liquidity. If liquidations were triggered by last price, a single aggressive seller could cascade a wave of forced closures. Mark price prevents that.

Always check whether a platform uses mark price for liquidations before trading.

Perpetual futures vs standard futures contracts

The differences between perpetual futures and traditional dated futures are structural, not just cosmetic.

For most crypto traders, perpetuals are the default choice. The lack of expiry removes operational complexity, and the continuous market structure suits the 24/7 nature of crypto markets. Dated futures contracts have their place, particularly for institutions that need specific settlement dates for hedging purposes, but for active speculation, perpetuals dominate.

What you can trade with perpetual futures

Bitcoin and Ethereum perpetuals are by far the most liquid markets, with deep order books across major venues and tight spreads even at size. These two markets alone account for the bulk of all crypto derivatives volume globally, and they're where most serious traders spend the majority of their time.

Beyond the majors, most large exchanges offer perpetuals on a range of altcoins, SOL, DOGE, AVAX, and dozens of others. Liquidity in altcoin perps is meaningfully thinner, which translates to wider bid-ask spreads, higher slippage on large orders, and greater vulnerability to price manipulation via the perp market itself. Funding rates can also become extreme in altcoin perps during periods of speculative excess, making them expensive to hold if you're on the crowded side.

For traders just starting out with perps, BTC and ETH are the right starting point, not because the opportunities are better, but because the market structure is more predictable and liquidation risk from thin liquidity is lower.

It's also worth noting how perpetuals fit into the broader derivatives landscape. Unlike options, which give you the right but not the obligation to buy or sell, a perpetual futures position is a binding obligation that marks to market in real time. Unlike spot trading, you don't hold the underlying asset — you hold a contract whose value is derived from it. That distinction matters for how you think about custody, counterparty risk, and what you actually own.

Trading perpetual futures on Grvt

Grvt is a hybrid decentralised exchange built on ZKSync, designed specifically for the demands of derivatives trading at institutional and professional-grade scale.

On the infrastructure side, Grvt operates an off-chain order matching engine, which means order execution speed is comparable to a centralised exchange.

Meanwhile, settlement is handled on-chain via ZKSync's zero-knowledge proof system. For traders who care about latency (algo traders, market makers, systematic strategies), this matters: you get CEX-level execution without custody risk.

Grvt's perpetual markets are built with API-first access in mind. If you're running a trading bot, a grid strategy, or any kind of programmatic execution, the Grvt API gives you the same depth and speed that institutional desks expect. The platform also offers granular margin controls and real-time position monitoring — the kind of tooling that makes risk management tractable rather than reactive.

This matters more than it might seem at first glance. Many traders move to perpetual futures because the instrument is powerful, then discover that the platform they chose wasn't built for serious use: slow APIs, opaque liquidation engines, poor mark price methodology. The infrastructure you trade on shapes your actual edge just as much as your strategy does.

Start trading perpetual futures on Grvt →

Key risks to understand before you trade

Perpetual futures are powerful instruments. They're also among the faster ways to lose money in crypto if the mechanics aren't respected. Three risks stand out.

Liquidation cascades. In volatile markets, large liquidations can trigger a chain reaction. Forced selling pushes price down, which triggers more liquidations, which pushes price down further. If you're holding a leveraged long during one of these events, your position may be liquidated at a worse price than you'd expect from the initial move alone. Position sizing and stop losses are not optional. Monitoring open interest data alongside price action gives you early signals of when a cascade is building.

Funding rate exposure in trending markets. In a sustained bull run, longs consistently pay shorts. A position that's directionally correct can still lose money to cumulative funding costs over time, particularly at higher leverage. Check the current funding rate and annualise it before holding a position for more than a day or two. An annualised funding rate of 50%+ (which is not unusual during bull market peaks) means you're paying 50% per year just to stay in the trade. That's a high bar for directional return to clear.

Leverage amplifies in both directions. A 5x leveraged position that goes 10% in your favour doubles your margin. The same position going 10% against you wipes it out entirely. The asymmetry in perception, it doesn't feel like you're risking 100% of your capital, but you are, is what catches most new traders. Size positions as a percentage of total capital, not as a function of what the exchange will allow you to borrow.

Counterparty and platform risk. Unlike spot trading on a regulated exchange, you're trusting the platform's mark price methodology, insurance fund, and liquidation engine. A poorly designed platform can socialise losses across traders (auto-deleveraging), use a mark price that's easy to manipulate, or have an insurance fund too small to cover extreme moves. Understanding the mechanics of the specific platform you use is as important as understanding perpetual futures themselves.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between perpetual futures and futures contracts?

Standard futures contracts have a fixed expiry date and settle, either in cash or via physical delivery of the underlying asset, at that date. Perpetual futures have no expiry date and never settle. Instead, they use a funding rate mechanism to keep their price aligned with the spot market.

What does the funding rate mean in perpetual futures?

The funding rate is a periodic payment between traders on opposite sides of the market. When perpetual prices trade above spot, longs pay shorts (which pushes price back down). When perpetual prices trade below spot, shorts pay longs. It's the mechanism that keeps the perpetual price from diverging permanently from the real-world spot price.

Are perpetual futures the same as perpetual swaps?

Yes. The terms are used interchangeably across the industry. Both refer to the same instrument: a derivative contract with no expiry date, settled in crypto, using a funding rate to maintain price alignment with spot.

Can you hold a perpetual futures position forever?

Mechanically, yes. There's no expiry forcing you to close. In practice, the funding rate creates an ongoing cost if you're on the wrong side of the market sentiment, and margin requirements mean your position can be liquidated if the price moves against you enough. "Forever" is possible; it just requires active management of both funding costs and margin levels.

What is a good leverage ratio for perpetual futures?

There's no universal answer. It depends on your strategy, risk tolerance, and the volatility of the asset you're trading. A reasonable starting principle: use leverage low enough that a 15–20% adverse move doesn't liquidate your position. For most traders, that means 3–5x on major assets like BTC and ETH, and lower still on altcoins.

How to read funding rates as a market signal

Beyond their mechanical role, funding rates carry genuine information about market sentiment, and experienced traders use them as a signal in their own right.

When funding rates are persistently high and positive (longs paying shorts), it indicates the market is heavily long and leveraged. That's not necessarily a sell signal, but it's a warning that any negative price catalyst will be amplified by forced long liquidations. Conversely, sustained negative funding, shorts paying longs, suggests crowded short positioning and the potential for a sharp short squeeze.

Tracking the funding rate alongside price action, open interest, and spot market behaviour gives you a more complete picture of market structure than any single indicator. Many systematic traders build funding rate monitoring directly into their signal stacks, using it to calibrate position size or identify which direction has a structural tailwind from positioning dynamics.

An annualised funding rate of 50%+ (not unusual during bull market peaks) means you're paying 50% per year in carry costs just to hold a long. That's a high bar for directional return to clear, and it's the kind of number that makes holding positions overnight a materially different decision than opening them intraday.

Data on current and historical funding rates is available across most major perpetual exchanges and aggregators. If you're trading actively, building a habit of checking it before entering any position you plan to hold overnight is straightforward to implement and meaningfully reduces the chance of being caught offside by carry costs.

The bottom line

Perpetual futures are the dominant trading instrument in crypto derivatives for a reason: they're flexible, accessible, and structurally well-suited to a 24/7 market. But the funding rate mechanics, mark price calculations, and liquidation dynamics all require genuine understanding before you put capital at risk.

If you've read this far, you have the foundation. The next step is understanding how to size positions, read funding rate data as a market signal, and choose a platform that gives you the infrastructure to execute with precision.

Trade perpetual futures on Grvt →

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

Most traders accept a silent cost: the collateral sitting in your account earns nothing while it waits. It funds your positions but generates no return in the meantime. That's capital doing half a job.

Grvt's Yield Layer was built to close that gap. And now it's powered in part by Aave V3, the world's largest onchain lending protocol.

Aave V3 Is Now Live on Grvt

Aave V3 is now an active yield source within the Grvt Yield Layer.

A portion of the USDT deposited into Grvt is routed through smart contract, putting it to work in Aave's lending markets. The yield generated flows back to traders as part of their overall APY, without requiring any separate action on their end.

Your balance on Grvt is your trading margin. It is also now your yield-generating position. Both happen simultaneously, from the same funds, in the same balance.

How the Yield Layer Is Structured

The Grvt Yield Layer draws from two sources currently: Grvt platform fees and Aave V3. The allocation between them shifts based on overall trading activity on the platform. You can see the live split directly on the platform. It updates constantly so you always know where your funds are deployed.

Curious how much of Grvt's total TVL is deployed into Aave at any given time? The Grvt protocol page on DeFiLlama tracks this publicly. It is a protocol-level view, separate from your personal yield breakdown in the app.

What You Can Actually Earn

Earn on Equity V3 is structured around three layers of yield. Your rate increases based on how actively you use the platform:

At maximum boosts, you are looking at 11.00% APY, earned on the same balance you are using to trade.

For a deeper look at how the rate structure works and the mechanics behind the Yield Layer, read Inside Grvt's Yield Layer. The article covers the architecture, epoch cycles, and how yield accrues relative to your collateral.

One Balance. No Extra Steps.

Grvt was designed around a simple belief: users should never have to choose between "earn" and "trade".

Your deposited collateral earns yield from the moment it arrives. It stays available for margin. It earns through Grvt Yield Layer. When you are ready to trade, there is no delay.

This is what Grvt refers to as the one-balance design. The same funds that back your positions are the ones generating yield. Capital that is sitting idle between trades is not wasted.

Start Earning

Aave yield on your trading margin is live now.

Deposit, trade, and let your collateral work the whole time.

Start trading on Grvt

Messari, one of the most cited research firms in crypto, just published an in-depth report on Grvt. Here is what they found.

TL;DR

• Grvt's share of total perp DEX open interest grew 26x year over year, far outpacing the 4x growth of the broader market over the same period
• Unlike most perp DEXs where deposited collateral sits idle, Grvt routes it into real yield while your trades stay open, offering up to 11% APY on all collateral
• One-balance design is the structural reason this is possible: all collateral is treated as a single unified balance, enabling the Grvt Yield Layer to route idle capital into real yield via Aave while positions stay open
• Open interest is up 53% year to date to $451 million. TVL is up 36.8% to $80.4 million. Daily volume has ranged from $650 million to $2.6 billion in 2026

For the full picture, read the Messari report here: [Messari Report].

The rest of this article walks through the core mechanics behind those numbers.

Grvt's position in the perp DEX market

The perp DEX market is largely winner-take-most. Liquidity begets liquidity, and Hyperliquid currently leads with strong network effects. That makes Grvt's 26x increase in open interest market share year over year against a market that itself grew 4x, a meaningful signal. These are not numbers explained by one catalyst. They reflect a platform differentiated at the infrastructure level.

The separator: yield on margin

Yield on all collateral deposited to trade is what sets Grvt apart. The yield comes from two sources: a share of protocol trading fees, and rehypothecation of most user deposits to external DeFi protocols via Aave V3. Integrations with Morpho, Pendle, and Ethena are planned.

On Grvt you do not choose between putting capital to work and using it to trade. The same balance does both. APY scales with trading activity across a four-week cycle, starting at 3.5% for five completed trades and reaching up to 11% at $5 million in volume. Maker fees are negative across all fee tiers, so climbing the APY ladder does not necessarily cost you fees to get there.

How one-balance design makes this possible

Yield on all collateral is structurally incompatible with isolated margin, where each position requires its own dedicated pool and capital cannot be redirected. Grvt operates on one-balance design: all collateral is treated as a single unified balance, simultaneously supporting all open positions and routing idle capital into yield strategies.

This is what the Grvt Yield Layer operationalizes. The same balance backing your trades is generating yield in Aave. That is only possible because the collateral is never locked per position. The risk tradeoff is real. Unified margin concentrates risk at the account level, which is why Grvt settles everything inside a ZK Validium system on ZKSync, ensuring correctness and privacy without publishing transaction data to Ethereum.

The Yield Layer as capital lifecycle infrastructure

Grvt decouples where collateral earns yield (Ethereum L1) from where activity is tracked (Grvt's private L2). Most deposits are rehypothecated to external DeFi protocols on L1, while the L2 retains enough for day-to-day withdrawals. The Aave integration is the first implementation of this design, proving that collateral deposited to trade can be composable with external DeFi without giving up the privacy guarantees of the Validium architecture.

Having built the trading infrastructure, the CLOB, ZK Validium settlement, and one-balance design, the Yield Layer is the next crucial step toward a full capital lifecycle system, where capital deposited to trade is also earning. Payments and spending come next, closing the loop so that capital never needs to leave the system to be useful. BTC, ETH, and yield-bearing RWAs as collateral extend that logic further, covering more of the capital lifecycle within a single self-custodial account.

The full Messari report covers the architecture, competitive landscape, and data in depth. Read it here: [Messari Report].

Ready to put your capital to work? Start trading on Grvt.

In 2025, over $154 billion in crypto positions were forcibly closed by exchanges. That averages out to $400 to $500 million in crypto liquidations every single day.

On October 10, 2025, the market saw its largest ever single-day event: $19 billion wiped out in hours, with $3.21 billion vanishing in just 60 seconds.

If you trade perpetual futures or use leverage, understanding how crypto liquidations work is not optional. This guide covers the mechanics, the data sources professional traders use to track them, and six strategies to keep your positions alive.

What Is a Crypto Liquidation?

A crypto liquidation occurs when an exchange forcibly closes your leveraged position because you no longer meet the margin requirements.

When you trade with leverage, you borrow funds to increase your position size. This amplifies both gains and losses. If the market moves against you, your margin balance can fall below the maintenance threshold, which is the minimum collateral required to keep your position open.

At that point, the exchange automatically sells your assets to cover the borrowed funds. You lose your position and often a significant portion of your margin.

Partial vs. Total Liquidation

Not all liquidations work the same way.

Partial liquidation reduces your position size just enough to bring your margin ratio back above the maintenance threshold. You keep a portion of your position and collateral.

Total liquidation closes your entire position. This happens when price moves so sharply that even partial reduction is not enough and your collateral is wiped out completely.

During the October 2025 crash, 85% to 90% of all liquidated positions were longs. When the cascade hit, overleveraged bulls were systematically wiped out as prices crashed through liquidation threshold after liquidation threshold.

How Crypto Liquidations Work: The Mechanics

Every leveraged position has a liquidation price, which is the price at which your position will be automatically closed. Four factors determine it.

Entry price. The price at which you opened your position.

Leverage ratio. Higher leverage means a tighter liquidation price. At 10x leverage, a 10% adverse move wipes you out. At 50x, it only takes 2%.

Maintenance margin. The minimum collateral percentage required to keep your position open, typically 0.5% to 1% of position value on most exchanges.

Mark price. Most exchanges use a mark price calculated from multiple data sources rather than just the last traded price. This protects against manipulation, but during volatile conditions, mark price can move faster than you can react.

Here is the simplified formula for a long position:

Liquidation Price = Entry Price × (1 - 1/Leverage + Maintenance Margin Rate)

At 20x leverage on a $100 entry with a 1% maintenance margin rate, your liquidation price is roughly $96. A 4% drop ends your trade.

Why Cascading Liquidations Move Entire Markets

When a large number of positions get liquidated simultaneously, it creates a liquidation cascade, and this is where real damage happens.

The feedback loop works like this. Prices fall. Overleveraged positions breach margin thresholds. Exchange liquidation engines sell those positions at market. Forced selling pushes prices lower. Lower prices trigger more liquidations. The cycle repeats until leverage is flushed from the system.

On October 10, 2025, this cascade accelerated to 86x the normal liquidation rate during the peak 40-minute window. Open interest collapsed by $36.71 billion, 25% of the total market, as the system unwound $147 billion in leveraged positions.

The most alarming detail: liquidity that appeared on order books evaporated under stress. Visible liquidity dropped from $103.64 million to just $0.17 million, a 99.8% collapse, right when traders needed it most.

This is where exchange infrastructure becomes the deciding factor. When market liquidity evaporates that fast, the difference between a venue with a well-designed risk engine and one without is the difference between a bad day and a complete account wipe. Grvt's ZK Validium architecture settles positions onchain with cryptographic guarantees while matching orders at speed offchain, so execution quality does not degrade under stress the way it does on less robust venues.

How to Track Liquidation Data

Monitoring aggregate liquidation data helps you understand market sentiment and identify elevated risk periods before they hit.

Key platforms for tracking this:

CoinGlass provides real time liquidation heatmaps, exchange breakdowns, and historical data. CoinMarketCap Liquidations aggregates liquidation metrics across major exchanges. Laevitas covers derivatives analytics including liquidation levels and open interest shifts.

What to pay attention to: the long to short liquidation ratio shows which side of the market is under pressure. Sharp drops in open interest often accompany cascades. Extreme funding rates in either direction indicate a crowded trade that is approaching its unwind. Professional traders use this data to size positions, set stops, and avoid entering trades when conditions are already dangerous.

6 Strategies to Avoid Getting Liquidated

1. Use Lower Leverage

The simplest defense. At 2x to 5x leverage, you have room to weather normal volatility. At 50x to 100x, you are one news headline away from total liquidation.

2. Set Stop Losses Before Your Liquidation Price

Do not let the exchange close your position. Close it yourself at a level you choose. Set stops with enough buffer that normal volatility will not trigger them, but tight enough to protect meaningful capital.

3. Use Isolated Margin

With isolated margin, only the collateral allocated to a specific position is at risk. With cross margin, your entire account balance can be drawn on to cover a losing position. Isolated margin limits your downside to what you specifically allocated to that trade.

On Grvt, the unified margin design gives you capital efficiency across positions while keeping your collateral productive even when it is not actively deployed in a specific trade.

4. Monitor Funding Rates and Open Interest

Crowded trades get unwound violently. If funding rates are extreme and open interest is at local highs, the market is primed for a squeeze. Either reduce size or stay out until conditions normalize.

5. Add Margin to Positions Under Stress

If you believe in the trade and have capital available, you can add margin to push your liquidation price further away. But be honest: are you adding to a thesis that is still valid, or are you fighting the market?

6. Trade During Peak Liquidity Hours

Liquidation cascades are worse in thin markets. Trading when US and Asia sessions overlap gives you better fills and more orderly price action. The October 2025 event intensified partly because it hit during a period of reduced market depth.

What Good Infrastructure Looks Like During a Cascade

The October 2025 crash exposed a clear divide between exchanges that held up and those that did not. Fragmented liquidity, slow risk engines, and opaque mark price calculations all contributed to traders facing worse outcomes than the market itself should have produced.

Grvt is a perp DEX built on ZK Validium architecture, meaning state correctness is verified through zero-knowledge proofs while order matching runs offchain at speed. The risk engine is designed to handle cascades without catastrophic liquidity failure. And because Grvt operates with full self custody, your assets remain in your control throughout, no custodial risk stacked on top of market risk.

For traders who take risk management seriously, the exchange infrastructure is not a minor detail. When $3.21 billion liquidates in 60 seconds, it becomes the most important variable in the room.

Trade perpetuals on Grvt → Start here

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

Grvt is now fully supported inside Tealstreet, and we are inviting the Tealstreet community to trade with us.

If you are already using Tealstreet as your terminal of choice, connecting to Grvt is a natural next step. You get the execution environment you are used to, running on top of a self-custodial, privacy-first derivatives exchange with institutional-grade infrastructure and up to 50x leverage on crypto and RWA perpetual futures. Your margin earns yield from the moment it is deposited. And for a limited time, new Grvt users coming from Tealstreet can earn rewards just for showing up.

Here is what you need to know.

What Is Tealstreet?

For traders who are new to the terminal, Tealstreet is a free, pro grade crypto trading terminal available on web, desktop, and mobile. It connects to exchanges via API and provides a single unified interface for charting powered by TradingView, depth of market, order books, positions, PnL tracking, and a real-time news feed.

The appeal for active traders is speed and control. Tealstreet supports custom hotkeys, macros, advanced order types like scaled orders and chasers, and direct chart execution. The interface is fully customisable. And because Tealstreet uses a serverless architecture, your API keys never leave your device, which means the terminal itself introduces no additional custody risk.

Tealstreet Built on Grvt Builder Codes

The Tealstreet integration goes deeper than a standard API connection. Tealstreet was one of the first partners when Grvt launched Builder Codes, a program that lets external developers build terminals, tools, and applications on top of Grvt's infrastructure and earn a share of the order flow they generate.

Builder Codes allow Grvt to focus on what it does best, the underlying matching and settlement layer, while ecosystem teams like Tealstreet build front-end trading experiences on the same foundation. The connection is native, not bolted on.

The Tealstreet Terminal Transfer Campaign

To mark the integration and welcome Tealstreet traders to Grvt, we are running an exclusive campaign for new Grvt users from the Tealstreet community. The campaign runs from April 14 to May 4, 2026.

There are three ways to earn:

• Trading Volume Milestone Rewards. Reach cumulative volume milestones during the campaign period and receive stackable USDT rewards at each tier you hit.
• Raffle. New users who make a qualifying deposit and complete at least one trade are entered into a prize raffle. Sharing campaign content on social media may improve your odds of being selected.
• Ambassador Status. Every eligible participant who submits the campaign form receives Ambassador status for the duration of the campaign, including a 35% referral commission, a 30% trading points boost, and access to Fee Level 6 rates.

The campaign is open to new Grvt users from the Tealstreet community only. A Google Form submission is required, along with your Tealstreet profile name and a screenshot of your profile.

For the full reward tiers, eligibility criteria, and submission instructions, see the Tealstreet Transfer Campaign Details page.

Get Started

Sign up on Grvt, connect to Tealstreet, and start trading before May 4.

• Create your Grvt account and earn 30% more pounts
• Create your TealStreet account
• Connect to TealStreet to Grvt