The Arkis Manifesto
Arkis's approach to credit, risk, and prime brokerage in programmable markets, and why these principles matter as financial systems converge.
Most credit in digital markets still operates on fragmented logic.
This is why credit is hard. You cap your upside, fix your principal and interest, and still discover there are countless ways to lose capital. Most of those risks only reveal themselves after something breaks.
Every mature financial market eventually learns this lesson. Credit is not about believing things will go well. It’s about ensuring that when they don’t, the system still functions: rules, margin, collateral, liquidation mechanics, and risk limits that operate without negotiation or trust.
Digital markets are now learning the same lesson.
Smart contracts and decentralized infrastructure promised a programmatic financial system, one governed by deterministic rules rather than relationships. A trust-minimized world where outcomes are enforced by mathematics. It was a powerful idea. In practice, it remains unfinished.
Today's DeFi ecosystem resembles an early-stage financial experiment, innovative in form but fragile in its foundations. Vaults often operate as yield black boxes. Capital is withdrawn into unmanaged trading environments. Margin calls are discretionary. Liquidations are manual, delayed when volatility peaks, or simply impossible. Much of the yield has been driven by incentive schemes rather than native fundamental returns, with pricing frameworks built on utilization curves, static ratios, or counterparty trust instead of exposure, volatility, and liquidity.
The tools designed to remove trust have ended up demanding more of it.
It’s a natural phase of market formation. The Wild West always precedes standardization. But it does mean that traditional financial institutions cannot meaningfully plug into crypto yet, not because they lack interest, but because there is no institutional interface for risk, margin, and liquidation that works consistently across assets, venues, and chains.
Arkis was built for exactly this moment.
Since the Bitcoin whitepaper, the industry has attempted to rebuild finance from first principles. That effort is now converging with the real world. On September 8, 2025, Nasdaq filed SR-NASDAQ-2025-072 with the SEC, proposing tokenized settlement for equities and ETPs on the same order books as their traditional counterparts. On January 19, 2026, NYSE announced developing a blockchain-based platform to enable 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs, combining traditional matching engines with private blockchains for instant settlement and stablecoin funding, offering continuous access beyond traditional hours. Market utilities like DTCC are publishing tokenization playbooks. Regulators are actively debating on-chain settlement for high-volume securities. Apollo launching tokenized products. Tether lending to oil companies. The direction is no longer theoretical.
Blockchains are becoming the next financial rails: transparent, programmable, always on. Issuance, trading, collateral, and settlement will increasingly be expressed in code. Equities, treasuries, commodities, credit, and real estate will be tokenized. Clearing, custody, and compliance will become real-time, verifiable, and global.
But none of this works without credit.
As returns compress and institutional capital arrives, leverage becomes structural. Capital efficiency determines who can compete. Risk management stops being optional and becomes a requirement. Markets do not scale on the sheer force of innovation. They scale on enforceable risk frameworks that keep innovation from crashing and burning. With Arkis, this approach is not theoretical. It's already operating in live markets, at scale.
The Capital-Efficient Prime Broker
Arkis is the prime broker built for how credit should actually work. Old-school risk management principles, but on the most efficient technological stack.
By unifying collateral, margin, and risk across CeFi and DeFi, Arkis delivers portfolio-level credit that is predictable, scalable, and aligned with institutional standards. Instead of fragmented leverage across venues, Arkis provides a single counterparty with consistent risk logic, unified margin, and deterministic liquidation behavior.
Funds can scale strategies with confidence, knowing that credit is priced by risk with predictable outcomes, not by venue constraints or discretionary controls.
Spark's decision to deploy liquidity through Arkis validates this framework in practice. It transforms risk architecture into real credit capacity, funding market-neutral, directional, and structured strategies at institutional scale.
This is the model professional trading firms expect, and the one markets converge toward.
As we announce this partnership, we also reflect on the foundations that made it possible:
Over $100M in credit provisioned to crypto-native institutions across market-neutral and directional strategies.
One of the most comprehensive marginable collateral universes in the market, including stables, majors, LSTs, LRTs, LP tokens, and other on-chain primitives, all priced under a portfolio margin model and supported within a unified margin account.
Live CeFi + DeFi portfolio margin, enabling cross-venue netting and up to 5× leverage without forced unwinds.
Zero bad liquidations across multiple volatility regimes.
Recognizing Arkis’s underwriting discipline, pricing methodology, and execution infrastructure, Spark has selected Arkis as its instrument, routing capital through unified margin rails to enable basis trades, structured credit, options overlays, and tokenized RWA financing at scale.
With this, Arkis becomes a core credit and risk platform not only for on-chain markets, but for global finance more broadly.
The same framework used today for crypto extends naturally to traditional prime brokerage: unified collateral across equities, bonds, CME derivatives, digital assets, and tokenized securities; consistent margin logic; and reporting suitable for banks, asset managers, and regulated institutions operating across on-chain and off-chain venues.
As assets become tokenized and settlement becomes programmable, markets will require infrastructure capable of underwriting portfolios regardless of where assets live.
Arkis is designed for this convergence.
Our organizing principle is simple: unified portfolio margin, unified collateral stack, unified liquidation logic, holistic risk picture, whether exposure comes from perps, tokenized T-bills, or a blue-chip equity settled on-chain.
Arkis is the calculator and the control plane: unified margin, real-time pricing, and liquidation logic across all venues.
Spark is the allocator: scaling credit through sustainable capital and enforcing the discipline that allows standards to hold at institutional scale.
Together, we are building the Prime Brokerage of Everything — a single hub that aggregates positions, nets risk, and finances portfolios across digital and traditional markets.
This is the future of prime brokerage. Systems that survive cycles, scale with real capital, and support the next phase of economic coordination.
Convergence is closer than it appears. Arkis is building the credit core that connects digital and traditional markets.