Altura: Generating Transparent 20% APY

Every Monday, we zoom in on a specific project that offers unique and attractive opportunities to earn yield. We tell you exactly how we’re using the project to put money to work, and show how you can do the same.

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When it comes to earning yield in DeFi, it’s easy to get fooled.

“Phantom APYs” are a common occurrence. If a project’s yield looks too good to be true, it most likely is. 

In many cases, the yield beneath a high advertised APY is derived from dilutive token emissions, fragile and circular incentive systems, or directional bets on crypto assets dressed up as "strategies."

Altura, an emerging platform built on HyperEVM, brings an innovative solution to these issues. The project is built around 3 sources of yield – market making, funding rate arbitrage, and RWAs. Users can deposit funds for Altura’s yield-earning AVLT token, and track how the platform is allocating capital in real-time. This data is backed by cryptographic verification from Accountable Data, which publishes proofs every 15 minutes to ensure that Altura’s strategies are running as intended.

The process to begin earning is seamless:

The process is simple, but what happens after you deposit is where things get interesting.

Most retail investors share the same limited access to yield, primarily via staking, lending, and liquidity provision. 

Altura changes this by offering three independent, professional-grade strategies – all in the same product.

Altura's system continuously places buy and sell orders across major crypto exchanges, capturing the spread between them. Think of it like a currency exchange desk at an airport: not betting on which direction the dollar moves, just collecting the gap between the buy rate and the sell rate, thousands of times a day. 

The strategy maintains delta-neutral positioning, meaning price moves don't cause directional losses. Automated hedging engines neutralise inventory exposure in real time.

When traders pile into perpetual futures on one side of a trade, the protocol charges a fee – the “funding rate” – to keep the market balanced. 

Altura captures this by holding opposite positions simultaneously: long spot, short perpetual, or vice versa. This generates income regardless of price direction, just like the market making strategy.

For example, if BTC perpetual longs are paying 0.05% every 8 hours to shorts, Altura collects that 0.05% while staying market neutral. Annualised, persistent funding rates at that level generate meaningful yield with no directional exposure.

While the first two strategies are useful and reliable, Altura’s most unique value-add is their RWA yield.

Specifically, this yield is generated via physical gold arbitrage. Access to this type of strategy has always been very exclusive, but Altura brings it to the broader public via their connection with Inessa Holdings – a private commodities desk. Through Inessa, Altura is able to purchase gold at a discount and sell it on the open market at a higher price – passing the difference directly to AVLT holders. 

All physical gold movements are insured at market value and executed through internationally recognized logistics providers. The gold itself is tokenized on-chain through Aurellion, making every transaction visible and traceable – all the way up to delivery and settlement: 

In addition to being an impressive demonstration of onchain logistics transparency, Altura’s RWA strategy highlights how onchain platforms can incorporate sophisticated, uncorrelated yield strategies to DeFi.

Between these three strategies, Altura has been able to maintain an impressive APY of ~20%, far higher than many onchain platforms. This yield – plus extra rewards – is delivered to depositors via the Altura Vault. When you include the rewards, total APY is currently approaching 40%:

To start earning yield, anyone can deposit USDC or USDT into the app. While Altura is built on the HyperEVM network, deposits can be made directly from 5 different chains via LayerZero’s interchain infrastructure (HyperEVM, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon). 

Once you deposit, the protocol mints vault shares (AVLT) – Altura’s yield-generating token – and transfers them to you. As the strategies earn income, it’s directly passed through to AVLT.

Over time, the yield accrual is reflected in the token’s price; the process is similar to automatically reinvested dividends. 

The value is embedded directly in the share price, updated through authenticated oracle reporters with movement limits, freshness checks, and timestamp validation to prevent manipulation.

Withdrawals run on a dual-path system. If your withdrawal amount sits within the vault's available liquidity, it processes immediately with a 0.1% fee. If it exceeds available liquidity, it enters the current epoch queue and settles at zero fee when the epoch closes. No lock-ups. No penalties beyond that 0.1% for instant exits.

While Altura’s ability to generate yield is impressive, it’s crucial to know that assets are being handled responsibly and as intended. The team behind the yield is highly conscious of this fact, which is why transparency is their top priority. 

For example, Altura’s Strategies page provides real-time information on the exact amount of total reserves backing AVLT, as well as the allocation of funds within each strategy.

As you can see, Altura’s unique yield-generating strategies have caught the attention of DeFi users, resulting in nearly 20x growth since mid-January despite relatively weak overall market activity:

Additionally, Altura has partnered with Accountable Data, which posts zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) every 15 minutes to prove that their strategies and capital management are being implemented as intended. The Accountable dashboard shows data pertaining to AVLT collateralization, asset distribution, and more.

We’ve had our eye on AVLT as an attractive potential addition to our portfolio for a while, and last week we officially added it as a core yield-generating position. Here’s a step-by-step look at how we made the investment.

Immediately, the process was efficient due to Altura’s LayerZero integration; this allowed us to mint AVLT on the HyperEVM network by depositing USDC on Ethereum. Since we had very low funds available on HyperEVM at the time, this saved us the extra step of bridging money from another network. 

Next, you can see the slippage you’ll incur during the minting process – Altura automatically sets the limit at 1% to avoid potentially harmful activity.

Once we confirmed the transactions, all we had to do was wait for it to process (if you use Ethereum like we did, expect this to take ~30 minutes). Once it was finished, we received ~938.54 AVLT tokens at a price of $1.065 – and here’s the transaction to prove it!

Since we deposited $1,000 into Altura, we also qualified for extra YieldRun rewards, which are allocated based on total deposits and total time deposited. 

If you decide to deposit, you should also be aware that to qualify for the points bonuses below, your deposit must remain active for at least 72 hours. You can also earn additional points for referring depositors, connecting your X account, and more. These points may contribute to future airdrops of the Altura native token, and they can be tracked here.

Our decision to add AVLT to our portfolio is based solely on our own conviction in its ability to produce quality yield over time. If you’re considering this investment as well, you should be aware of all possible risks. While Altura has clearly prioritized safety and transparency, risks always remain – we’ve outlined a few below.

The RWA gold strategy involves real-world settlement cycles, in which capital can take up to 7 days to recall. Typically, this will not affect AVLT, but it could become a bottleneck during a worst-case scenario where user funds must be recovered. Altura has already begun to offset this risk with additional means of user protection. Last month, the team secured £5M of deposit insurance from Native Insurance – a top provider of insurance for projects and firms, both onchain and offchain, in the Web3 industry.

The funding rate strategy depends on markets being imbalanced enough to pay yield. In very quiet, perfectly balanced markets, that source compresses. Altura dynamically reallocates across strategies based on conditions, but no reallocation eliminates that dependency entirely.

There’s no guarantee that AVLT will continue to generate its remarkably high yield, particularly the portion represented by ALTU rewards, which may decrease or even disappear completely after the ALTU airdrop. 

However, we’re confident that the base APY of ~20% is a unique opportunity made possible by Altura’s fundamentally different model – consisting of market-making desks and exotic arbitrage strategies such as capturing the physical gold spread. As always, whether this type of asset is a good fit for your portfolio is up to you!