By the time Hong Yea made the transition into crypto, he had already spent years inside the world’s most powerful financial institutions, from Credit Suisse to Goldman Sachs. But in the spring of 2022, something shifted. He wasn’t just thinking about the future of finance. He saw it. And it didn’t look like Wall Street.
At a crypto conference in Barcelona, he found himself surrounded by builders, engineers, and protocol designers, but noticed a glaring gap.
“They were brilliant,” he tells CEOWorld magazine, “but very few had real experience in traditional finance. That looked like a perfect opportunity for me to step in.”
Yea had long wrestled with the inefficiencies of the system he helped operate. For everyday people, building wealth was unnecessarily hard. Financial products were complex. Trading environments were inaccessible. Knowledge was siloed. And most critically, access was limited to a privileged few.
“Barriers like high investment minimums, opaque processes, and exclusionary eligibility requirements shut out the majority,” he says. “You could be smart, disciplined, and ready, and still be locked out.”
For institutions, the problem wasn’t access, but scale. “Trust can’t be automated in traditional finance,” he explains. “So instead, you get these layers of legal overhead, compliance checks, operational burden, all designed to compensate for the lack of trust baked into the system.”
And that burden, he argues, ends up getting passed downstream. “Those overhead costs turn into higher fees, tougher terms, or minimum investments that most people can’t meet.”
Crypto, he believes, offered a clean break.
“Blockchain can automate trust. That’s the breakthrough. It removes friction, reduces cost, and allows the system to scale with fewer middlemen,” Yea says. “It’s like a smarter internet. Instead of just passing data, you’re embedding logic directly into the pipes. That’s a game-changer for an industry like finance, where trust has always been the limiting factor.”
From the Inside Looking Out
During his years as a trader, Yea saw the structural divide between retail and institutional finance play out in real time.
“Institutions had access to deals that never touched the public markets,” he says. “You’d see hedge funds participating in exclusive rounds, structured products, or strategies that weren’t even visible to individuals.”
Outside of work, he realized that even with his experience, those same products were inaccessible to him as an individual.
“There’s a structural disjoint in how finance evolved,” he adds. “Not necessarily unfair in intention, but definitely skewed in access.”
That reality became the foundation for Grvt, the company he co-founded to rebuild financial infrastructure for a more inclusive generation of investors.
Redesigning Access Without Reinventing the Wheel
Yea is quick to note that Grvt isn’t trying to blow up the system. He sees the mission more as a technical and cultural evolution, one that mirrors the way other parts of life have become simpler, faster, and more inclusive.
“Everything around us has become frictionless, communication, payments, information,” he says. “But when it comes to growing wealth, we’re still stuck with systems that were designed decades ago.”
That’s where Grvt comes in.
“Our goal is to make the core actions of wealth-building, trading, investing, compounding returns, radically more accessible,” he says. “We don’t want to replace TradFi or DeFi. We want to evolve them.”
Why Everyone’s Still Getting It Wrong
Solving for access isn’t as simple as opening the gates. That might work in e-commerce, Yea says, but not in finance.
“You’re dealing with complex trust mechanisms, custodians, brokers, regulators, counterparties,” he says. “It’s a layered system designed to protect, but also exclude.”
DeFi has offered a partial fix. “It’s been revolutionary in terms of breaking open access,” he says. “But it’s not easy to use. For most people, smart contracts and self-custody are confusing. Even I found parts of it hard to navigate at first.”
Yea believes the bottleneck is now usability, not innovation. “The tech is here. But until the experience is simple and the risk clearly understood, it’ll stay a niche for crypto natives.”
The Power of Invisible Advantage
Earlier this year, Grvt rolled out a feature called RPI Orders, a structural tweak designed to quietly tilt the odds back toward the average investor.
“Let’s break it down,” Yea says. “Algorithms dominate markets today. They’re fast, precise, and emotionless. They can trade across hundreds of assets in milliseconds. Retail just can’t keep up.”
Market makers provide the liquidity, posting buy and sell prices, while market takers respond. But in high-speed environments, aggressive takers (especially HFTs) can pick off market makers before they can hedge.
“When that happens, makers quote less aggressively,” he explains. “That leads to worse prices for retail over time.”
RPI Orders change the game by creating a protected space. “Certain quotes are only visible to retail,” Yea says. “That gives makers the confidence to offer better prices without worrying about getting picked off.”
It might only save a fraction of a cent per trade, but over thousands of trades, it adds up. In traditional equities markets, similar programs have saved retail investors billions.
“This is about leveling the playing field, not with slogans, but with structural changes,” Yea says.
Trust, Rebuilt From the Ground Up
Given the damage done by past scandals, centralized exchange blowups, rug pulls in DeFi, exit scams, Yea knows trust won’t be won with marketing alone.
“We design trust into the product,” he says.
That means no middlemen. No ambiguous fees. All investment strategies on Grvt are governed by smart contracts, with self-custody, transparent parameters, and clearly defined risks.
But infrastructure isn’t enough. “We also made the call early on to be regulatory compliant,” he says. “We believe thoughtful regulation is what will bring the next 100 million people into this space.”
It’s also why Grvt doesn’t chase hype.
“We’re not trying to be the trendiest protocol. We’re trying to build infrastructure that lasts.”
What’s Coming Next
On July 15, Grvt launched its most ambitious product to date, a compliant, peer to peer onchain investment marketplace that opens up institutional-grade strategies to retail investors.
“This is a big one,” Yea says. “We’re talking about strategies from hedge funds, quant firms, and top-performing individual managers. Previously, these were only accessible to institutions. Now, anyone can participate, without needing to know the right people or meet a massive minimum.”
The launch is just one part of a broader roadmap focused on three pillars: access, curation, and simplicity.
- Access: From real-world assets to options markets, Grvt wants to bring institutional tools to retail users, powered by strategy providers with proven performance.
- Curation: The goal is to help users cut through noise. Grvt is building a peer-to-peer system for discovering, validating, and following high-quality trading strategies.
- Simplicity: From onboarding to trading flows, the experience is being rebuilt for normal people, not crypto insiders or finance pros. “Growing wealth should feel like booking a flight or sending a message,” Yea says.
The company is also working on a string of upcoming products: a new spot market, an options platform, real-world asset integration, unified margin, and even an AI-powered fund of funds.
Licensing is on the table too. “We’re actively exploring expansion in North America and the EU,” Yea confirms.
But he’s also quick to temper expectations.
“Grvt provides the infrastructure. We don’t guarantee performance or outcomes. Every strategy comes from third-party providers. The risk is real, and users need to understand that.”
The disclaimers are clear. So is the vision.
“We want a world where access to wealth-building tools isn’t limited by who you know or how much you start with,” Yea says. “That’s what drives us. That’s what Grvt is here to build.”
