Hong Yea’s transition from a decade-long career on Wall Street to founding Grvt in May 2022 (which happened just weeks before a major crypto market crash) reflects his strong belief in blockchain’s transformative power for finance.
As Co-Founder and CEO, Hong viewed the market downturn not as a setback but as an opportunity to innovate, meeting scepticism with confidence and a clear strategy.
While established players struggled, his team advanced a groundbreaking platform that integrates traditional finance with decentralised finance through secure, blockchain-based self-custody solutions.
Drawing on his global experience, Hong now leads Grvt’s ambitious mission to invest on-chain in a more accessible, transparent, and secure way. In an interview with Invezz, he shares insights from this pivotal journey.
Invezz: Grvt Strategies is positioned as the world’s first compliant, peer-to-peer on-chain investment marketplace. What motivated you to launch this specific platform now, and how does it address current gaps in both traditional and decentralised finance for everyday investors?
As you know, these days, almost everything in our lives has become frictionless.
We communicate instantly, move money in seconds, and access endless information with a tap or two.
But when it comes to building lasting wealth – trading, investing, and earning in ways that truly compound – we still face obstacles built decades ago.
The thing is, for everyday people, it’s hard to grow wealth. Access to quality financial products, simple and professional trading environments, and even basic financial knowledge are limited to a privileged few.
Barriers like high investment minimums, non-transparent processes, and exclusionary eligibility requirements shut out the majority.
While it’s true that DeFi made a great leap forward, the reality is that parts of it are still hard to fully grasp, and it remains a niche for a very specific group only.
As for TradFi industry players, scalability is a major bottleneck because “trust” can’t be automated.
This limitation results in complex regulations, licensing requirements, and governance structures designed to manage trust issues, which, in turn, lead to significant operational and legal overheads.
These overhead costs are also often passed on to consumers through higher fees, investment minimums, or restrictive terms, effectively pricing out many individuals.
So when it comes to addressing these gaps with blockchain technology and specifically what Grvt is offering, the idea is to automate trust, reduce friction, and dramatically improve scalability, benefiting both sides.
We achieve those things through a streamlined process.
All Strategies are on-chain and non-custodial, while investors engage directly with Strategy Managers without intermediaries.
Strategies are built entirely on our secure blockchain, powered by ZKsync technology and using smart contract logic to automate the entire investment lifecycle.
This means that every step, from accepting deposits to distributing profits, operates transparently through programmable rules, eliminating the need for manual processes or intermediaries. Historical performance, methodology, and allocations are also visible on-chain.
By designing investment logic to be self-custodial and automated, we reduce counterparty risk and eliminate unnecessary middlemen at the protocol level.
This makes sure users remain in control of their assets while participating in strategies with clearly defined parameters, fee structures, and risk controls that are all enforced by code.
And by integrating blockchain into financial systems, we can build markets that are not only more efficient and transparent, but more importantly, accessible to all.
Invezz: It’s clear that regulatory compliance and accessibility are central to Grvt Strategies. Can you share how you achieved both full compliance and open access for retail investors, and what challenges you faced in navigating this balance?
For numerous platforms in both TradFi and DeFi, navigating and balancing the dual imperatives of compliance and open accessibility is a key challenge.
For us as a platform that wants to bring together the best from both of those worlds, we had to figure out how to solve the scalability bottlenecks faced by TradFi.
As for the DeFi and on-chain part, challenges largely came in as two parts: public opinion from the DeFi crowd and regulatory uncertainty.
We had a situation where many people thought compliance and open access, especially within the DeFi context, were self-contradictory.
Internationally, there are growing discussions around how to better regulate DeFi, but most of those lack a standardised approach, as the whole thing is very nascent to both projects and regulators.
In our case, we had to think ahead about which technologies and compliant standards we could use to achieve this balance. I’m glad to say that through blockchain technology, Grvt was able to:
- Eliminate intermediaries that traditionally existed in wealth management and investing, thus creating better accessibility to retail investors
- Automate the fund process, and by proxy, solve the scalability issue for institutions
- Govern the investment logic and process with smart contracts, reducing counterparty risks
- Add another layer of user fund safety ensured by self-custody
In addition, we kept optimizing our platform for users to experience frictionless and seamless onboarding, trading, and investing.
For example, Privy became our default onboarding architecture provider earlier this year.
Our entire team not only directly reviewed user feedback on a daily basis, but also shipped tons of product improvements and upgrades since Mainnet last December, including UI and UX, bridging, speed, on/off-ramping, etc.
As for the compliance front, we set ourselves apart from other decentralised exchanges or swap platforms by implementing AML, along with sanctions screening rules and policies to make sure users are interacting with a “clean” platform.
Our measures include transaction monitoring, wallet screening, and trade surveillance tools.
The goal is to prevent malicious actors from interacting with the platform, without creating unnecessary barriers for legitimate retail investors at the same time.
However, I’d say that maintaining this balance while navigating the rapid evolution of the industry and the regulatory landscape is something we’ll have to deal with constantly in the near future.
Invezz: Grvt Strategies is built fully on-chain and uses smart contracts for automation and transparency. How do you ensure security and trust for users, and what unique technological choices were core to your architecture?
Good question. I’ll start with our hybrid architecture, which was an intentional and carefully deliberated decision when we founded Grvt.
As you may know, Grvt is a private Layer 2 chain that settles directly to Ethereum. From the start, the rationale was to leverage ZKsync technology capable of building this hybrid model, and address major risks we observed with the crypto market, such as:
- Counterparty risk, so that the ZK structure provides a self-custodial solution
- CEX-like experience with DEX transparency, where everyday transactions are processed off-chain for high throughput and lower costs (Web2 or CEX model), and the on-chain functionality supports critical operations like final settlement and dispute resolution (on-chain / DeFi / DEX model)
- Protect trading alpha (which should be private and confidential, rather than full transparency as seen in DeFi maxi platforms) to avoid front running and MEVs
If you want a deep-dive analysis of our ZK model, I recommend visiting our blog, where we go into detail.
Apart from the architectural level that ensures security and trust, we also adopted a series of measures:
- Hybrid security that combines both Web2 and Web3 practices, such as two-factor authentication, wallet sig, and role-based access control typically available in Web2
- Smart contract audit
Invezz: Industry-wise, what do you see as the biggest pain points for retail and institutional investors when it comes to investing, from both technological and behavioural perspectives? How does Grvt Strategies aim to overcome these?
For starters, retail investors have no access to high-quality investment strategies or products.
These are generally reserved for institutions, hedge funds, family offices, or ultra-wealthy individuals.
It doesn’t help that the barriers to entry are high. Minimum investment requirements are often too expensive for everyday investors.
Also, discovery and curation are fragmented and opaque, with the lack of a clear, systematic way to explore available investment products and strategies.
These offerings are often bundled into complex portfolios by banks or fund managers, reducing transparency and making understanding even more difficult.
I’ll give you a more vivid example. When I was a trader at top institutions, I saw firsthand that hedge funds and large players had access to investment opportunities that simply weren’t available elsewhere.
Outside of work, I couldn’t access those same opportunities as an individual. That experience really exposed the gap between institutional privilege and retail reality for me.
For institutions, the operational process remains a headache, and shooting up overhead costs a lot.
Many touch points of some critical function areas still have to be managed and done manually, from fund redemption and due diligence to risk controls and so on.
Although DeFi had various great innovations in breaking down the traditional barriers, particularly when it comes to more open access, a lot of barriers remain.
Curation is lacking, the entire industry remains niche, and the target audience is only a very small portion of the population who are willing to invest better and more easily.
Invezz: With increasing institutional interest in on-chain finance, what trends or obstacles do you foresee for broader adoption over the next year? What is Grvt’s strategy for attracting industry-leading strategy managers and institutional participation on your platform?
I feel the biggest trends that will significantly shape the future of the industry are the development of stablecoin infrastructure and Real-World Assets (RWAs).
I’m not saying there aren’t other notable aspects, like payment infrastructure, wallet developments, and AI, to name a few, but those two, in my view, are at the center of all that’s happening because they are the foundational layer for Wall Street to come on board.
Then, regulatory uncertainty and the establishment of international standards will continue to be a top challenge.
It’s unclear which jurisdictions will lead this charge and to what extent institutions will need to follow specific regulations and policies.
This makes it difficult to create a level playing field for all parties who want to participate, including both TradFi and DeFi players.
It seems to be especially true for RWAs, which directly involve highly regulated TradFi features. As a result, projects like ours are still struggling to get a clear definition of these regulations moving forward.
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