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

In that era, trading still relied on physical space. But soon, computer terminals began to replace the shouting in trading halls. In 1981, a trader named Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers, and with a $10 million severance package, he founded a company aimed at making financial data transparent and instantaneous. He succeeded.

The Bloomberg terminal allowed traders to sit in offices for the first time and see real-time scrolling market quotes. Finance began to shift from the privilege of a few to a standardized flow of information.

By the 1990s, the proliferation of the internet pushed this revolution to a peak, drastically reducing the cost of serving clients. Companies like E*Trade and Charles Schwab enabled ordinary people to place stock orders from home for the first time, with trading commissions dropping from tens of dollars per trade to single digits. The threshold for finance was drastically lowered.

Now, forty years later, the technological pioneers of the past have themselves become huge traditional forces. And a new disruptor is stepping from the crypto world into the traditional world. This time, what it intends to change is something more fundamental than trading itself—capital efficiency.

The Predicament of the Trillion-Dollar Casino

By 2025, the global trading volume of crypto derivatives reached $85.7 trillion. Just in the Perp DEX market, it generated $7.9 trillion in trades. Of the total revenue generated by the entire cryptocurrency market in a year, 15% came from this rapidly spinning roulette wheel. Perpetual contracts are one of the most profitable businesses in this industry.

Grvt emerged from this casino. Launched in January 2025, it accumulated a trading volume of $177 billion in just a few months, consistently ranking fifth to tenth in the global Perp DEX trading volume rankings. Monthly trading volume growth once reached 352%, and the growth rate of open contracts reached 1601%.

On the capital table, it also secured $34 million in investments from top institutions like Hack VC, Delphi Ventures, Further Ventures, ZKSync, and EigenLayer.

However, this casino itself is facing a crisis.

It is well known that nine out of ten gamblers lose. On-chain data shows that on Hyperliquid, as many as 86% of traders are losing. A few winners eat away at the initial capital of the majority; this is not sustainable.

A product that leads the vast majority of users to lose money consistently will inevitably face continuous user attrition. The casino needs a new story; beyond speculation, there must be true value anchors.

Thus, everyone's gaze turned to the tokenization of real-world assets. Bringing things like U.S. Treasuries, stocks, and commodities—items that are understandable and tangible—on-chain to transform them into 24/7 tradable digital certificates. Giants like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have already rushed in. By the end of 2025, the total market size of on-chain RWAs has exceeded $35 billion, and according to Boston Consulting Group's predictions, this figure will reach $16 trillion by 2030.

This migration has also changed the rules of the game for perpetual contracts.

In October 2025, Hyperliquid launched the HIP-3 standard, allowing anyone to deploy perpetual contract markets on its platform for any asset, including gold, oil, stocks, and even geopolitical indices, theoretically making any of these tradable targets.

In February 2026, Ondo Finance announced the launch of Ondo Perps, enabling global non-U.S. users to trade perpetual contracts for stocks like Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla directly. Kraken also announced the launch of the world's first regulated tokenized stock perpetual contracts in the same month.

This is a significant direction; perpetual contracts are evolving from a "crypto casino" into a true global asset allocation tool.

But there is a contradiction that almost everyone is avoiding.

Existing perpetual contract platforms have a fatal capital efficiency flaw: they only accept stablecoins as margin. This means that if you hold tokenized Apple stocks and want to hedge risks or leverage, you still have to prepare a separate amount of stablecoins to act as margin.

So, who will provide the underlying account system that can link all assets together?

From Goldman Sachs to On-Chain: The Answer from a Group of "Rebels"

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

Before founding Grvt, he spent over a decade as an executive director at Goldman Sachs and also worked as a trader at Credit Suisse. Someone with this background can see clearly the weaknesses of traditional finance. He has gathered around him a group of similarly minded rebels: CTO Aaron Ong, from Meta, who was responsible for designing the data privacy framework; COO Matthew Quek, from Singapore's DBS Bank and government tech departments, who has worked extensively in blockchain and payment systems.

This group was not assembled to create another Binance or Coinbase. What they want to do is bring something that has existed on Wall Street for decades into the crypto space. This thing is called a "prime broker."

A prime broker serves as the logistics department for hedge funds. Top investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley provide comprehensive services to major clients like Bridgewater and Renaissance Technologies, including trade execution, financing, clearing, risk management, etc. Hedge funds only need one account to long, short, and leverage in global markets, switching seamlessly. Every dollar of their money operates efficiently.

But today’s crypto world is extremely fragmented. Your Bitcoin is on exchange A, your Ethereum is in wallet B, and your stablecoins are earning interest in protocol C. You want to use Bitcoin as collateral to trade Ethereum perpetual contracts, while still wanting to benefit from your stablecoins. Sorry, that’s not possible. You must jump back and forth between three platforms, and each switch incurs a capital loss—hammering your fees, time cost, and visible yet ungraspable returns.

Grvt refers to this loss as "capital drag." This is precisely the core pain point they aim to solve.

In simpler terms, while Charles Schwab broke Wall Street's information barriers with the internet, allowing ordinary people to buy stocks for the first time; Robinhood eliminated trading thresholds with zero commissions, allowing retail investors to play options. Grvt aims to create the next-generation broker in the on-chain world, replicating the prime brokerage model of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on-chain, making the capital efficiency tools that only top hedge funds could enjoy available to everyone. This is something that has never been achieved before.

Their solution can be distilled into a single term: "on-chain prime broker." And the core weapon for achieving this goal is called "unified margin."

This is a concept that sounds simple but is extremely complex to implement. It means that all the assets you hold in Grvt, whether Bitcoin, stablecoins, or future tokenized U.S. Treasuries and stocks, exist within a unified balance. The money in this balance can simultaneously serve multiple purposes: acting as trading margin to open long or short perpetual contracts; generating up to 11% annual returns through integration with DeFi lending protocols; and even if the Bitcoin you posted as collateral appreciates, you will still enjoy the benefits of the price increase.

Your money has finally learned "multiple shadow duplication."

Grvt attempts to compress the actions of trading, asset management, and investment—originally disparate—into one account, one balance, one interface. But there is another problem; Grvt is not just building a better exchange; its ambition is to create a full-stack financial platform for institutional users, which means it must simultaneously meet the rigor of institutional-level risk control and auditing while providing a zero-threshold user experience, seeming contradictory.

Grvt's solution is to embed "institutional-level" features into the underlying architecture of its products, rather than treating it as an independent threshold. Its risk management system operates on dual tracks, featuring a real-time risk engine off-chain and an automatic liquidation mechanism via smart contracts on-chain. The flagship strategy provided by its strategy market boasts a Sharpe ratio of 11.97, a figure that even most traditional hedge funds find hard to reach.

So, does this seemingly beautiful system technically work? How does it solve the trust issue looming over all centralized exchanges?

Making Trust Computable

Grvt’s answer lies in a hybrid model combined with zero-knowledge proofs. You can think of it as a front desk operating at high speed with absolute security in the back. Your trade orders are matched on Grvt's off-chain servers. There is no congestion or high gas fees from the blockchain here; the speed can reach sub-millisecond levels, making it indistinguishable from placing an order on the NYSE. This is the experience of a CEX.

However, all aspects involving asset transfer and settlement must return to the chain and be completed within a zero-knowledge proof system called Validium. This is a safe based on ZKsync technology. Grvt will also use this mathematical method of zero-knowledge proofs to prove to the world that each settlement is accurate while completely ensuring that your transaction details remain undisclosed. Your money always stays in your own wallet; no one can touch it.

This combination of institutional-level compliance and on-chain self-custody is extremely rare in the entire Perp DEX space. Most DEXs either follow a purely on-chain route, sacrificing compliance; or follow the CEX path, sacrificing self-custody. Grvt has chosen a path that is tougher but also wider.

In terms of compliance, it strictly applies regulatory-grade standards to itself, consistently undergoing professional audits to ensure that the platform meets the transparency and security levels of regulated entities, actively keeping up with compliance dynamics in major jurisdictions worldwide to prepare adequately for the future.

Spinning the Flywheel: Aave Partnership and the 2026 Roadmap

At the end of February 2026, Grvt announced a partnership with Aave. As the largest lending protocol in the DeFi world, Aave has a net deposit scale exceeding $40 billion, accounting for about 60% of the DeFi lending market share. The core of this partnership is to directly embed Aave's lending returns into the trading margins of Grvt users. Your stablecoins in Grvt, while waiting for trading opportunities, will automatically be routed to Aave to earn up to 11% annual returns. When you need to open a position, this money will be immediately withdrawn from Aave, becoming your margin. The entire process is completely transparent to users and requires no manual operation.

Aave's founder Stani Kulechov stated in the announcement of this partnership: "Stablecoins that do not earn yields represent an opportunity cost for traders." This collaboration aims to reduce this opportunity cost to zero.

This is the first key gear in Grvt's 2026 roadmap. The entire roadmap is divided into four layers, resembling a compounding flywheel that builds layer upon layer:

The first layer is Earn. The core is unified margin and prime broker lending, with Grvt establishing a bridge connecting funding parties and trading parties. The platform allows traders to use 20% of their own funds to leverage 80% through platform loans. At the same time, the system sets the trader's own funds as a cushion so that in the event of a loss, the trader's own money is lost first. This mechanism creates a positive feedback loop between Earn and Trade: more traders generate more lending demand, providing higher returns for depositors.

The second layer is Trade. Grvt will expand the targets for perpetual contracts from cryptocurrencies to global stocks, forex, and commodities. It will also launch a spot market, where in the first phase, professional market makers will provide deep liquidity, while in the second phase, a community-driven listing mechanism will allow anyone to stake funds to propose new trading pairs, with the community voting on whether to list.

The third layer is Invest. Grvt will expand its strategy market, enabling institutional fund managers, professional traders, and even AI algorithms to act as wealth advisors on the platform. Users can entrust their funds to these strategies and enjoy the returns.

The fourth layer is Pay. It will integrate P2P payments and fiat deposits/withdrawals, allowing users' crypto assets to be used as conveniently as money in a regular bank account.

These four layers form a tightly interlocking system. Grvt describes this logic like this: unified margin increases lending efficiency, lending creates more productive deposits, which attract more capital, deeper liquidity enhances execution quality, and better execution attracts more traders, thereby generating further lending demand.

On March 12, 2026, Grvt disclosed key details of its tokenomics plan, including the distribution details, purposes, and distribution mechanisms for the $GRVT token. Users holding $GRVT will enjoy lower fees in perpetual contracts, spot markets, and payment layers, receive higher bonuses on DeFi yields, and gain access to platform revenue sharing and priority access to new markets.

Conclusion

Forty years ago, the technological revolution broke down the islands of information and reshaped Wall Street. Forty years later, Grvt aims to break down the islands of capital using the model of the on-chain prime broker.

Starting from the highest frequency, most chaotic battleground of perpetual contracts, addressing the stubborn issues of capital efficiency with unified margin, then resolving trust issues with zero-knowledge proofs and self-custody, ultimately extending its reach into stocks, forex, and commodities of the broader real-world assets.

This is no longer a story about speculative trading; it is a story about assets. The future of finance does not belong to those who build more islands but to those who can connect all islands into a continent.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。