Guest: Ashwin, Chief Strategy Officer, Axis
Compiled by: momo, ChainCatcher
From trader to entrepreneur, Axis founder Chris's path has always revolved around one core: finding real and sustainable returns in the market.
As QCP Capital's first employee, he witnessed the explosive growth of crypto trading. Later, he co-founded the quantitative fund Alphanonce, which managed over $400 million in assets over five years, achieving an annualized return of over 35%. This experience made him realize that the risk control framework and capital efficiency of traditional finance are precisely the most scarce elements in the current DeFi ecosystem.
He saw the industry riddled with unsustainable token incentives, opaque "black boxes" of returns, and compromises users were forced to make between security and ease of use. These problems didn't stop him; instead, they became the starting point for founding Axis: Could institutional-grade arbitrage strategies generate stable and transparent returns on-chain?
Axis was thus born. Through strategies such as cross-market arbitrage, it mints synthetic assets (such as USDx), which users can stake to earn returns. It does not rely on market directional judgments, does not require inflationary incentives, and its only source is capturing real-world price differences.
This vision has recently attracted capital investment. 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 such as OKX Ventures and FalconX.
According to Axis, the protocol is planned to launch on the Plasma chain and is currently in a private testing phase, with final preparations underway for a public launch. Following USDx, Axis will also consider gradually launching yield-generating assets based on Bitcoin and gold.
In this exclusive interview with ChainCatcher, the Axis team shared their entrepreneurial logic, product architecture, risk philosophy, and thoughts on the future of on-chain finance. The following is a transcript of the interview.
From quantitative funds to DeFi, what opportunities does Axis see?
1. ChainCatcher: The Axis core team has extensive experience spanning top trading desks and quantitative hedge funds. How has this background shaped your unique perspective on DeFi? What are the core insights behind this leap from Alphanonce to Axis?
Axis: Founder Chris, as an early member of QCP Capital, experienced the early development of the crypto trading market; he subsequently co-founded Alphanonce, 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 independent 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 experienced that although the emerging DeFi ecosystem has amazing capital formation capabilities and user accessibility, its profit model is often based on unsustainable incentives and generally suffers from a lack of transparency, making it difficult for users to achieve a balance between security, returns, and ease of use.
The motivation for creating Axis was that we saw an opportunity for integration: learning from capital efficiency in traditional finance; learning from capital formation and user accessibility in DeFi; and learning from competitive advantage principles in 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 Axis's core team built? What were your principles when assembling the founding team? To build a top-tier "arbitrage engine," what three capabilities do you consider 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 team's philosophy is clear: to bring together world-class talent in DeFi, traditional finance, trading, and asset issuance to create unprecedented financial products and solve real problems.
We aim to address many practical issues, such as the unsustainable phenomenon in DeFi that relies on token incentives rather than real yield; the lack of transparency in yield products, leaving users unsure of the source of their funds; overcrowding in basis trading strategies leading to diluted returns; and the dilemma users face between institutional-grade security/infrastructure and the ease of use of DeFi.
As for the three essential capabilities of an arbitrage engine, I believe the first is world-class engineering capabilities to ensure extremely low latency, direct market access, and top-tier exchange connectivity.
Secondly, institutional-level risk management is the foundation for gaining trust, maintaining resilience, and achieving capital efficiency.
Finally, there are institutional-grade security practices, including robust hosting solutions, multisignature controls, audited smart contracts, and institutional-standard operational security processes.
Building an institutional-grade arbitrage-driven interest-bearing dollar
3. ChainCatcher: If you were to introduce Axis to someone unfamiliar with DeFi in one sentence, what would you say? What are the fundamental differences between it and typical DeFi yield protocols?
Axis: Axis is a protocol that issues USD-pegged assets (USDx) supported by institutional-grade arbitrage strategies, allowing users to earn rewards by staking (sUSDx).
Our fundamental difference lies in the fact that our profits come from genuine cross-market arbitrage, rather than unsustainable token incentives or directional market betting.
In addition, the team has a proven track record of institutional trading performance, enabling us to provide “24/7” returns that are independent of funding rates or market cycles, and we always prioritize transparency by employing independent third-party 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." While basis trading is a reliable strategy in itself, the current market is overcrowded. Our breakthrough lies in not only using spot inventory for arbitrage, but also deploying it to meet real working capital needs, particularly liquidity infrastructure needs, thereby enabling us to capture opportunities across a broader strategic dimension.
Our engine monitors liquidity, opportunity windows, and preset risk parameters across multiple markets in real time, automatically and dynamically allocating capital to the most advantageous strategies (whether it's cross-market arbitrage, cross-asset arbitrage, or other convergent trades). This process is fully automated, supplemented by 24/7 human monitoring. It is this dynamic adaptability that ensures we can deliver relatively stable and sustainable returns 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 under extreme market conditions. What tail risks are you most concerned about? What risk management mechanisms are in place?
Axis: The tail risks we are most concerned about mainly include counterparty or exchange risk, as well as the risk of liquidity crunch.
Our risk control mechanisms include a rigorous risk budgeting framework, due diligence on trading venues, collateral and counterparties, and a full suite of institutional-grade risk management practices derived from hedge fund experience.
Most importantly, our team has many years of experience managing large sums of money in real-money accounts and has developed comprehensive contingency plans to manage and mitigate various extreme situations.
6. ChainCatcher: Many collapsed interest-bearing stablecoin protocols were later exposed as not implementing the claimed delta-neutral strategy. What fundamental flaws in the industry's "transparency" does this reveal? How can Axis fundamentally solve this problem and make yields truly credible?
Axis: This exposes a core problem: transparency is often considered after the fact, rather than as a first principle in many projects. They make promises that cannot be verified.
Axis has prioritized transparency from the very beginning. We insist on independent third-party verification, rather than relying on our own assessments. Through our proof-of-reserve system, users will ultimately be able to verify on-chain whether our asset reserves are sufficient, whether our strategies maintain true delta neutrality, and our historical performance data—all of which have been independently verified by third parties before being recorded on-chain.
Our goal is to enable users to directly verify our reserves, delta-neutral state, and performance on-chain in the future.
7. ChainCatcher: Under the current regulatory environment, interest-bearing USD transactions are in a gray area. When designing your product, did you consider future compliance? How did you do so?
Axis: We are indeed building with the future in mind. We emphasize transparency, third-party verification, and verifiable on-chain data, not only to build user trust. We also believe that as regulatory frameworks become clearer, protocols that prioritize accountability and provide clear audit paths will be better positioned. We are preparing ourselves.
8. ChainCatcher: You plan to launch Origin Vault on Plasma. Why Plasma?
Axis: The Plasma chain was chosen primarily based on ecosystem considerations, as it has sufficient USDT liquidity, a vibrant USDT DeFi ecosystem, the second-largest Aave marketplace, and all the key infrastructure we need is already in place.
9. ChainCatcher: What stage is your product development currently at? What milestones or updates can the community follow in the near future?
Axis: We are currently in the private test trading phase and are making final preparations for the public launch.
Upcoming milestones include more updates on transparency and opportunities for community participation in 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 be Axis's ultimate competitive advantage?
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's not a simple copy, but rather an integration of new technologies, new products, and new interfaces with the guidelines and principles required by institutional finance.
Axis's moat comes from several aspects: the capital pooled by on-chain depositors, the trading system built by our team based on experience, and our organizational culture.
But what is most difficult to replicate is the combination of these three elements, especially the trading system and culture that can drive 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 areas to be stress-tested are likely collateral risk management, counterparty solvency, and our ability to capture spreads during periods of high volatility. These are precisely the areas where our institutional-grade risk management framework will need to demonstrate its value.
13. ChainCatcher: What are Axis's strategic priorities for the coming year? What is its long-term vision?
Axis: The recent strategic focus is clear: to ensure the successful launch of the product and to introduce it to the broader crypto ecosystem in an easy-to-understand and engaging way.
In the long term, our vision is to transform trading inventory into "liquidity infrastructure" within the ecosystem, not just for pure arbitrage, but to meet the real and diverse capital needs of this ecosystem.
