Guest: Ashwin, Chief Strategy Officer of Axis
Edited by: momo, ChainCatcher
From trader to entrepreneur, the path of Axis founder Chris has always revolved around one core: seeking real and sustainable returns in the market.
As the first employee of QCP Capital, he personally experienced the wild growth of crypto trading; later, the quantitative fund Alphanonce, which he co-founded, managed over $400 million in assets over five years, achieving an annualized return of over 35%. This experience gave him a deep understanding that the risk management framework and capital efficiency of traditional finance are precisely the most scarce elements in the current DeFi ecosystem.
He saw an industry filled with unsustainable token incentives, opaque "black box" returns, and users forced to compromise between security and ease of use. These problems did not deter him; instead, they became the starting point for founding Axis: Could institutional-grade arbitrage strategies be used to generate stable and transparent returns on-chain?
Thus, Axis was born. Through strategies like cross-market arbitrage, it mints synthetic assets (such as USDx), which users can stake to earn yields, without relying on directional market bets or inflationary incentives—the only source is capturing real, existing price differences.
This vision has recently gained the attention of capital. Axis has completed a $5 million private funding round led by Galaxy Ventures, which was oversubscribed by 4 times, with participation from several well-known institutions including OKX Ventures and FalconX.
According to Axis, the protocol plans to launch on the Plasma chain and is currently in the non-public test trading phase, making final preparations for the public launch. Following USDx, Axis will also consider gradually launching yield-bearing assets based on Bitcoin and gold.
In this exclusive interview with ChainCatcher, the Axis team shared in-depth their entrepreneurial logic, product architecture, risk philosophy, and thoughts on the future of on-chain finance. The following is the transcript of the dialogue.
From Quantitative Fund to DeFi, What Opportunity Does Axis See?
1. ChainCatcher: The core team of Axis has a complete background from top trading desks to quantitative hedge funds. How has this background shaped your unique perspective on DeFi? What is the core insight behind the leap from Alphanonce to Axis?
Axis : Founder Chris, as an early member of QCP Capital, experienced the initial development stage of the crypto trading market; subsequently, the co-founded Alphanonce is a quantitative hedge fund that has been operating continuously since 2018, managing hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, and achieving an annualized return of over 35%. Currently, Alphanonce and Axis are two completely separate legal entities.
This shared experience has given us a dual perspective. On the one hand, we have deeply internalized the standards of capital efficiency, rigorous risk control, and systematic execution required by traditional finance and quantitative investment; on the other hand, we have also personally felt that although the emerging DeFi ecosystem has amazing capital formation capabilities and user accessibility, its profit models are often built on unsustainable incentives and普遍 lack transparency, causing users to struggle to balance security, returns, and ease of use.
The motivation for founding Axis was that we saw an opportunity for integration,即 borrowing capital efficiency from traditional finance; borrowing capital formation and user accessibility from DeFi; and borrowing the principle of competitiveness and advantage from quantitative trading.
We believe there is an opportunity to build financial products that were previously impossible, by combining institutional-grade infrastructure with the open nature of DeFi to solve some practical problems.
2. ChainCatcher: How was the core team of Axis built? What was your philosophy when forming the founding team? To build a top-notch "arbitrage engine", what three capabilities do you think are essential?
Axis :Our team brings together veterans from several top companies in the digital asset space, with backgrounds spanning traditional finance (like BlackRock, Blackstone), stablecoin issuance (Tether), trading (QCP Capital, Alphanonce), and DeFi (Ondo, Maple, Velodrome).
Our philosophy for team building is clear: to bring together world-class talent from DeFi, traditional finance, trading, and asset issuance to build unprecedented financial products and solve real problems.
There are many practical problems we want to solve, such as the unsustainable phenomenon in DeFi that relies on token incentives rather than real yields; opaque yield products where users don't know where the money comes from; crowded basis trading strategies that dilute returns; and the situation where users struggle to have both institutional-grade security/infrastructure and DeFi ease of use.
As for the three essential capabilities for an arbitrage engine, I believe they are world-class engineering capabilities, ensuring extremely low latency, direct market access, and top-tier exchange connectivity.
Secondly, institutional-grade risk management, which is the foundation for winning trust, maintaining resilience, and capital efficiency.
Finally, institutional-grade security practices, including robust custody solutions, multi-signature controls, audited smart contracts, and operational security processes that meet institutional standards.
Building Institutional Arbitrage-Driven Yield-Bearing Dollars
3. ChainCatcher: If you had to introduce Axis to someone unfamiliar with DeFi in one sentence, what would you say? What is the fundamental difference between it and typical DeFi yield protocols?
Axis :Axis is a protocol that issues dollar-pegged assets (USDx) supported by institutional-grade arbitrage strategies, and users can earn yields by staking (sUSDx).
Our most fundamental difference is that the yield comes from real cross-market arbitrage, not from unsustainable token incentives or directional market bets.
Additionally, the team has a proven track record of institutional trading,能够提供不依赖于资金费率或市场周期的“全天候”回报, and we always prioritize transparency, employing third-party independent verification mechanisms.
4. ChainCatcher: What do you mean by "Beyond Basis"? How does the yield engine adapt to different market environments?
Axis:Axis's core philosophy is "Beyond Basis". Although basis trading itself is a reliable strategy, the current market is already too crowded. Our breakthrough lies in not only using spot inventory for arbitrage but also deploying it to meet real operational capital needs, especially liquidity infrastructure needs, thereby allowing us to capture opportunities in a broader strategic dimension.
Our engine monitors liquidity, opportunity windows, and preset risk parameters in multiple markets in real-time, automatically dynamically allocating capital to the most advantageous strategies (whether cross-venue arbitrage, cross-asset arbitrage, or other convergence trades). This process is fully automated, supplemented by 24/7 manual monitoring. It is this dynamic adaptability that ensures we can provide relatively stable and sustainable returns even in different market environments such as high volatility, deleveraging, or sideways markets.
5. ChainCatcher: Arbitrage is theoretically low-risk, but in practice, many strategies fail in extreme market conditions. What tail risks are you most concerned about? What risk management mechanisms are in place?
Axis :We are most concerned about tail risks主要包括 counterparty or exchange risk, and liquidity crunch risk.
Our risk control mechanisms include a strict risk budget framework, due diligence on trading venues, collateral, and counterparties, and a full set of institutional-grade risk management practices brought from hedge fund experience.
Most importantly, our team has years of live experience managing large amounts of capital and has established complete contingency plans to manage and mitigate various extreme situations.
6. ChainCatcher: Many collapsed yield-bearing stablecoin protocols were later exposed to not have implemented the claimed delta-neutral strategies, what fundamental flaws in "transparency" does this暴露 in the industry? How does Axis fundamentally solve this problem to make yields truly credible?
Axis :This exposes a core problem: transparency is often an afterthought in many projects, not a first principle. They made unverifiable promises.
Axis puts transparency first from the beginning. We insist on third-party independent attestation, not just our own word. Through our proof of reserves, users will eventually be able to verify on-chain themselves whether our asset reserves are sufficient, whether the strategies maintain true delta neutrality, and historical performance data, all of which are independently verified by a third party before being put on-chain.
Our goal is to enable users to directly verify our reserves, delta-neutral status, and performance on-chain in the future.
7. ChainCatcher: In the current regulatory environment, yield-bearing dollars are in a gray area. Did you consider future compliance when designing the product? How?
Axis :We are indeed building with the future in mind. We emphasize transparency, third-party attestation, and verifiable on-chain data, which is not only to build user trust. We also believe that when regulatory frameworks become clearer, protocols that prioritize accountability and provide clear audit trails will be in a better position. We are preparing ourselves for that.
8. ChainCatcher: You plan to launch the Origin Vault on Plasma. Why choose Plasma?
Axis :Choosing the Plasma chain is mainly based on ecosystem considerations, because there is sufficient USDT liquidity there, a vibrant USDT DeFi ecosystem, the second-largest Aave market, and all the key infrastructure we need is already well established.
9. ChainCatcher: What stage is your product development currently in? What milestones or updates can the community look forward to in the near future?
Axis :We are currently in the non-public test trading phase, making final preparations for the public launch.
Upcoming milestones to watch for include that we will陆续发布更多关于透明度的更新, and the community will have the opportunity to participate in the Origin Vault later this year.
Long-term Vision: From Arbitrage Engine to Liquidity Infrastructure
11. ChainCatcher: In your opinion, what is the most difficult thing to replicate in true "on-chain institutional finance"? What will ultimately be Axis's moat?
Axis :I believe "on-chain institutional finance" means that the DeFi capital market needs to meet the standards of Wall Street and institutional trading. Of course, it is not a simple复制, but a fusion of new technologies, new products, new interfaces with the norms and principles required by institutional finance.
Axis's moat comes from several aspects, namely the capital pooled from on-chain depositors, the trading system built by our team based on experience, and our organizational culture.
But the most difficult thing to replicate is the combination of these three, especially the trading system and culture that drives continuous evolution.
12. ChainCatcher: If the next market cycle experiences an extreme bull or bear market, which part of the Axis system do you think will be tested first?
Axis :The first to be stress-tested would likely be collateral risk management, counterparty solvency, and our ability to capture spreads during剧烈波动. And these are precisely the key moments where our institutional-grade risk management framework needs to demonstrate its value.
13. ChainCatcher: What is Axis's strategic focus for the next year? What is the long-term vision?
Axis :The near-term strategic focus is clear: ensure the successful launch of the product and introduce it to the broader crypto ecosystem in a way that is easy to understand and participate in.
Long-term, our vision is to transform trading inventory into "liquidity infrastructure" within the ecosystem, not limited to pure arbitrage, but to meet the real and diverse capital needs of this ecosystem.
