I just went through a round of discussion around @grvt_io and found an interesting phenomenon: many people spend their days watching task progress, points rankings, and the expectation of airdrops, but in reality, not many actually go research why GRVT exists.
Many people are still using the logic of traditional DEXs to look at it—they think it’s basically just another trading platform: compare TVL and trading volume, then guess the valuation.
But if you change your perspective, you’ll find that GRVT is actually betting on a bigger question:
When truly large capital enters Crypto in the future, where will they trade?
Over the past few years, DeFi really has completed a great experiment by moving financial behavior onto the chain. But in the end, early DeFi was more like it was designed for retail users and small funds.
AMMs are straightforward, efficient, and permissionless—those advantages are undeniable.
But once you get to the institutional level, the problems show up immediately.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in trades don’t feel like much, but if it’s a position shift of several tens of millions—even up to hundreds of millions—then AMM slippage, MEV attacks, and trade exposure turn into real costs. For retail traders, a few basis points might not matter. For quantitative institutions, this is daily profit loss measured in real money.
So don’t misunderstand: Wall Street doesn’t not know about AMMs—it just fundamentally wouldn’t accept such inefficient trading mechanisms. Real large capital needs an order book: it needs to place orders, do market making, arbitrage, and risk management the way traditional financial markets do. That’s the most core point of #grvt .
It didn’t choose to keep grinding for the “pure on-chain matching” ideal route. Instead, it took a path closer to real-world markets: high-performance matching off-chain, with settlement completed on-chain. Many people will say this isn’t decentralized enough. But in the end, what markets care about isn’t how pretty the philosophy sounds—it’s who can solve real needs.
Institutions want speed, but they also need safety. They want the trading experience of CEXs, but they don’t want to hand over control of their assets to exchanges anymore. After FTX, this demand has become increasingly obvious. And GRVT is exactly trying to be the bridge connecting traditional capital and on-chain finance. More importantly, it’s not only focused on trading speed—it’s also focused on capital efficiency.
Many people are still using the logic of traditional DEXs to look at it—they think it’s basically just another trading platform: compare TVL and trading volume, then guess the valuation.
But if you change your perspective, you’ll find that GRVT is actually betting on a bigger question:
When truly large capital enters Crypto in the future, where will they trade?
Over the past few years, DeFi really has completed a great experiment by moving financial behavior onto the chain. But in the end, early DeFi was more like it was designed for retail users and small funds.
AMMs are straightforward, efficient, and permissionless—those advantages are undeniable.
But once you get to the institutional level, the problems show up immediately.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in trades don’t feel like much, but if it’s a position shift of several tens of millions—even up to hundreds of millions—then AMM slippage, MEV attacks, and trade exposure turn into real costs. For retail traders, a few basis points might not matter. For quantitative institutions, this is daily profit loss measured in real money.
So don’t misunderstand: Wall Street doesn’t not know about AMMs—it just fundamentally wouldn’t accept such inefficient trading mechanisms. Real large capital needs an order book: it needs to place orders, do market making, arbitrage, and risk management the way traditional financial markets do. That’s the most core point of #grvt .
It didn’t choose to keep grinding for the “pure on-chain matching” ideal route. Instead, it took a path closer to real-world markets: high-performance matching off-chain, with settlement completed on-chain. Many people will say this isn’t decentralized enough. But in the end, what markets care about isn’t how pretty the philosophy sounds—it’s who can solve real needs.
Institutions want speed, but they also need safety. They want the trading experience of CEXs, but they don’t want to hand over control of their assets to exchanges anymore. After FTX, this demand has become increasingly obvious. And GRVT is exactly trying to be the bridge connecting traditional capital and on-chain finance. More importantly, it’s not only focused on trading speed—it’s also focused on capital efficiency.