Grvt is trying to build something slower on ZKsync, and in the context of crypto trading, that is the point. Instead of relying only on turnover, the platform is packaging stocks, credit, derivatives, and yield-bearing instruments into an onchain product stack that lets retail users park capital, earn income, and trade from the same venue. In the article by Joel John and Vaidik Mandloi, translated by TechFlow, Grvt is framed not as another exchange chasing volume but as an experiment in rebuilding brokerage and banking functions with tokenized assets.
The contrast is set up early. Robinhood and Charles Schwab have already pushed commissions to zero, and perpetual exchanges have reached $964 billion in monthly trading volume. Grvt, by comparison, is described as pursuing a slower business on ZKsync: making yield-bearing assets accessible to retail participants inside onchain markets.
How trading fees moved toward zero
The article traces the economics of exchanges back to May 17, 1792, when 24 brokers and merchants gathered under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and agreed on a minimum stock-trading commission of 0.25%. By 1975, that figure had risen to 1%-2%. That same year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission deregulated the market structure, opening the way for zero-commission exchanges.
From there, the piece makes a simple argument: the history of exchanges is a history of trading costs falling over time. At a basic level, a trade is the movement of information, a record that one asset has been exchanged for another. As storage, transmission, and verification became cheaper, helped by the long arc of computing progress, the question stopped being whether exchanges could keep charging for execution and became what else they could charge for.
That is the setting in which Robinhood, Charles Schwab, and, in crypto, Lighter brought commissions down to zero. The article asks whether exchanges are increasingly defined less by the click that executes a trade and more by their role as a full-stack financial product.
Markets were digitized first, then democratized
In 1969, Wall Street began testing what would happen if large institutions could trade over networks instead of routing orders through manual specialists at the New York Stock Exchange. That system was Instinet, one of the earliest electronic communication networks, or ECNs. In 1984, the NYSE launched its own electronic network, SuperDOT. During the 1987 Black Monday crash, traditional phone lines were overwhelmed, while ECNs such as Instinet allowed large market participants to keep trading.
By 2001, Instinet accounted for around 15% of Nasdaq trading volume, while SuperDOT handled 99% of NYSE volume. The article describes the 1980s as the decade of digitization and the 1990s as the decade of democratization.
Charles Schwab went online in 1996, when internet trading was still a small part of the brokerage business. Three years later, the industry looked very different. By 1999, Charles Schwab had more than 3.6 million online accounts and was processing more than 1 million online trades per day. In the early 1990s, a retail equity trade typically cost $40-$50 in commission. A decade later, many online brokers had cut that to under $15.
Over the next two decades, even that $15 moved toward zero. The article cites a 2001 prediction from the Bank for International Settlements that market pricing and trading methods would change as computing and networks improved. That shift did happen. By the late 2010s, high-frequency trading and algorithmic orders were adding liquidity and efficiency. By 2020, Robinhood and Charles Schwab had made the zero-commission structure mainstream.
That did not remove revenue; it changed where revenue came from. The article says the BIS had already suggested in 2001 that exchanges would make money through payment for order flow and their own market-making operations. Another route is interest earned on idle cash balances.
Both models depend on scale. Robinhood, the article notes, has $324 billion in platform assets, including $32.4 billion in cash. By contrast, crypto-native perpetual exchanges have seen peak TVL of just $5 billion. That gap helps explain why most crypto exchanges still rely on trading fees. Hyperliquid and Lighter have both explored earning interest directly from USDC deposits on-platform, but the article argues the sector has not yet evolved into a true scale-economy ecosystem.
Why perpetual exchanges have expanded so quickly
Decentralized perpetual exchanges are described as crypto’s third-largest revenue category, behind stablecoin issuers and decentralized exchanges. Unlike those older sectors, which benefited from more than eight years of development, perpetuals are a more recent phenomenon.
The numbers in the article are stark. In January 2022, all perpetual exchanges combined generated $62 billion in monthly volume. By January 2026, that had climbed to $964 billion. Fees across the sector were only $100,000 in the earlier period, then reached $3.3 million in January 2026 alone. At the time of writing, cumulative volume across all exchanges had reached $14 trillion, with $4 trillion of that coming in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. Annual trading volume grew from $648 billion in 2023 to $6.7 trillion over the past year.
The piece describes this as a hockey-stick chart more commonly seen in Web2 software than in financial market infrastructure. It offers three main reasons.
- First, perpetual exchanges have matured to the point where the user experience is close to that of centralized exchanges. Users would rather hold their own assets and withdraw immediately than take on the risks tied to centralized custodians. The article contrasts that setup with FTX and says custody risk on these platforms is relatively low.
- Second, they list new assets faster than centralized venues such as Coinbase. In the first quarter of 2024, Hyperliquid was said to be listing new meme assets ahead of Binance. In the second quarter of 2025, the same exchange began offering pre-market perpetuals for newly issued tokens. Earlier this year, when SpaceX and CRBRS listed, perpetual exchanges were presented as one of the best avenues for pre-listing access.
- Third, perpetual exchanges can produce much higher velocity than peer sectors such as lending. In January 2026, every $1 of TVL in Hyperliquid’s HLP vault generated an average of $24 in daily volume. Last month, each $1 of TVL on Hyperliquid generated $0.0053 in fees.
The broader point is that perpetuals widen crypto’s addressable market. Startup equity, commodities, and indexes can all find trading and settlement rails through perpetual structures, turning crypto-native financial infrastructure into something that speaks to a much larger asset universe than niche onchain tokens alone.
The real contest is over yield
The article then shifts from execution to a more important question: who captures yield.
In traditional lending, capital often leaves the system and moves into offchain bank accounts, which means risk has to be managed through collateral requirements and multiple layers of underwriting. In perpetual exchanges, by contrast, capital often stays inside a closed platform ecosystem.
When users go long an asset such as SpaceX, the platform does not necessarily hold the underlying security. Instead, traders hold a synthetic instrument designed to track the price of the real-world asset. Exchanges pull in price indexes from external sources to set the mark price, which is then used to determine liquidation thresholds. The article says Nasdaq now provides price data directly to oracles such as Pyth, making the pricing mechanism itself available onchain.
If too many users pile into long positions on a hot asset, particularly one with strong demand such as a pre-IPO stock, the market has to attract traders willing to take the other side. That balancing mechanism is the funding rate. The piece defines it as the interest transferred between longs and shorts depending on demand conditions. Binance, the article says, is currently paying funding rates of roughly 11% annualized, while niche assets with strong demand can spike into the hundreds of percent annualized.
Funding rates are not the same as open interest. Funding is the interest traders pay to hold positions. Open interest is the total size of positions held on the platform. On Hyperliquid, the article says, roughly $5 billion in USDC collateral currently supports more than $10 billion in open interest, putting exposure at about 2x the capital behind it.
That matters because it shows why perpetual exchanges become interesting from a yield perspective. Unlike many historical lending products, the interest generated in perpetual markets is formed, collected, and settled inside a participant loop on the platform. Onchain systems make the transfer, verification, and claiming of that interest easier to handle.
Traditional brokers already proved the float model
The article also focuses on idle margin deposits. When users place collateral on an exchange, that capital is not always immediately active. In principle, it can be moved into more productive use.
Binance’s BUSD once worked like this. Paxos issued the token, placed reserves into Treasuries, and shared the interest income with Binance. New York regulators shut that business down in 2023, and Binance could no longer monetize the float in the same way.
Hyperliquid ran into a similar dynamic in 2025. USDH, issued by Native Markets, was one of the stablecoins on the exchange. Of the exchange’s $5 billion in holdings, around 2% was in USDH form. When conditional markets were preparing to launch under HIP-4, payments were to be settled in USDH. Support for the asset, according to the article, was partly based on Native Markets agreeing to use 50% of reserve yield to buy back HYPE from the market. Then in May, Coinbase acquired the rights to the USDH brand and became the official deployer of USDC on the exchange. The yield on that $5 billion in USDC was then directed back into the protocol to fund HYPE buybacks.
This kind of float capture is not unusual in brokerage. As of last year, Interactive Brokers earned more from interest and margin than from commissions. Roughly 57% of its revenue, or $3.56 billion, came from interest. Robinhood derived about 34% of its revenue from that line, and Charles Schwab about 27% from sweep-account interest. Morgan Stanley went one step further by acquiring E*Trade and broadening the wealth and interest-income mix available to users.
Crypto-native exchanges have had a harder time monetizing float efficiently. Even where users can hold dollars that earn yield, those balances often cannot be used as collateral at the same time. The missing mechanism is one that lets users deposit dollars into fixed-income products, post them as collateral, and still retain instant liquidity.
The article says crypto-native derivatives markets need three things to move beyond their current stage:
- Asset flexibility, meaning the ability to move between crypto, equities, commodities, and yield products without leaving the platform.
- Instant liquidity, so users can access capital in emergencies instead of being trapped in long-duration structured products.
- Interest income on idle collateral, while keeping that capital usable.
Grvt is trying to put those pieces together
That is where Grvt comes in. The platform is presented as using ZKsync and a stack of crypto-native primitives to solve all three problems at once. Its design combines private execution, user control over assets, and settlement linked back to Ethereum.
According to the article, Grvt is one of the leading applications in the ZKsync ecosystem. It processes a little over $1 billion in daily volume, has about $46 million in TVL, and around $348 million in open interest. Among perpetual exchanges, it ranks fifth by 24-hour trading volume on DefiLlama, behind Aster and edgeX.
One reason it has reached that position, the article says, is that it abstracts away much of the complexity usually associated with decentralized exchanges. During the reporting process, the author used the product for several weeks. Users sign in with Google, set up 2FA, and manage margin settings in a way that feels closer to Binance than to a typical DeFi interface. The product is mobile-first because Grvt expects retail users to come in through an app before anything else.
At the time of writing, Grvt had close to 90,000 users. In September 2025, the company raised a $19 million Series A led by ZKsync, with participation from Further Ventures, EigenCloud, and 500 Startups. Across all rounds, Grvt had raised about $33.3 million.
Why ZKsync matters to the product
The article spends time on why ZKsync led the round.
First is throughput. Grvt claims it can process close to 600,000 transactions per second, or 36 million per minute. For reference, Hyperliquid supports about 200,000 orders per second, while Binance’s matching engine is said to handle 1.4 million orders per second. The author notes that these units are not perfectly interchangeable, but directionally the claim puts Grvt above today’s leading onchain perpetual exchanges and at about 43% of Binance’s stated matching-engine capacity.
Second is Atlas, ZKsync’s interoperability and performance layer. Atlas is designed to let ZK chains communicate with Ethereum and with one another with faster finality. For Grvt, the important thing is not that trader balances instantly talk to every institutional chain. It is that Grvt does not have to become an isolated pool of liquidity. Trading can happen in a private, high-throughput environment while collateral and yield layers ultimately connect to Ethereum DeFi, tokenized funds, and other ZKsync-native chains.
That architecture matters because Prividium allows institutions to run private chains while still settling proofs back to Ethereum. The article cites several examples: Deutsche Bank and Memento’s DAMA 2 work uses ZKsync Prividium for tokenized fund management; the U.S. regional bank consortium Cari Network is using Prividium for tokenized deposits; and ZKsync materials also mention ADI Chain for sovereign-grade settlement infrastructure.
Atlas is what makes that ecosystem relevant to Grvt. If these chains can interoperate, Grvt could become a venue where capital moves between trading, yield products, and tokenized financial instruments instead of remaining trapped inside a single exchange.
Not built around nonstop speculation
The article says that after six months of interaction with the team, a clear pattern emerged: Grvt is not obsessed with becoming another decentralized exchange that competes on volume alone. The authors are blunt on this point. “Super gambling” is not treated as a durable business model. The focus instead has been to make a new class of assets and primitives available to ordinary users without the balance requirements associated with traditional prime brokers.
The business case follows from that. The market for wealth-preservation products is not saturated, while there are already more than fifty players offering the same “get rich with crypto” pitch. Compared with exchanges built mainly for speculation, the article argues, this model points to a larger total addressable market and lower customer acquisition costs.
Most people are not online to trade all day. The larger segment is made up of users who want a place to store money, earn yield, trade a narrative occasionally, and access that money when needed.
One example in the piece is access. If a user has less than $100,000, products such as the credit funds offered by Blue Owl are generally unavailable to retail depositors. And when they do need access for personal emergencies, those funds may impose high withdrawal fees.
Tokenized asset growth created the supply side
The article argues that Grvt is showing up at a time when the menu of onchain assets is expanding quickly. Tokenized equities are now available through Ondo. DTCC itself is considering native tokenization for stocks. As demand rises for AI-related stocks from around the world, awareness and appetite for regional equity instruments could rise with it. Equity perpetuals and tokenized versions give users a way to trade those themes globally.
BlackRock, Apollo, and Franklin Templeton have also joined the push by bringing money-market funds and credit funds onchain. Data from RWA.xyz cited in the article shows roughly $1.4 billion in tokenized equities, $14.6 billion in tokenized Treasuries and money-market funds, and $5.8 billion in credit onchain. That does not include equity perpetuals themselves, which the article says have become a trillion-dollar economy over the past quarter.
Users anywhere in the world can buy these products with as little as $1, earn yield on the capital, and potentially loop them through channels such as Morpho for extra returns.
Still, the author stresses that the marginal user is not chasing layered strategies involving every available protocol. In that environment, yield itself becomes commoditized. The defensible edge shifts to distribution and to whether capital used in one part of a product can talk to other parts of the same product. In crypto terms, that is composability, and the article says it has been central to Grvt’s approach.
What Grvt offers now
At the time covered by the article, Grvt supported more than 43 tokenized stock trading pairs. Some of them are tied to heavily discussed Korean equities. The platform also supports commodities such as gold and mainstream crypto assets.
On the collateral side, when users deposit funds into Grvt, the capital is automatically converted into yield-bearing instruments through a product called Earn on Equity. That is a notable break from the traditional exchange model, where the $100 used to trade bitcoin stays $100 until a position is closed or liquidated. Grvt wants that collateral to earn while it sits there. Earlier this year, the platform integrated Aave so users could verify where that yield comes from.
For users who do not want to trade directly, Grvt also launched Grvt Invest. Instead of building the underlying instruments itself, it brought in Centrifuge and Plume. The article says Centrifuge introduced the Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund, while Plume supplies tokenized Treasuries and BlackRock’s AAA CLO ETF.
Those instruments can also be used as collateral in exchange vaults. The article compares Grvt with Hyperliquid and Lighter, both of which let users deposit funds into vaults that provide trading liquidity in return for yield. Hyperliquid’s vault has $266 million in TVL and produces a 12% annualized yield. Lighter is near 11% annualized. The problem, the piece says, is that those vaults carry meaningful risk because they take directional market-making exposure based on the active markets they serve. Sharp volatility can erode depositor capital.
Grvt’s approach stands out for two reasons in the article’s telling.
- First, it uses tokenization and composability to shift the burden of yield sourcing to specialized providers. Centrifuge is better suited to bring in Janus. Plume already has BlackRock tools onchain. Grvt is not rebuilding those instruments from scratch. It is creating demand for regulated, relatively stable products that already exist.
- Second, it is trying to let users stack multiple sources of yield. A user can deposit dollars and earn yield, or allocate to a credit fund and take more risk. The article says users still cannot, on most channels, provide liquidity to vaults, maintain margin, and earn yield at the same time. Grvt is working toward that vision in the third quarter.
Why the article calls this “slow finance”
The piece cites a study of day traders who traded for more than 300 consecutive days in 2020 and found that 97% lost money. Prediction markets are popular now, but the article says 70% of users there also lose money. On Polymarket, the top 1% of users account for 76.5% of profits.
That is why the authors do not believe the internet’s mass market will be unlocked by building a better casino. Grvt’s positioning is to blur the lines between wealth storage, inflation defense, and opportunistic trading. Users could keep money in money-market funds on the platform and, with that same setup, occasionally trade semiconductor stocks or meme-coin momentum.
The article frames this as crypto moving into a “slow finance” phase, or more simply, into adulthood. Crypto-native products have long had a narrow objective: get users to trade as often as possible because that is how fees are generated. If there is one broad lesson from financial history, the piece argues, it is that the real goal is to become the banking layer for the end user. Once users keep their wealth inside a product, lifetime value rises sharply.
A switch from trading to yield changed conversion rates
The article refers to a February conversation with Grvt founder Hong Yea. His argument was straightforward: the market for people who want capital storage, access to capital-market products, diversification, and self-custody is much larger than the market for perpetual speculation.
To illustrate the point, the article mentions stress in equities. The KOSPI index fell as much as 12.6% on July 29. Semiconductor names such as SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics can also suffer near-double-digit drops in a single session. In that setting, the authors argue, pushing users toward excessive risk may sound commercially attractive in the short run but does not build products with strong retention.
Hong shared a more direct metric. Once the product pitch shifted from trading to yield, referral conversion rose from 7% to 45%. Most people already understand the idea of a fixed rate at a bank. Adding a few extra points on top of that is much easier to explain.
He also said Grvt may not ultimately make most of its money from end users buying these instruments. Instead, issuers could become the more important revenue source. If the platform reaches sufficient scale, firms such as Franklin Templeton and Blackstone have incentives to pay Grvt distribution fees for tokenized products. The business objective, then, is not to depend on aggressive monetization of gambling-like behavior but to build a distribution layer that can partner with high-quality asset issuers over time.
Investors see a path across the money stack
The article also quotes Further Ventures’ Ganesh Mahidhar on why the firm invested. His view is that Grvt has a chance to earn across the full money stack. Users could eventually pay through a debit card, borrow, earn yield, and access niche assets such as compute derivatives through the same channel.
For tokenized-asset issuers and mutual funds, the benefit is a new route to distribution. Traditional bank channels carry heavy costs in distribution, compliance, and customer servicing. According to the article, this new route simply did not exist before 2024.
The concept of using yield as a differentiator is not new. Crypto has been selling that story since at least 2018, the article notes, citing higher-yield products marketed by crypto.com in Singapore. What has changed is the infrastructure. Grvt is built on ZKsync and paired with its own risk engine. ZKsync can connect across multiple chains, and the range of onchain real-world assets now stretches from stablecoins to tokenized real estate.
The next battleground may be distribution and retention
The article ends by arguing that crypto’s next major competitive front is shifting away from pure infrastructure, the area that defined much of 2022, and toward distribution, retention, and business models that can capture value over time. In the author’s framing, this is the arrival of the fat-application era.
This round of applications is different from the centralized model represented by FTX because users can choose to hold their own assets. Even if capital is moved into tokenized yield tools, the article says, users can still redeem back into stablecoins through third-party interfaces if Grvt were to fail, as long as the assets remain in their wallets. Grvt’s moat, in that reading, comes from its risk engine, its brand, and its distribution, not from custody.
The article also argues that several primitives had to mature at once for a product such as Grvt to exist at scale: demand for perpetuals, usable ZKsync infrastructure, and the parallel rise of tokenized instruments. The last comparable wave, in the author’s view, was the period when centralized companies raced to offer yield while FTX competed on perpetuals. This time, the difference is visible transparency and self-custody.
The piece closes on a simple line: perhaps gravity is not pulling the market toward more speculation, but back toward financial rationality.
Source attribution in the article points to Decentralised.Co @Decentralisedco. The piece is by Joel John and Vaidik Mandloi, translated by TechFlow.