Grvt: From Perps to Private Wealth Management

Key Insights

• Grvt is building the infrastructure for an onchain wealth management platform, starting with a professional-grade perpetual DEX as its foundational product. This hybrid platform combines the speed and efficiency of a CEX with the security and self-custody of a DEX, while ensuring privacy through its architecture as a ZK Stack validium.
• Powered by ZKsync’s recent Atlas upgrade, Grvt integrates deeply with Ethereum’s liquidity, tapping into Mainnet capital natively without bridges. This unified liquidity enables Grvt to pool capital seamlessly across chains, delivering a private, institutional-grade wealth management platform that combines the depth of Ethereum with the speed of a high-performance Layer 2.
• The Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP) hit its $7.5 million deposit cap in just 23 days, boasting a 31.2% APR and an 11.48 Sharpe Ratio that underscore exceptional risk-adjusted returns.

Primer

Grvt (pronounced "gravity") is a hybrid exchange that blends the efficiency of a centralized exchange (CEX) with the transparency of a decentralized exchange (DEX). Grvt currently offers perpetual futures, with plans to expand into spot and option markets in the future. Unlike typical DEXs that rely on Automated Market Makers (AMMs), Grvt utilizes a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) model. This allows it to deliver a trading experience comparable to centralized exchanges (CEXs), featuring high throughput and low latency, while ensuring users retain full ownership of their assets. Grvt’s mission is to build an onchain wealth management platform, democratizing access to institutional-grade financial products in a regulated, self-custodial environment.

The platform’s infrastructure is built on ZKsync, a Layer 2 (L2) Ethereum scaling solution. Grvt was the first dedicated appchain launched on the ZK Stack, a modular framework that enables developers to deploy custom, interoperable blockchains known as ZK Chains. By integrating into the Elastic Chain, an ecosystem of ZK chains that share liquidity and users, Grvt can seamlessly interact with other ZK chains while maintaining its own sovereign execution environment.

ZKsync’s Atlas upgrade is foundational to Grvt’s mission. By leveraging the Elastic Chain’s one-second finality and shared bridge, Atlas allows users to seamlessly interact with assets across Ethereum and other ZK chains as margin within a single unified account. This eliminates liquidity fragmentation, enabling the institutional-grade performance and capital efficiency required for a comprehensive, self-custodial wealth management platform. Grvt recently raised $19 million in a Series A funding round co-led by the ZKsync Foundation, Further Ventures, EigenCloud, and 500 Global.

Website / X / Telegram / Discord / YouTube / Instagram / TikTok

Architecture

Grvt employs a hybrid architecture designed to achieve the low-latency throughput of a Web2 server while maintaining the cryptographic security and self-custody of a Web3 decentralized exchange.

Grvt leverages the ZKsync Prividium architecture. In this design, sensitive transaction data remains entirely offchain in a secure database, effectively eliminating predatory behaviors like sandwich attacks and front-running. To ensure security, the system generates zero-knowledge proofs, which serve as cryptographic evidence that a batch of transactions is valid, and submits only these proofs and the state roots (snapshots of the new account balances) to Ethereum. This anchors the Grvt chain to Ethereum’s security without ever revealing the underlying data.

All actions, such as order placements and profile updates, by the user are first initiated in the offchain Grvt application. To maintain efficiency and privacy, non-financial activities such as KYC verification remain strictly offchain.

Financial actions are driven by specialized high-performance modules. The Matching Engine utilizes a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) to pair orders instantly, while the Risk Engine monitors margin levels in real-time. This setup allows Grvt to achieve execution speeds of up to 600,000 trades per second with single-digit millisecond latency. Simultaneously, the account and fund management modules handle wallet authorization and asset routing before any data is transmitted to the blockchain.

Once executed, these financial actions are pushed to the Grvt L2 for immutable verification. Here, smart contracts ensure:

• Trade & Risk Validation: The protocol verifies that matched orders are correct and that any liquidations triggered offchain are mathematically fair, protecting users from malicious system behavior.
• Fund Integrity: Smart contracts validate all internal and external transfers to ensure the L2 ledger perfectly mirrors the assets locked on L1, while verifying that only authorized entities can access specific funds.

The L2 bundles these valid transactions and publishes them as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to Ethereum’s L1. This provides absolute finality and security without revealing sensitive private data to the public mainnet, combining the speed of Web2 servers with the settlement assurances of the Ethereum blockchain.

Accounts

The exchange operates under a two-tier account system.

• Funding Account: This serves as the user's primary onchain identity, dedicated exclusively to fund management. It acts as the gateway for the platform, processing all deposits, withdrawals, and external transfers to other users. To initiate trading, assets must be transferred internally from here to a linked trading account.
• Trading Account: These accounts are purpose-built for executing trades. A single Funding Account can be linked to multiple Trading Accounts (e.g., Funding Account A), allowing users to segment their trading activities. Users must fund these specific accounts individually to open positions.

ZKSync Atlas

The Atlas upgrade for the ZK Stack introduces technical improvements centered on transaction throughput (~15,000 TPS) and finality (~1 second). For Grvt, which operates as a ZK chain within this ecosystem, the upgrade addresses underlying limitations in current cross-chain liquidity models.

Capital Efficiency via Faster Finality

A persistent friction in L2s is the delay in bridging assets, which fragments liquidity between the base layer (Ethereum L1) and the execution layer (Ethereum L2).

Atlas aims to reduce this friction by enabling 1-second finality between ZK Stack chains and faster settlement paths to Ethereum. Reduced finality times allow for faster state synchronization between Ethereum and Grvt. This allows traders to utilize assets held on Ethereum L1 (or other ZK chains) as collateral on Grvt with significantly reduced lead times compared to optimistic rollup withdrawal periods (7 days) or standard bridge wait times. This minimizes the opportunity cost of capital for market makers and traders. In this model, Ethereum becomes the primary liquidity hub, allowing ZK chains to compose with Ethereum L1 from day one rather than incurring costs to bootstrap local liquidity.

Integration with Institutional-Grade Assets

As Liquid staking tokens (LSTs), Liquid restaking tokens (LRTs), and real-world assets (RWAs) are issued on ZK stack chains, interoperability becomes a key constraint. Atlas utilizes the Elastic Chain, a shared bridge that connects all ZK Chains, to facilitate asset transfers without the need for third-party intermediaries.

This infrastructure is particularly vital for RWAs. As institutional issuers increasingly choose to tokenize private credit, treasuries, and other RWAs on ZK stack chains to leverage their privacy and compliance features, the demand for secure and interoperable liquidity becomes paramount.

Assets issued on a distinct ZK Stack chain can be recognized and transferred to Grvt via the native bridge. Rather than requiring bespoke integrations for every new asset issuer, Grvt can theoretically support trading for any asset compatible with the ZK Stack standards. This simplifies the onboarding process for assets that originate on separate institutional chains. Assets are not only tradable on Grvt but can also be utilized as margin. This ensures that while a position is open, the underlying capital continues to accrue yield.

By leveraging Atlas to aggregate liquidity, Grvt positions itself as a unified cross-chain environment where these yield-bearing and institutional-grade assets can be deployed.

The Yield Flywheel

Grvt’s Yield Flywheel is a structural incentive model that enables traders to stack four concurrent revenue streams, maximizing capital efficiency. This flywheel combines a fixed 10% yield on active margin via Earn on Equity, rebates on limit orders through Negative Maker Fees, rewards from Referral Incentives, and delta-neutral returns using the GLP strategy. This allows users to generate yield regardless of whether funds are idle, actively traded, or providing liquidity.

Grvt Strategies

Traditional DeFi vaults offer non-custodial execution but typically mandate real-time transparency of strategy logic and positions. While this allows for auditability, it exposes managers to front-running and copy-trading, which can erode alpha.

Grvt attempts to mitigate these onchain constraints through a hybrid disclosure model that separates execution rights from custody through:

• Delayed Disclosure: To mitigate MEV and copy-trading risks, onchain position updates are subject to a four-hour latency. This delay intends to preserve the manager's execution edge while still providing investors with verifiable proof of solvency and activity, albeit not in real-time.
• Manager Verification: Unlike permissionless protocols, where strategy creators can remain anonymous, Grvt requires manager verification. This creates an identity layer for reputation tracking, intended to reduce the counterparty risk associated with anonymous smart contracts.
• Custodial Controls: The architecture is non-custodial regarding withdrawals; managers hold execution permissions to trade within defined parameters but cannot withdraw investor funds.

The platform supports a range of strategies, from quantitative rotations to delta-neutral yield farming. Managers are incentivized via a customizable fee structure (Management Fees up to 4%, Performance Fees up to 40%), aligning their upside directly with investor returns.

Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP)

GLP is Grvt’s flagship strategy, a community-owned, delta-neutral market-making vault designed to deliver stable, consistent returns. The vault is managed in partnership with Ampersan, a veteran trading team comprising former Optiver employees.

As a community-owned market-maker, there are no management or performance fees; 100% of the yield is distributed to depositors. Since its launch on Nov. 11, 2025, the GLP vault has experienced rapid uptake, reaching $8.4 million AUM in less than two months. At the time of writing, the vault boasts a 25.6% APR and an 11.4 Sharpe Ratio, underscoring exceptional risk-adjusted returns

Access to the vault is gated by a volume-based tiering system. A user’s maximum investment is capped based on their Lifetime Trading Volume. This encourages users to trade more on Grvt to unlock higher allocations in the GLP. The strategy maintains strict risk controls with a 2–7 day redemption period to manage liquidity flows.

• If your lifetime trading volume is between 0 and 10 thousand USDT
  • You can invest up to 10% of your total account equity. Your maximum single investment is 10 thousand USDT
• If your lifetime trading volume is between 10 thousand and 1 million USDT
  • You can invest up to 20% of your total account equity. Your maximum single investment is 20 thousand USDT
• If your lifetime trading volume is between 1 million and 10 million USDT
  • You can invest up to 30% of your total account equity. Your maximum single investment is 50 thousand USDT
• If your lifetime trading volume is between 10 million and 100 million USDT
  • You can invest up to 40% of your total account equity. Your maximum single investment is 100 thousand USDT
• If your lifetime trading volume is between 100 million and 250 million USDT
  • You can invest up to 50% of your total account equity. Your maximum single investment is 250 thousand USDT
• If your lifetime trading volume is above 250 million USDT
  • You can invest up to 60% of your total account equity. Your maximum single investment is 500 thousand USDT

Other vaults consist of a diverse range of institutional-grade and community-led strategies:

Professionally Managed Strategies

• Silentist BALANCE: A crypto asset manager delivering an equally split basket of mean-reversion and trend strategies backed by top Korean VCs.
• AllDeFi Quant Directional Strategy: A premier alpha strategy provider led by seasoned quantitative traders from a top crypto fund with a more than seven-year track record. Bringing institutional-grade expertise to DeFi, the team has maintained a 15–50% APR from arbitrage and momentum strategies over a 5-year period.

Community Strategies

• Rogue Trader Discretionary: Managed by the Rogue Traders, a group of professional, full-time traders who run a BTC Options Hedge Fund and a trading academy. The team has nearly 25 years of experience across derivatives, futures, equities trading, FX structuring, and software development.
• Fisher8 Vault: A family office with over seven years of experience in the crypto space, Fisher8 focuses on directional mean reversion bets and delta-neutral market making. They consistently ranked in the Top three on the Bybit weekly and monthly leaderboards throughout 2024.
• AI Grid Trading Strategy (Gridy.ai): A systematic approach that blends AI’s capability to analyze market context for high-level directional decisions with the quantitative precision of grid trading.
• AI Alpha Strategy: A VASP-regulated AI quantitative platform that democratizes access to sophisticated trading tools. This strategy brings hedge fund-grade algorithms to everyday users.
• Directional Bitcoin Meerkat: A sentiment-based directional strategy for Bitcoin. This approach generates both short-term and long-term price predictions by analyzing datasets that reflect market participant sentiment (bullish vs. bearish). By leveraging these sentiment factors, which are often highly correlated with future price changes, the strategy executes calculated long and short positions.
• ProjectBTC - Liquidity Cycle Protocol: Primarily targeting BTC and ETH perps, this protocol emphasizes a rules-based trading approach with strict risk controls and transparent reporting.

Earn on Equity

“Earn on Equity” is a mechanism designed to minimize the opportunity cost typically associated with holding collateral on exchanges. By offering a 10% annualized return on active trading equity, Grvt addresses the tradeoff between dormant capital sitting in margin accounts and yield-bearing assets in DeFi protocols, a core inefficiency in crypto market structure.

Unlike standard yield products that require assets to be locked or moved to isolated savings pools, this feature applies directly to funds available for trading, including active margin and unrealized P&L. This ensures that capital retains its optionality; traders do not need to unwind positions or sacrifice liquidity to generate yield. Interest is compounded every four hours and paid out weekly, lowering the cost of capital for active market participants.

Yield eligibility is tied to platform activity. Increased usage allows you to earn rewards on a larger portion of your balance. To ensure sustained liquidity and engagement, usage stats reset every four weeks. This "streak" mechanic prevents the program from becoming a passive drain on the protocol's treasury.

Instead, it compels continuous engagement, requiring users to actively requalify for their yield caps on a monthly basis. This yield applies strictly to Trading Account equity; funds held in Funding Accounts or allocated to Strategies (like GLP) are excluded to prevent double-dipping on yield.

Negative Maker Fees

Grvt inverts the traditional DEX revenue model by introducing Negative Maker Fees across all user tiers, a mechanism typically reserved for high-frequency institutional desks. Instead of charging users to provide liquidity, Grvt pays a rebate on every limit order, effectively turning the order book into a revenue stream for the entire user base, not just "whales."

Initially, this was a fixed rebate of 1 basis point. In October 2025, the exchange transitioned to a tiered model that balances retail accessibility with long-term protocol health. Unlike competitors that require millions in volume to unlock rebates, Level 1 users (0 volume) immediately qualify for negative maker fees, starting at -0.0001%. As traders scale, rebates deepen, reaching -0.003% for Level 9 VIPs, rewarding those who contribute the most significant depth to the order book. This democratizes market making, enabling everyday traders to offset their costs or even generate a profit by providing liquidity on the exchange.

Referral incentives

Grvt utilizes a performance-based referral model that rewards users based on the activity of their direct referrals. The protocol dedicates 20% of the weekly points allocation to incentivize user referrals. These points will be used to airdrop the platform’s token to its users (discussed later in the “Airdrop and TGE” section)

To determine the points received for referrer, Grvt tracks the total points earned by a user's Direct Referrals across all categories (trading volume, TVL, and Open Interest). These points are summed to create a unique "Referral Score" for the referrer, effectively mirroring the aggregate activity of their invitees. Users are then ranked globally based on this cumulative score, and the 20% pool is distributed proportionally according to this ranking. A referrer’s earnings are not determined by the number of people they invite, but by the number of points those invitees generate.

Market Performance

From Jan. 8 to Dec. 5, 2025, TVL increased from $9.3 million to $48.8 million, a gain of 427.1%. Over the same period, daily perp volume rose from $46.8 million to roughly $1.3 billion, an increase of 2,688.7%.

Two catalysts that fueled this momentum were the announcement of Series A fundraising and the launch of the Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP). In the month following the Series A announcement on Sept. 18, TVL increased 145.9% from $8.19 million to $20.8 million, while daily perp volume grew 726.7% from $114.60 million to $947.34 million. Since the Nov. 11 launch of the Grvt liquidity provider, TVL has increased 61.7% from $30.2 million to $48.8 million, and perp volume has grown 47.8% from $882.63 million to $1.30 billion.

Retail Price Improvements

In a first for the DeFi landscape, Grvt has implemented Retail Price Improvement (RPI) orders, a mechanism adapted from traditional equity markets (such as the NYSE’s Retail Liquidity Program) designed to shield retail traders from predatory algorithmic flow while lowering execution costs.

In typical crypto order books, market makers must quote wider spreads to protect themselves against "toxic" flow, arbitrage bots and high-frequency traders (HFTs) that snipe stale prices. Because market makers cannot distinguish between a retail user and a sophisticated bot, they price liquidity defensively for everyone, forcing retail users to overpay.

Grvt’s RPI mechanism addresses this by enabling market makers to post more aggressive, tighter quotes that are exclusively accessible to non-algorithmic (UI) traders. RPI orders can only interact with orders placed via the Grvt frontend. API-based algorithmic traders are blocked from accessing this liquidity pool. These orders are also hidden from the public API data feeds to prevent gaming by HFT. When a retail trader places a market order, the matching engine automatically checks for RPI liquidity. If a selected market maker has provided a price better than the standard order book, the trade executes against the RPI order. This ensures that retail users consistently receive price improvement inside the spread without needing to toggle complex settings.

Airdrop and TGE

Grvt is preparing for its Token Generation Event (TGE) in 2026. In preparation for this milestone, the protocol has expanded its total Community Airdrop allocation from 20% to 22% of the total supply. This increase is designed to accommodate new users entering during Season 2 without diluting the allocations earned by early adopters in Season 1.

The distribution is bifurcated into two distinct phases:

Season 1: The Legacy Framework (10% Allocation)

This tranche, which concluded on September 22, 2025, rewards the protocol's earliest participants (Genesis & Early Mainnet). Unlike the unified system of Season 2, Season 1 utilized a complex Multi-Point System divided into three specific reward categories:

• Ecosystem Reward (Invite-to-Earn): Designed to bootstrap the network, this vertical rewarded users for viral growth.
  • Genesis Phase: Users earned fixed points for waitlist invites (10 points per direct invite and 2 points per indirect invite).
  • Mainnet Phase: Incentives shifted from raw signups to referral volume, rewarding quality over quantity. Users earned 1 point for every 1 USDT traded through direct invites and 1 point for every 10 USDT traded through indirect invites.
• Trader Reward (Trade-to-Earn): This category rewarded users based on their contributions to protocol revenue rather than just volume. Points were calculated using a "Fees Paid" metric.
• Liquidity Provider Reward (Quote-to-Earn): Focused on order book health, this reward incentivized market makers for quoting depth. Scores were derived not just from order size, but from spread tightness, rewarding those who provided competitive bid/ask quotes within a specific depth.

Season 2: The Unified Growth Campaign (12% Allocation)

This phase simplifies the legacy model into a Single Point System, replacing the distinct three reward categories above with a unified "Grvt Point." Season 2 is currently live and expected to continue until the token generation event in 2026.

The total number of points distributed weekly is not fixed. Instead, it correlates with the exchange’s total trading volume. This prevents early users from being disproportionately diluted by new volume while incentivizing protocol growth.

Season 2 points are allocated weekly based on a strict activity matrix designed to incentivize genuine market depth and retail participation. Notably, UI-based trades earn more than API trades, and Taker volume is weighted higher than Maker volume to encourage aggressive price discovery.

To prevent metric gaming (e.g., flash depositing before a deadline), Grvt employs a randomized snapshot mechanism. TVL and Open Interest scores are calculated using the average of multiple random snapshots taken throughout the week, ensuring rewards reflect sustained liquidity provision rather than momentary deposits.

Closing Summary

By leveraging the ZKsync ZK Stack and a private Validium architecture, Grvt serves as a high-performance market layer for Ethereum. It delivers the execution speed (600,000 TPS) and privacy of a centralized entity while maintaining the trustless settlement and secure composability of a DEX.

The Atlas upgrade marks a pivotal shift in this architecture, introducing unified liquidity and margin to enable unprecedented capital efficiency across diverse assets and chains. While today Grvt offers institutional-grade perps and strategies, its broader mission is to serve as an accessible platform for privacy-preserving wealth management.

By allowing users worldwide to trade, earn, and invest across diverse products, Grvt is positioned to become an onchain wealth management platform that facilitates seamless interoperability across assets and ZK Stack chains.