UAE’s Further Ventures Makes Bold $19M Bet on Hybrid DEX GRVT

Dubai's venture capital scene just placed its biggest crypto wager yet.

Funding Frenzy

Further Ventures commits $19 million to GRVT—a hybrid exchange blending centralized efficiency with decentralized security. The investment signals institutional confidence in next-gen trading infrastructure.

Architecture Breakthrough

GRVT's platform processes orders off-chain before settling on-chain, slashing gas fees while maintaining non-custodial protections. It cuts transaction costs by 80% compared to pure DEXs.

Market Positioning

The platform targets professional traders fleeing traditional CEX limitations—offering real leverage without KYC hurdles. It bypasses regulatory choke points while maintaining compliance through zk-proof verification.

Because sometimes the best way to reform finance is to build a parallel system that renders the old one obsolete—with better margins and no banker lunches.

Grvt will use $19 million to fast track product development

The funds raised will be used to fast track product development, engineering, including cross exchange vaults, options markets, and RWA integrations to consolidated the currently fragmented onchain financial landscape.

As for the remaining funds, they will be used to support community initiatives and talent acquisition to drive global expansion.

Hong Yea, co-founder and CEO at Grvt, stated that previously onchain finance had been held back by privacy gaps that expose users to exploitation. He added, “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 onchain finance world.”

Alex Gluchoski, co-founder and CEO at Matter Labs, commented: “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 demonstrates how ZK can bring onchain finance to mainstream.”

Grvt’s ZKsync technology ensures privacy, security and scalability

Grvt’s utilization of zksync allows it to offer privacy as it runs on ZKsync Validium L2 blockchain that validates L2 state without publishing it, thereby ensuring privacy, an issue that has long plagued most DeFi protocols.

It also ensures 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.

Finally in terms of scalability, the ZKsync Stack improves scalability by operating as a L2 solution, enabling the processing of significantly more transactions than Ethereum’s base layer while making transactions cheaper by handling them off-chain in bulk.

UAE Further Ventures, backed by sovereign wealth fund ADQ has a $200 million fund that has already been allocated to investments in the digital assets, fintech and technology ecosystem.

They have invested in digital asset custodian Zodia, as well as digital asset insurer Soter, digital asset infrastructure provider Fuze and earlier this year it also led a $16 million investment Series A round in French digital asset wallet and custodian developer, DFNS

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