Neutral Trade is an on-chain quant strategy marketplace built by quant trading veterans in a top-three global hedge fund. The platform gives institutional allocators and individual investors access to professionally managed, systematic strategies spanning delta-neutral arbitrage, directional CTA, and Yield Enhancement Strategies — all deployed through NT vaults built on Solana.

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Running institutional-grade quant strategies on-chain creates a problem that most custody providers have never had to solve: how do you give professional trading teams the low-latency, programmatic access their strategies demand — while ensuring vault capital can never leave through an unintended path? With $48 million in TVL across an expanding suite of active strategies, Neutral Trade needed custody infrastructure that could hold these two requirements simultaneously, without compromise.

The Challenge: Governance at the Speed of DeFi

Multi-manager quant platforms operating on-chain face structural tensions that traditional custody was never designed to resolve. Trading teams need programmatic, high-frequency access to execute strategies across venues, chains, and protocols — often via API and automated. At the same time, investors need a structural guarantee that capital flows only through pre-approved pathways, and that no single actor — however senior — can unilaterally route funds outside their defined mandate.

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That governance must be enforced at the cryptographic layer. A policy document is not enough.

Finding custody infrastructure that could meet all of these requirements simultaneously — across a multi-manager, multi-chain, multi-strategy architecture — was Neutral Trade's founding infrastructure problem.

The Solution: Fordefi

Neutral Trade selected Fordefi as the institutional MPC custody layer underpinning all of its on-chain vaults. Today, Fordefi secures $48 million in Neutral Trade's TVL and automated strategy execution, with every vault operating inside a cryptographically enforced, policy-driven execution environment. The partnership is built around three interlocking principles that together define what Neutral Trade calls its walled-garden architecture.

1.  Segregated Keys. Unified Oversight.

Each strategy manager on Neutral Trade operates from a dedicated Fordefi workspace, holding an isolated MPC key share that is cryptographically bound to their specific vault. Custody is never centralised — no single key, device, or individual holds unilateral control over any vault's capital. Neutral Trade maintains a separate platform-level governance share that enables it to enforce policy, set vault parameters, and respond to operational events — without those controls ever intersecting with live strategy capital.

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The architecture means managers deploy capital with full operational autonomy within their defined mandate, while Neutral Trade maintains institutional-grade oversight across every vault on the platform. Neither layer can compromise the other.

2.  A Fully Automated Walled Garden.

All vault capital operates inside a policy-enforced execution environment. Trading teams access their positions exclusively through API — there is no manual key access and no hot wallet anywhere in the execution stack. Capital can flow only through a whitelist of pre-approved smart contracts, protocols, and tokens, enforced cryptographically before every signature via Fordefi's policy engine. Vault deposits and withdrawals are processed end-to-end through smart contract logic, with zero private key exposure at any point in the execution path.

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Pre-sign transaction simulation runs on every call before it clears — surfacing expected balance changes, approval chains, and risk flags so that any anomaly is caught before execution, not after. Routine vault operations that fall within pre-configured parameters clear automatically. Transactions that exceed defined thresholds, reference a new contract address, or breach position size limits are routed to a multi-admin quorum before any signature is released.

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The result is an execution environment where trading teams operate at the speed and automation their strategies require — while investors benefit from structural protections equivalent to institutional prime brokerage, enforced entirely on-chain.

3.  Chain-Agnostic Infrastructure That Scales With Opportunity.

DeFi liquidity does not wait. When a new yield opportunity opens on an emerging chain or rollup, Neutral Trade needs to be there before the spread compresses. Fordefi's support for over 90 networks — combined with a bring-your-own-EVM pathway for unlisted chains — means Neutral Trade can extend to a new trading venue in hours rather than weeks. Strategy managers can deploy to new chains as soon as a viable opportunity appears, without waiting for custody integrations or infrastructure updates. Each new venue launches inside the same walled-garden policy framework, giving investors consistent protections from day one regardless of network.

By the Numbers

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“Neutral Trade represents exactly the infrastructure evolution we built Fordefi for. A platform that needs trading-speed execution and institutional-grade policy enforcement simultaneously — across multiple managers, strategies, and chains. The walled-garden model they’ve deployed is a benchmark for how multi-strategy DeFi platforms should be built.”

— Fordefi

About Neutral Trade

Neutral Trade is an on-chain quant strategy marketplace, built by experienced quants and traders. The platform enables allocators to access professionally managed, systematic quant strategies directly on-chain — spanning directional CTA, delta-neutral arbitrage, and index strategies — with on-chain transparency and non-custodial vault architecture. For more information, please visit: www.neutral.trade

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About Fordefi

Fordefi, now part of Paxos, is the institutional MPC wallet platform built for DeFi. Founded in 2021, Fordefi enables hundreds of institutions to operate securely on-chain through its combination of distributed key management, a granular policy engine, and broad multi-chain connectivity — safeguarding over $120 billion in monthly transaction volume. For more information, please visit: www.fordefi.com