Grvt, a decentralized exchange for on-chain financial privacy that is powered by zero-knowledge technology, has closed a $19 million Series A funding round. The Series A round was co-led by Grvt technology partner ZKsync; Further Ventures, a capital markets infrastructure investment firm based in Abu Dhabi; EigenCloud, a verifiable cloud platform that lets developers build any application; and VC 500 Global.
As Wall Street embraces blockchain technology, the next chapter of global finance is being written, and it’s happening on-chain. In August, Ethereum’s on-chain volume surpassed $320 billion, its highest level since mid-2021. Research also projects the DeFi sector to surge from $32.36 billion in 2025 to over $1.5 trillion by 2034.
However, this potential remains untapped due to critical concerns raised by a surge of issues on decentralized platforms. These issues include “whale hunting”, where large trades are front-run or exploited by sophisticated actors scanning the mempool. Such tactics lead to billions in annual losses from maximum extractable value (MEV) attacks and other manipulative tactics. Further challenges include smart contract exploits, compliance hurdles on public chains, a siloed on-chain ecosystem, and a lack of ease of use for everyday people.
“On-chain finance has been held back by privacy gaps that expose users to exploitation,” said Grvt co-founder and CEO Hong Yea. “By building a privacy-driven, scalable, and trustless DEX that offers a wide array of structured products, Grvt exemplifies how ZK-powered solutions will become the new normal for everyone, realizing the vision of an open and secure on-chain finance world.”
Alex Gluchowski, co-founder and CEO at Matter Labs, added, “We believe ZK is the ‘HTTPS moment’ for crypto. Just as HTTPS took the internet mainstream by adding a layer of trust and privacy, ZK will do the same for Web3. Grvt is uniquely positioned to be the most liquid and impactful application layer to help realize this vision, their dedication and progress excellently demonstrate how ZK can bring on-chain finance to the mainstream.”
“Verifiable data powers verifiable compute, and with EigenDA now at 100 MB/s, the bottleneck has shifted from data to compute,” Eigen Labs founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan said. “Grvt is tackling that frontier head-on. Their ambitious vision is matched by the calibre of their team, and we’re thrilled to back them alongside ZKSync in bringing on-chain finance to cloud scale with the security and privacy it requires.”
A collective charge to lead and consolidate on-chain finance
Privacy: Grvt runs a ZKsync Validium L2 blockchain that validates L2 state without publishing it, thereby ensuring privacy, an issue that has long plagued most DeFi protocols.
Ethereum-level security: With ZK proofs, L2 transactions inherit Ethereum-level security. Every batch of transactions is verified directly on Ethereum; this means that even though transactions are processed off-chain for speed and low cost, their validity is mathematically guaranteed. If any transaction were invalid, the proof would fail, and Ethereum would reject it.
Scalability: The ZKsync Stack improves scalability by operating as an L2 solution, enabling the processing of significantly more transactions than Ethereum’s base layer.
Accessibility: ZKsync technology makes transactions cheaper by handling them off-chain in bulk and only posting the essential proofs to Ethereum’s base layer, cutting settlement costs dramatically.