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Arkis, the prime broker that manages margins across CeFi, DeFi, and TradFi as one portfolio, has established a governance board with Spark, one of the largest on-chain capital allocators and Arkis' strategic investor and anchor lender. No contract can be deployed or upgraded without the board's multisig approval, so Arkis itself no longer has unilateral control over its own production code.
This is the enforcement half of a verifiable release process built for institutional lenders. The other half, attestation, came first. Arkis worked with Spearbit, the security research firm behind reviews for Morpho, Coinbase, Optimism, and Liquid Collective, to build the first fully verifiable, tamper proof provenance record for institutional smart contracts. Every release carries signatures from the developer, the build infrastructure, and security auditors, so any counterparty can verify the record independently.
The board now enforces it. When Arkis proposes a release, the board checks provenance and the attestation chain against release policies agreed in advance, then adds the multisig signatures every on-chain contract upgrade requires. An independent security firm verifies the code; institutions with capital at stake approve what ships. Spark is the board's first member, and the seat is structured to expand as more institutional lenders come on.
"The governance board finishes what we set out to build: a release process that doesn't depend on trusting Arkis. We made attestation independent first, so anyone can confirm that what runs in production is exactly what was built and reviewed. Now enforcement is independent too. We produce the release and the attestations, and the board checks the whole chain and decides whether it ships."
For funds lending through Arkis, this is the point: counterparty risk is reduced in a way no audit report can match, with controls enforced on-chain and checkable directly during due diligence. Arkis and Spark intend this to become the standard for how institutional infrastructure is governed.
"Spark coordinates capital within governance approved strategies and defined multi-layered risk frameworks, and that discipline can't stop at the strategy level. It has to cover the infrastructure the capital runs on. A seat on the Arkis governance board means every release is independently attested and signed before it moves to production, which can be verified. That's the operating model institutional credit requires."
Arkis has deployed more than $200M in institutional credit with zero bad debt since 2022, across multiple market cycles. The governance board extends that track record to the code itself: every change to the smart contracts holding client collateral now requires a verified attestation chain and the board's approval before going live.
About Spark
Spark is a decentralized finance protocol designed to allocate stablecoin liquidity across on-chain lending and yield opportunities while maintaining transparency and user control of assets. Rather than acting as a custodial asset manager, Spark operates programmable vault infrastructure that allocates liquidity across lending markets and other strategies according to predefined rules.
Through products including SparkLend, Spark Savings, and the Spark Liquidity Layer, Spark deploys stablecoin liquidity across decentralized finance. The platform also provides institutional access through solutions such as Spark Prime and Spark Institutional Lending.
For more information, visit
https://spark.fi | https://x.com/sparkfinance | https://docs.spark.fi/
About Arkis
Arkis is the institutional prime broker for digital markets that margins CeFi, DeFi, and TradFi as one portfolio, delivering credit, execution, and DMA as a single product. Backed by Spark, Arkis has deployed over $200M in institutional credit with zero bad debt since 2022.
To learn more about the implementation, please read the technical blog post ‘How we enforce every Arkis release’
