UAE’s Further Ventures pours $19M in hybrid DEX GRVT

UAE sovereign wealth fund backed investment firm Further Ventures has co-led a $19 million Series A funding round in Grvt a decentralized exchange for onchain financial privacy powered by zero knowledge ￰0￱ Series A round was led by both ZKsync

and Further Ventures both of whom had either partnered or invested in earlier in ￰1￱ other investors included Eigen Cloud (formerly EigenLayer) a verifiable cloud platform that lets developers build any application; and 500 Global (formerly 500 Startups) a venture capital firm with $2.3B in AUM investing in founders with a global outlook building fast-growing ￰2￱ January 2025 Further Ventures

had invested $5 million in GRVT noting that the investment would be utilized to drive GRVT’s Middle East expansion and license ￰3￱ per the press release the investment strengthens Grvt’s pioneering position as the global blueprint for the future of finance accelerating its mission to disrupt the fragmented onchain finance ecosystem by addressing longstanding industry challenges

including privacy vulnerabilities security scalability and ￰4￱ Al Hammadi Managing Partner

Further Ventures noted that the firm was committed to backing the next generation of financial infrastructure from Abu Dhabi to the ￰5￱ emphasized that Grvt’s application of zero-knowledge proofs is reflective of how cutting edge cryptography can underpin markets at institutional ￰6￱ August Ethereum’s onchain volume reached over $320 billion its highest level since ￰7￱ also projects the DeFi sector to surge from $32.36 billion in 2025 to over $1.5 trillion by ￰8￱ is working to solve issues faced by decentralized platforms

such as the issues of whale hunting maximum extractable value attacks and others which lead to billion of dollars in losses ￰9￱ 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 ￰10￱ for the remaining funds they will be used to support community initiatives and talent acquisition to drive global ￰11￱ Yea

co-founder and CEO at Grvt stated that previously onchain finance had been held back by privacy gaps that expose users to ￰12￱ 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 ￰13￱ as HTTPS took the internet mainstream by adding a layer of trust and privacy ZK will do the same for ￰14￱ 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 ￰15￱ also ensures Ethereum-level ￰16￱ ZK proofs L2 transactions inherit Ethereum-level ￰17￱ 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 ￰18￱ any transaction were invalid the proof would fail and Ethereum would reject ￰19￱ 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 ￰20￱ 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 ￰21￱ 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

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