Grvt just closed a $19 million Series A to fuse privacy and scale into onchain finance, pitching a zero-knowledge (ZK) exchange that makes institutional polish feel retail-friendly.
Grvt’s $19M Lift Targets MEV Pain and Compliance Friction
Grvt (pronounced gravity) — a decentralized exchange (DEX) and investment marketplace on the ZKsync Stack — says the round was co-led by Zksync, Further Ventures of Abu Dhabi, Eigencloud (formerly Eigenlayer), and 500 Global. Based in Panama City, the team bills the platform as “privacy by default” for onchain trading.
The pitch: public ledgers without public exposure. Grvt argues mempool “whale hunting,” maximum extractable value (MEV) games, and compliance friction have kept decentralized finance (DeFi) from broader adoption. Its answer is a Zksync Validium L2 that verifies on Ethereum while keeping activity off-chain, with EigenDA bandwidth at 100 MB/s to raise throughput.
Proceeds will fund a multi-pronged stack for active traders and passive savers: a fixed-yield “flywheel” to shuttle funds across funding, trading, and vault accounts; a fortified privacy-first infrastructure layer; and a stablecoin-enabled system with cross-exchange vaults and real-world asset hooks. Translation: fewer tabs, more capital efficiency.
Backers cast the bet as crypto’s “HTTPS moment.” Matter Labs’ Alex Gluchowski says ZK adds the trust and discretion that took the web mainstream. Further Ventures pitched institution-grade rails “from Abu Dhabi to the world,” and Eigen Labs pointed to a shift from data limits to compute as EigenDA scales.
Coming attractions: a 1 basis point maker fee rebate across all maker orders — a perk usually reserved for pros — plus a fixed-yield product targeting 10% and a flagship liquidity program, the Grvt Liquidity Provider (GLP), touting high double-digit APRs. The marketing drum is loud; the team claims the math keeps time.
Context cuts both ways. Ethereum volumes are rising and research pegs a big runway for DeFi, but the field is crowded, security lapses happen, and “privacy” claims invite scrutiny. If the stack performs, Grvt could offer discretion without ditching settlement guarantees. $19 million won’t buy a new order, but it can buy time, talent, and block space. With Avantis and Hyperliquid already making plenty of noise, Grvt doesn’t get a quiet runway—it gets a stress test. Either way, the onchain plot just got a little more interesting.
