Altura: A Multi-Strategy Yield From Gold Trading, Funding Rates, and Private Credit | DeFi Frontier

Altura is a multi-strategy yield vault that has been live since December, deploying capital across market making, funding rate arbitrage, and real world assets with the explicit goal of reducing correlation risk across yield sources. Matthew Penuk leads the team, which has traditional finance backgrounds including members from PwC and Fidelity, where Penuk spent three years working on tokenizing money market funds and bonds and helped develop a standard with the International Capital Markets Authority.

At the time of recording, OKX represented approximately 41 percent of AVLT and served as the primary venue for both funding rate arbitrage and market making. The gold trade through a company called Inessa represented roughly 39 to 40 percent of AVLT, while a private credit allocation through Fasimera MF1 sat at around two percent. Funding rate arbitrage has been scaled back because market volumes have not been favorable, and Altura's policy for all crypto strategies is to remain delta neutral and avoid directional price risk.

The gold trade involves a commodities desk in Ghana that buys gold directly from mines and sells it to buyers in Dubai or Turkey at spot price, with returns generated through economies of scale rather than price spread, producing a base yield of approximately 19 percent. Brinks takes physical possession of the gold and transports it to the airport, Emirates is the primary carrier, and a logistics company called Zeal coordinates the trade primarily for Inessa. Each leg of transport carries its own insurance covering events such as armored truck raids or plane crashes, and Brinks is also used on the receiving end after delivery.

Fasimera is building its funds as on-chain native products rather than tokenizing existing funds as an afterthought, and its MF1 product currently yields between eight and eleven percent. The Fasimera allocation is deliberately held at two percent until a sustainable low-risk path to reaching Altura's hurdle rate of approximately 20 percent is identified. The private credit strategy referenced in connection with Fasimera has an approximately eleven-year track record, is unleveraged, and focuses on short-term invoice receivables. Both the gold trade and the Fasimera private credit strategies are considered uncorrelated from crypto markets.

Altura holds protocol-level insurance covering smart contract exploits, employee theft, and adverse events including an OKX hack, with current coverage at approximately 10 million dollars and plans to raise it to 15 million dollars. Penuk acknowledged this does not represent full vault coverage and noted that Altura grows faster than it can get insured because underwriting takes time, creating a persistent coverage gap. Penuk attributed the majority of crypto hacks to poor operational security including weak key management and social engineering, which led Altura to hire two or three dedicated OPSEC security experts. The vault has completed multiple smart contract audits including two with Onchain in the current year, with results published on a transparency dashboard.

The vault contract is deployed on HyperEVM and uses LayerZero with Enzo as the cross-chain bridge, supporting Ethereum mainnet and multiple other EVM networks. On Pendle, the AVLT pool held approximately 24 million dollars at the time of recording, with a base yield for USDT0 depositors of 19.29 percent and a total yield including Altura incentives of approximately 29 percent. The YT leverage on the pool was approximately 17x, and the fixed PT yield was 13.6 percent, which is below the base yield earned by simply holding AVLT. A Morpho market for AVLT allows users to borrow against the token and loop into more exposure, and those markets were frequently reaching near full capacity at the time of recording.

Altura runs a points program called Yield Run with a current prize pool of one hundred thousand dollars in AVLT distributed via leaderboard, rewarding users for holding AVLT, referring depositors, holding YT or PT tokens on Pendle, borrowing and lending on Morpho, and completing in-app quests. Penuk said Altura plans to transition from a pure vaults protocol toward something more akin to a neobank, with new products expected in the near term.