Introduction

How Crypto Became a Market That Expanded by Breaking Apart

Crypto scaled volume and participation without scaling market unity. Structural expansion outpaced liquidity unification, resulting in markets that grew larger and more active, yet remained isolated across different chains, protocols, and ecosystems.

Evolution of Perpetual Markets - Source: Memento Research

Perpetual markets evolved through four distinct phases, each expanding market capability without converging into a unified structure. CEX dominance delivered deep and efficient markets, but liquidity remained opaque and structurally fragile. Early on-chain designs broadened access and transparency, yet liquidity reorganized into isolated, protocol-level pools rather than a shared market.

As Ethereum gas costs rose, builders expanded across alternative chains to escape cost constraints, accelerating ecosystem growth while dispersing activity across networks. High-performance chains then pushed execution speed and throughput forward, anchoring activity within closed ecosystems rather than resolving fragmentation. Across all of these phases, the pattern remained the same: crypto solved performance locally, but never solved liquidity globally.

Grvt’s Core Thesis: Battle-Tested Perpetuals Powering Accessible On-chain Wealth

Grvt (pronounced "gravity") positions itself at the intersection of a structural shift from fragmented capital pools to single, composable home for on-chain capital. The platform launched with perpetual futures that delivered CeFi-grade speed with DeFi-grade transparency, proving institutional execution could work on-chain without sacrificing self-custody or verifiable settlement. But perpetuals were only the beginning.

The vision: enable wealth to build itself intelligently. If unified liquidity enables cohesive markets, then the next evolution isn't just better trading venues. It's a complete financial ecosystem where users can seamlessly bank, trade, and invest within a single capital-efficient architecture. Grvt's battle-tested infrastructure now evolves into accessible on-chain wealth putting institutional-grade savings, investments, and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) within reach. What was exclusive becomes available. On-chain wealth infrastructure for savings, investments, and RWA products, open to everyone.

Report Overview

On-chain finance is entering the era of unified capital systems. Grvt is built as an on-chain wealth platform where savings, investment, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), and trading converge. This report will cover:

• Grvt’s Architecture and Core Design Principles: An in-depth look at the architectural foundations and design principles underpinning the platform.

• Grvt’s Product Stack:  An overview of the core products, savings, investment, and trading, and how they compose into a single on-chain wealth experience, with deeper liquidity and execution quality as the foundation underneath.

• Performance Metrics: Highlights key indicators of accelerating traction, strengthening market position, and growing confidence in the underlying architecture.

• Team Expertise & Accreditation: A review of leadership, institutional experience, and external validation from strategic partners and investors.

• Forward Outlook: An examination of the roadmap and strategic priorities as the platform expands beyond perpetuals toward a broader, capital-efficient trading and wealth infrastructure.

Grvt’s Architecture and Core Design Principles

Ethereum’s Visa Moment: Why ZKsync’s Atlas Enables Unified Liquidity

It is evident that Ethereum has scaled significantly in recent years, but liquidity remains deeply fragmented. ZKsync is Ethereum’s ZK-proof scaling framework, and its Atlas upgrade aims to do for liquidity what Visa did for isolated bank networks: unify it. Atlas provides the technical foundation for Ethereum to evolve from a collection of disconnected chains into a unified liquidity network.

Ethereum’s Visa Moment - Source: Memento Research, Alex | ZKsync X

What Visa did for payments, Atlas does for liquidity. Its shared proof and settlement layer connects liquidity across the network without bridges, so capital can move and settle instantly and pools that were once siloed can share depth. This is Ethereum's infrastructure finally catching up to its ambition.

How Atlas Unlocks Network-Wide Liquidity Unification

Before Atlas, application-specific chains scaled independently, each optimized for its own use case. While this enabled high-throughput and specialized performance, it came with a key limitation: state and liquidity remained constrained, with each chain operating in relative isolation.

Atlas addresses this by upgrading the architecture with four core components that make network-wide liquidity unification possible:

1. 15,000+ TPS Sequencer handles massive throughput at the network level. 

2. 1-second ZK Finality (Airbender) proves each block in approximately one second and commits it to the ZKsync Gateway, reducing proving costs to as low as $0.0001 per transfer.

3. Ultra-Low Proving Costs make frequent settlements economically viable at scale. 

4. Native Interoperability Without Bridges uses one-second ZK finality to enable seamless transfers across ZKsync chains without relying on external bridges, making funds usable on the destination chain immediately after proof verification.

Airbender’s Potential - Source: Memento Research, ZKSync

Together, these components transform ZKsync from a collection of independently scaling chains into a unified network where state and liquidity remain synchronized and verifiable. Grvt launched as the first application-specific chain within ZKsync's Hyperchain ecosystem, positioning itself to benefit from this architecture as ZKsync’s shared-liquidity vision matures. The aim is not just a faster Grvt, but a more coherent liquidity network for it to grow into.

Principles Guiding Grvt’s Architecture

With ZKsync providing the infrastructure foundation, it is important to first outline the principles that guide how Grvt is built before turning to its architectural design. These four principles reflect Grvt’s vision of enabling wealth to build itself intelligently and shape how the platform operates as it evolves from perpetuals into a more complete financial ecosystem.

1. Accessibility for Everyone: A principle focused on expanding on-chain access to sophisticated financial capabilities such as portfolio construction, risk-managed strategies, yield products, and capital-efficient financial services.

2. Unmatched Transparency: Every trade, settlement, and position is verifiable on-chain. Users maintain self-custody while trust is enforced through smart contracts rather than opaque intermediaries.

3. Effortless Simplicity: Complexity exists in the architecture, not the interface. Grvt simplifies access to advanced investments and trading tools, allowing users to deploy capital easily without dealing with protocol fragmentation or technical complexity.

4. Intelligent Empowerment: Products are designed to help users deploy capital more effectively, amplifying decision-making through automated strategies, curated opportunities, and integrated tools.

Grvt’s Hybrid Architecture

The Hybrid Advantage

Grvt's architecture combines CeFi-grade execution speed with DeFi-grade security, creating a hybrid model that delivers institutional performance without sacrificing transparency or self-custody. This approach sets Grvt apart through four key structural advantages:

Off-Chain Performance Engine

Grvt's performance begins off-chain, where speed and responsiveness are maximized without compromising eventual verifiability. All user actions are initially processed by Grvt's servers, delivering the execution speed users expect from centralized exchanges.

Non-fund-related actions, such as interface interactions, remain fully off-chain. These operations require no blockchain settlement and can be handled entirely within Grvt's infrastructure for optimal user experience.

Fund-impacting actions are prepared off-chain and then forwarded to the Grvt chain for verification and settlement. This includes order matching, liquidation events, account management, and fund management. Performance is optimized off-chain. Correctness is enforced on-chain. By processing these operations off-chain first, Grvt achieves CeFi-grade execution while maintaining the ability to verify and settle critical actions on-chain.

On-Chain Settlement & Verification

A subset of off-chain actions is submitted to the Grvt chain and published as zero-knowledge proofs. These proofs verify the correctness of off-chain activity before final settlement, ensuring that performance optimization never compromises security or transparency.

Off-Chain Execution with On-Chain ZK-Proven Settlement - Source: Memento Research, ZKsync

On-chain validation covers four critical categories of fund-impacting actions: trade settlement, risk validation, account validation, and fund settlement. Each category enforces specific rules through smart contract logic, creating a verifiable audit trail for all operations that touch user capital. What executes fast off-chain must settle correctly on-chain.

The architecture solves a problem that has plagued crypto markets since inception: choosing between speed and trust. Speed without verification is reckless. Verification without speed is impractical. Grvt delivers both: high-performance execution and on-chain verification.

Builder Codes: Designed to Be Built On

Grvt’s infrastructure is designed not just to be used, but to be built on. Builder Codes enables developers to create custom trading frontends, tools, and applications on top of Grvt's high-performance stack while earning direct fees on the trades they generate. The model is simple: route orders through Grvt, capture a share of the revenue.

But the deeper logic is structural. It works by amplifying the platform through externalised distribution, where every builder channels their own users and order flow, yet all of it settles into the same shared orderbook. More flow means deeper liquidity, tighter spreads, and a thicker book. Better market dynamics attract more traders, which draws more builders, which deepens liquidity further. The cycle compounds with every new builder.

Integration with ZKsync Atlas provides developers with direct access to Ethereum's liquidity layer while maintaining the speed and cost efficiency of ZK-rollups. Early adopters are already building: launch partners like Tealstreet, Tread.fi, CCXT, PADT, GridyAI, and Trebuchet Network are spearheading new ways to interact with DeFi. This isn't just a feature. It's the foundation of an open ecosystem, built collaboratively from day one.

The Vision: On-chain Wealth for Everyone

Grvt's hybrid architecture, combined with ZKsync Atlas network-wide liquidity unification, creates a robust foundation for next-generation on-chain finance. The platform delivers lightning-fast execution, unmatched capital efficiency, and a seamless user experience, allowing Grvt to support next-generation markets today while progressively expanding into full on-chain wealth stack, default savings yield, branded tokenized RWA investments, and trading in a single account. Designed to scale seamlessly and empower sophisticated users, this architecture positions Grvt to capture and lead the evolution of on-chain financial services.

The perpetual platform proves the model works. From this foundation, Grvt expands into a complete financial ecosystem where users maintain control over their capital while accessing sophisticated tools and services once exclusive to private banking clients. With the infrastructure in place and the ecosystem taking shape, the next phase focuses on on-chain wealth products that bring private-banking-grade access to a broader audience.

Grvt’s Product Stack

Grvt’s product suite is designed as an integrated, capital-efficiency-first system that drives capital inflows, usage, and yield growth. Each product supports the Grvt flywheel, where every action reinforces the next. Yield routes deploy capital across trading, liquidity provision, and strategy execution, while complementary products amplify engagement and deepen market depth. This solves the cold-start problem that plagues fragmented protocols, the “no liquidity, no users” trap that prevents ecosystems from gaining traction. The result is a self-reinforcing growth loop where activity deepens markets, deeper markets attract users, and more users generate sustainable yields.

Below is an overview of Grvt's four core products and their key features.

Earn on Equity

Earn on Equity began as Grvt’s experiment in capital efficiency:  the world's first way to earn up to 11% annual interest on trading equity through a task-based rewards program, transforming how capital works while deployed on the platform. Powered by the Grvt’s Yield Layer, this dedicated infrastructure routes idle margin capital across multiple yield sources, starting with Aave. It tested how much users value capital efficiency and the appetite was clear. Grvt’s Earn on Equity is now moving to the next stage: yield by default, where USDT earns a 3.5% base APR on a user’s full account (funding and trading combined).

Earn on Equity Value Added - Source: Memento Research

Interest will be calculated every four hours and is paid out weekly, creating a continuous yield stream. The unique aspect: traders can use their funds as margin in active trades and earn interest simultaneously on their total equity, including deposits, margin, and unrealized PnL. A portion of this yield is sourced from Aave lending markets, one of DeFi's most established protocols, with platform fees and base-yield revenue from these L1 treasury deployments funding the rate. In doing so, the yield layer takes an innovative approach by drawing directly from one of DeFi's most scalable lending markets.

The result is a single balance that remains continuously yielding and always available for trading, with margin allocated and returned seamlessly as trades are opened and closed, requiring no manual management. There is no lock-up period, allowing users to withdraw or reallocate funds at any time while maintaining full flexibility.

Users can activate up to 11% APY through participation mechanics, where completing 5 trades within a 4-week cycle unlocks 3.5% APY, while inviting an eligible friend and meeting target trading volume unlocks an additional 7.5% APY. The high-APY narrative now lives in Grvt’s opt-in RWA investment vaults, which target 9% to 12%, while the default yield provides a dependable base rate of reliability with deposits already rehypothecated as trading collateral. Your trading balance doesn't just sit there. It works for you.

Grvt Invest

Grvt Invest brings the platform’s investment products into one place: a flagship in-house strategy, a marketplace of curated third-party strategies, and institutional-grade real-world assets, all accessible from a low minimum and composable with the rest of a user’s balance.

Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP): Flagship Liquidity Strategy

GLP is a community-owned, delta-neutral market-making strategy designed to deliver stable and consistent returns. The product captures spread and funding with minimal directional exposure, managed professionally by an experienced team with over 40 years of combined experience in market-making and liquidity provision.

GLP’s Performance - Source: Memento Research, Grvt GLP

Performance highlights demonstrate GLP’s effectiveness as a liquidity engine. Ahead of launch, GLP was battle-tested over a six-month live trading period, delivering 48% APR with a 7.6 Sharpe ratio. The product attracted $1.8 million in AUM on its first day, signaling immediate market interest. As of writing, it now manages around $20 million in AUM, reflecting growing user confidence and sustained capital commitment, with current yields of 15.84% APY and a 12.64 Sharpe ratio. GLP’s ability to maintain performance will be closely watched as an indicator of long-term sustainability.

Curated RWA Bundles

Alongside managed strategies, Grvt Invest opens access to branded, institutional-grade real-world assets including tokenized treasury, credit, and fund products from issuers users already recognize. Grvt packages these into simple, curated bundles. 

The Balanced Bundle targets 4.5% APY on BlackRock’s AAA-rated CLO ETF. The Opportunistic Bundle targets an 11% APY through FX-hedged Brazilian card receivables via BlackOpal's LiquidStone II, with payments settled through Visa and Mastercard. Both bundles are available from $1 with no accreditation required, whereas access to comparable institutional investments has typically required minimum investments of $100,000 and qualified-investor status. Looking ahead, RWA vault tokens will be usable as trading collateral, and instant liquidity for exits is also planned.

Beyond the flagship GLP vault, Grvt Invest operates as a peer-to-peer, on-chain marketplace for community strategies, including those managed by professional traders, retail strategists, and AI-driven strategies. The platform is non-custodial, with on-chain performance tracking and smart contract-based execution. Together, the flagship strategy, community managers, and institutional RWAs make Grvt Invest a single venue where institutional-grade investing starts at $1, with expanded composability planned for the future.

Retail Price Improvement (RPI) Orders

Retail Price Improvement (RPI) comes on-chain, adapting a proven traditional finance feature to deliver better execution prices in decentralized markets. RPI matches retail orders with competitive quotes from market makers, helping users achieve better pricing and fairer trades. The system operates fully on-chain and automatically, ensuring transparency while users retain complete control of their funds. This essentially translates to better on-chain pricing without compromising custody or transparency.

Performance Metrics

Quantitative Proof of Traction

The following metrics illustrate Grvt's performance and reflect its accelerating growth across key dimensions of exchange activity:

Perpetual Trading Volume

Grvt’s Perpetual Trading Volume - Source: Memento Research, DefiLlama

As of March 2026, Grvt has generated $235 billion in cumulative perpetual trading volume, capping one of its strongest quarters since launch. Recent activity remains robust, with $38 billion over the past 30 days, $9 billion over the past 7 days as of writing.

The growth trajectory is clear. Monthly volumes were at minimal levels in early 2025 but have since scaled significantly, averaging around $30 billion in recent months. This consistency indicates healthy liquidity and sustained trader engagement, signaling growing trust in Grvt's hybrid architecture.

Total Value Locked (TVL)

Grvt’s TVL - Source: Memento Research, DefiLlama

Grvt currently peaked $112.5 million in TVL in March, reflecting substantial capital committed to the platform's ecosystem. This is up from $15 million at the time of the Atlas launch in October 2025, representing roughly a 7.5× increase.  More than a liquidity figure, this peak is a direct validation of Grvt’s capital-efficiency hypothesis: when yield is made native to trading capital, users commit more and leave it on-platform longer.

Savings & Investment Traction

Traction is becoming more visible on the wealth side, not just in trading. Even as incentive-driven flows have declined, most of the remaining capital continues to be deployed rather than sitting idle: roughly 76% of Grvt’s TVL is allocated to yield-bearing positions, including Aave, staked GHO (sGHO), and Aave-supplied USDT (aETHUSDT). 

Grvt TVL composition, roughly 76% held in yield-bearing Aave positions (sGHO and aEthUSDT) - Source: DeFiLlama

Interest in institutional RWA products is also beginning to emerge, with the Opportunistic bundle on the Grvt Invest app attracting around $500K toward its $1M capacity. While still modest in absolute terms, it suggests that a portion of capital is being allocated based on product demand rather than short-term incentives.

Open Interest

Grvt’s Exchange Open Interest - Source: Memento Research, CoinGecko

Grvt maintains close to $500 million in open interest across its perpetual markets as of writing, with positions distributed across several major assets including BTC, ETH, XRP, and many more. The diversity of open interest demonstrates broad market engagement beyond single-asset concentration. Strong open interest signals committed capital and deeper market participation, reinforcing Grvt's positioning as an active derivatives venue where capital is deployed with conviction across multiple markets.

That breadth increasingly extends beyond crypto. Alongside majors like BTC, ETH, and XRP, Grvt has been expanding into tokenized real-world-asset perpetuals, commodities, equities, and ETFs, listed with usable liquidity from day one. As tokenized RWAs become the second-fastest-growing sector in Web3, and with most perp DEXs only beginning to explore assets such as oil, Grvt is positioning itself as a leading venue for tokenized commodity, equity, and ETF perpetuals, a fast-growing frontier where few competitors yet operate at scale.

Top 10 Ranking in Perpetual Markets

Grvt is listed as a top 10 perpetual exchange on DefiLlama. This placement strengthens Grvt’s credibility and indicates growing competitiveness relative to more established perpetual trading platforms. Achieving this position suggests that the platform is gaining traction in a crowded market landscape. The ranking serves as an external benchmark of Grvt’s relative standing among its peers.

A Breakout That Signals Structural Fit

Grvt’s Growth Post-Atlas Announcement - Source: Memento Research, DefiLlama

In late 2025, Grvt's perpetual trading volume rose 366%. User activity increased following the announcement of Grvt's Season 2 program, driven by a combination of new and returning traders responding to the protocol's onboarding initiatives. That momentum was reinforced by strong institutional backing: ZKsync co-led Grvt's Series A, and while the deeper ZKsync Atlas integration is still ahead, that support signals real confidence in Grvt's architecture and roadmap.

If Grvt sustains this level of perpetual volume, it is positioned to move into the top tier of perpetual protocols by scale and relevance. More importantly, sustained volume establishes Grvt as foundational trading infrastructure for the ZKsync ecosystem, anchoring liquidity, derivatives activity, and market coordination as on-chain markets continue to scale. Together with its institutional backing and expanding wealth product suite, this momentum supports the thesis that Grvt's capital-efficient, non-custodial architecture can play a central role in enabling further growth.

Team Expertise & Accreditation

The Core Leadership 

Grvt's foundation rests on three accomplished founders: Hong Yea (CEO), Aaron Ong (CTO), and Matthew Quek (COO). This leadership trio brings a powerful convergence of expertise across traditional finance, high-performance engineering, and blockchain infrastructure. These three domains are critical to building a robust decentralized ecosystem.

Grvt’s Founders - Source: Grvt

The founding team brings experience from global investment banks, major technology companies, and institutional blockchain initiatives. This background combines expertise across traditional finance, technology, and digital asset infrastructure, which is reflected in Grvt’s approach to bridging CeFi and DeFi. It also supports the platform’s focus on making institutional-grade private on-chain banking accessible to all.

Partners & Investment Validation 

Grvt has raised $33.3 million across five strategic funding rounds: pre-seed ($2.1M), seed ($5M), strategic ($2.2M), equity financing ($5M), and Series A ($19M). This funding trajectory tells a compelling story of progressive validation and growing investor confidence.

Grvt’s Partners - Source: Grvt

The backing speaks volumes. Established investors and blockchain infrastructure leaders like ZKsync, Further Ventures, EigenCloud, 500 Global, and Matter Labs have joined alongside strategic partners across the DeFi ecosystem. The Series A round, larger than any prior funding round and a significant step up in scale, signals that these investors see transformative potential in Grvt’s approach. This level of backing validates not just the technology, but the market opportunity and the team's ability to capture it.

Forward Trajectory

Building the Infrastructure for Productive Capital

Grvt's roadmap is not a feature list. It is a structured evolution from next-generation trading infrastructure toward a fully permissionless fintech experience, where every layer of the capital lifecycle is unified, productive, and extensible. As expressed by Grvt, at its core, the mission is simple: “Grvt is the exchange designed to pay you – a platform where every dollar does more.” This signals a move toward a more capital-efficient model, where user participation drives value creation. This section covers the roadmap at a high level, before turning to its short-term and long-term goals.

The Roadmap at a Glance

Grvt’s 2026 Roadmap - Source: Grvt

Near-Term: Establishing the Yield-Native Foundation

The immediate priorities center on making capital productive from the moment it enters the platform. Through L1 Liquidity Expansion, Grvt is expanding connectivity across Layer 1 protocols via ZKsync’s architecture, beginning with Aave in March 2026. Deposits are trustlessly deployed to Aave on Ethereum L1 via the ZKsync Shared Bridge, allowing funds to earn yield immediately while remaining onchain and fully accessible for trading. This marks the end of idle capital. Every dollar is put to work from the moment it arrives. 

Grvt Invest extends the same foundation into investments: branded, institutional-grade real-world assets are brought on-chain and made available from a $1 minimum with no accreditation, giving deposited capital a place to compound beyond base yield, with liquidity and use as trading collateral planned as the product matures.

TradFi Perpetuals, already live with more than 80 pairs added in five months, extend the trading surface into global equities, foreign exchange, and commodities. This is where crypto infrastructure earns its place in the broader financial world. 

Simultaneously, the launch of Spot Markets brings professional-grade liquidity to major crypto pairs, while P2P Payments introduces frictionless value transfer between users, laying the groundwork for Grvt to function as a complete financial platform, not merely a trading venue. 

Underpinning all of this is the $GRVT token, announced in March 2026, a utility token that ties the ecosystem together, offering holders membership benefits such as better fee rates and enhanced reward tiers that grow with usage. This is the near-term blueprint: purposeful, interconnected, and already in motion.

Long-Term: Scaling Toward a Unified Capital Ecosystem

Capital drag is the hidden tax every trader pays on traditional exchanges, the yield lost, the margin locked, the capital forced to choose one job at a time. Grvt's long-term roadmap is built to make that tradeoff obsolete. Unified Margin allows the same asset to simultaneously generate yield, back margin positions, and hold spot exposure within a single programmable balance, delivering approximately 2.3 times the capital efficiency of traditional centralized exchanges. This is not an incremental improvement. It is a structural rethinking of how capital should behave.

Prime Brokerage Lending connects depositor funds directly to active traders on the platform. The system funds 80% of each position while traders put up 20% as a first-loss buffer, protecting depositors before their funds are ever at risk. Yield is driven by real trading demand within the system. Depositors earn. Traders get capital. The platform grows.

Strategies Offering Expansion broadens the investment layer across institutional managers, professional traders, branded RWA fund managers, and AI-driven strategies, ensuring every risk appetite has a home within the ecosystem. A Fiat On/Off Ramp then completes the loop, ensuring capital remains productive from entry to exit. Every upgrade is intentional, building toward a unified capital ecosystem where productivity is the default, not the exception.

The Bigger Picture

The broader industry keeps adding more assets and more markets, chasing capital utility without ever questioning the inefficiency underneath. Grvt is taking a fundamentally different path, building a self-reinforcing financial ecosystem where every layer compounds the next and maximizing capital productivity is the goal.

Grvt is building more than just an exchange. It is building the financial infrastructure that makes every other exchange look incomplete. That said, execution will be the ultimate measure. As Grvt moves from roadmap to reality, the market will be watching closely to see whether the platform delivers on the ambition it has laid out.

Final Thoughts “Why Grvt”

Grvt is building the foundational rails for a global on-chain wealth ecosystem through its Yield Layer, Grvt Invest backed by RWAs, and Unified Margin system. These systems enable capital to remain continuously in motion to maximize efficiency, while branded real-world assets become composable building blocks rather than hold-and-wait positions. Its hybrid design and alignment with ZKsync’s Atlas upgrade place it at the center of the next phase of market structure, where liquidity is unified and settlement is near-instant. Built for performance and capital efficiency, Grvt is designed to operate at institutional scale.

As on-chain derivatives grow alongside institutional adoption, Grvt is positioned to meet a full spectrum of user needs, from yield generation and risk management to advanced trading and long-term wealth building. More than just a product, it is a system that compounds value over time, with a trustless and accessible foundation that establishes a lasting edge in the on-chain financial ecosystem.

The normal definition of gravity is that it pulls things downward, but Grvt (pronounced “gravity”) is doing the opposite. If it delivers on its roadmap, the trajectory from here is decisively upward.

Authors: @houhowhou, Memento Research

This report was written in partnership with Grvt. This report has been prepared for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice, and you should not treat any of the report’s content as such.