Axis

A quant desk, wrapped into a dollar

Axis is a synthetic dollar protocol that earns on delta-neutral arbitrage between venues and stacks the profit into a dollar asset USDx.

In other words, the team runs market-neutral strategies — funding-rate arbitrage, CEX-DEX, cross-exchange spot, and cross-currency arbitrage. The yield gets wrapped into a token whose value grows over time.

The protocol has its own transparency dashboard and proof of reserves through Accountable.

So: a synthetic dollar, delta-neutral yield, and points toward a future token. The team ran $100M from existing LPs to stress-test the engine before opening it up.

The subtle point of the delta-neutral here is that the engine lives off-chain. The arbitrage runs on exchanges and on-chain you only see the wrapper — USDx and its staking version, sUSDx. You can't verify all the trading with smart contracts; the team suggests trusting Accountable's dashboard.

Three products in total:

• USDx — a dollar asset.

• sUSDx — a staked version of USDx whose value grows over time.

• Origin Vault — a public entry into the same strategy through a USDT deposit on Ethereum. This is the one launching now.

Further down the roadmap they promise yield products on BTC and gold, plus a platform with RFQ liquidity for any-to-any conversion.

About the team and their background

Strong quant, TradFi and DeFi background, mostly from the Alphanonce quant hedge fund and QCP Capital:

• Chris Kim — Co-Founder & CEO. First employee at QCP Capital. Ran the most profitable arbitrage book, cross-currency/stablecoin MM. Co-founder of Alphanonce, which grew to $400M AUM.

• Changsung Kim — Co-Founder & CIO. Co-founder of Alphanonce. Seoul National University. Experience in quant research, worked at Trexquant and others.

• Justin Im — Co-Founder & CTO. Former CTO of Alphanonce.

• Jimmy Xue — Co-Founder & COO. Co-founder of Velodrome. Earlier a data scientist / advanced analytics at Blackstone. Also has MEV experience.

• Ashwin Khosa — CSO. Ex-VP of BD at Ondo Finance, Institutional BD/Strategy at Tether/Bitfinex, where he worked for over 5 years

• Hyeonshik Ji — Head of Operations, from Alphanonce.

Investors: a $5M round led by Galaxy Ventures, with OKX Ventures, CMT Digital, FalconX, GSR, Maven 11, CMS Holdings, and Marc Zeller taking part. Steakhouse Financial and Serotonin joined later.

The track record is the pitch

On July 29, pre-deposits go live for the Axis Origin Vault. They accept USDT on Ethereum, promise 10–20% base APY, and points with multipliers for early capital.

Early depositors get a 2x multiplier. The campaign cap is $50M.

This wide range comes from the team's love for the historical stats of their management record and the early work of the Axis fund. You can see a detailed year-by-year report here. The returns aren't stable, but they rarely dropped below 10%.

https://docs.axis.to/performance-and-track-record/historical-track-record/long-run-composite

As we're used to by now, the team doesn't disclose the tokenomics or any info on the points supply. But either way, the offer looks good — a decent yield and points on top.

The Origin Vault opens July 29

The mechanics are simple, like every one of these pre-deposits:

1. Get USDT ready on Ethereum.

2. On July 29, go to the official Axis site and connect your wallet.

3. Deposit USDT into the Origin Vault.

4. Staking will probably give more points. We'll find out later.

Summary

There's a team with names behind the project: a Velodrome co-founder, people from Tether, Ondo, QCP, Alphanonce. A relatively modest $5M round that got 4x oversubscribed, led by Galaxy Ventures with OKX Ventures, FalconX, GSR, Maven 11, and Marc Zeller taking part, plus backing from Ceffu, Serotonin, and Steakhouse Financial.

I can't recommend putting in a big part of your deposit, but you probably shouldn't just skip past it either. I don't expect strong hype here. I think they might raise for a while, like it was with Tori.