#grvt Over the past two days, browsing X, my home feed is almost entirely taken over by protest posts about incidents where Gate users’ funds were stolen. It’s pretty frustrating to read—every time I see news like this, I feel like the lesson from the last round of FTX misusing funds was basically wasted. As long as your assets are still sitting in the centralized hot wallets of a CEX, “not your keys, not your coins” will always be a ticking time bomb that you don’t know when will explode. And for us, the platform’s internal risk controls are completely a black box.
But the reality is harsh: it’s simply not realistic to make real traders move entirely onto pure on-chain DEXs. When people run strategies with some technical indicators, push leverage to around 30–50x, and then face the utterly hopeless slippage and network latency of on-chain DEXs, you get worn down by a layer of skin in no time. And that’s not even counting the chain congestion during extreme market conditions that can trigger a cascading liquidation.
That’s also why I’ve recently been heavily bullish on the project @grvt_io . Their hybrid exchange (HEX) architecture hits exactly the most painful point in the current market: forcing an aggressive fusion of CEX experience with the hard safety guarantees of DEXs.
Its matching engine and order book are still run on off-chain servers, so the smoothness of opening and closing positions and the low-latency APIs are almost indistinguishable from those of traditional large exchanges. But the most core part—the custody layer of funds—everything goes through zkSync’s ZK Stack, locked inside smart contracts. You authorize using your own wallet, and the money only recognizes your private key. This means that even if the platform faces something like Gate’s hacker attack or malicious insider activity, your funds are mathematically and cryptographically secured at the deepest level—they simply can’t touch users’ principal.
Also, on the risk-control engine, it’s very friendly to leveraged traders. Beyond improving capital efficiency with combined margin, it retains a very pure “isolated margin” mode. This physically isolated position management based on smart contracts is actively clean and maximally prevents a needle-in-the-thread type of event from blowing up your other underlying positions along with it.
With Matter Labs clearly backing it behind the scenes, the underlying security logic and performance floor are guaranteed. If you’re also extremely picky about fund safety, yet still need an efficient matching environment, then taking advantage of this Gate blow-up incident really is the right time to shift your attention to this new generation of platforms that support self-custody of funds.
But the reality is harsh: it’s simply not realistic to make real traders move entirely onto pure on-chain DEXs. When people run strategies with some technical indicators, push leverage to around 30–50x, and then face the utterly hopeless slippage and network latency of on-chain DEXs, you get worn down by a layer of skin in no time. And that’s not even counting the chain congestion during extreme market conditions that can trigger a cascading liquidation.
That’s also why I’ve recently been heavily bullish on the project @grvt_io . Their hybrid exchange (HEX) architecture hits exactly the most painful point in the current market: forcing an aggressive fusion of CEX experience with the hard safety guarantees of DEXs.
Its matching engine and order book are still run on off-chain servers, so the smoothness of opening and closing positions and the low-latency APIs are almost indistinguishable from those of traditional large exchanges. But the most core part—the custody layer of funds—everything goes through zkSync’s ZK Stack, locked inside smart contracts. You authorize using your own wallet, and the money only recognizes your private key. This means that even if the platform faces something like Gate’s hacker attack or malicious insider activity, your funds are mathematically and cryptographically secured at the deepest level—they simply can’t touch users’ principal.
Also, on the risk-control engine, it’s very friendly to leveraged traders. Beyond improving capital efficiency with combined margin, it retains a very pure “isolated margin” mode. This physically isolated position management based on smart contracts is actively clean and maximally prevents a needle-in-the-thread type of event from blowing up your other underlying positions along with it.
With Matter Labs clearly backing it behind the scenes, the underlying security logic and performance floor are guaranteed. If you’re also extremely picky about fund safety, yet still need an efficient matching environment, then taking advantage of this Gate blow-up incident really is the right time to shift your attention to this new generation of platforms that support self-custody of funds.