Ex-Fidelity staff target retail investors with onchain gold arbitrage product

Altura, a decentralized finance protocol founded by former Fidelity and PwC staff is launching an onchain gold arbitrage strategy aimed at retail investors, targeting 20% annualized returns, according to a Thursday release shared with Cointelegraph.

According to Altura, the product pools user deposits into a vault that recycles capital through short-duration physical gold trades. Unlike platforms like Robinhood or Revolut that offer passive gold price exposure, Altura claims to be tokenizing the underlying arbitrage process itself.

The company says it has raised $4 million in funding and has already facilitated the movement of about 185 kilograms of gold, representing roughly $28.5 million in cumulative transaction volume, per the release.

Matthew Pinnock, co-founder and chief operating officer of Altura, told Cointelegraph the goal is to “bring an institutional-style gold strategy onchain in a way that retail investors can actually access.”

The launch comes as spot gold trades near record levels after surging to an all-time high above $5,300 an ounce in January, though it has since pulled back sharply. Altura’s launch points to a new phase in tokenized real-world assets, where projects are no longer just offering passive exposure to commodities but are trying to package institutional trading strategies as onchain DeFi yield products for retail users.

A strategy typically reserved for institutional traders

Pinnock said Altura’s “revenue-generating trading strategy” was historically used by institutional commodities desks, and that high capital requirements, legal complexity and counterparty risk in traditional bullion arbitrage have effectively kept smaller investors out of this type of trade.

Gold price over the last 12 months. Source: Trading Economics

Gold purchased on behalf of Altura by its trading partner Inessa is tokenized at acquisition, Pinnock said, with those tokens escrowed through each trade and custody transitions recorded via dual cryptographic signatures. Depositors do not hold direct title to bullion but gain exposure to returns generated by the trade flow, he added.

Altura’s setup depends on a network of offchain actors. The company says it is working with Aurellion Labs and Inessa, which in turn partners with air-cargo specialist Zeal Global, to execute and verify trades.

On the targeted 20% yields, Pinnock said the strategy is structured to be “close to delta-neutral,” with trade terms agreed before logistics execution begins so that returns come from price discrepancies between counterparties rather than directional bets on the gold price.

Each arbitrage cycle typically completes within one to two days, allowing capital to be recycled multiple times and limiting exposure to spot moves, he said, while acknowledging that yields would compress if pricing inefficiencies narrow.

Rising interest in real-world yields

The launch comes amid rising interest in “real-world” DeFi yields, as tokenized asset and RWA protocols grew to roughly $17 billion in total value locked in December 2025, according to DefiLlama data.

However, a joint report by RWA.io and Veritas Protocol in that same month found that losses from onchain operational failures in tokenized RWA markets rose to $14.6 million in the first half of 2025, a 143% increase from the previous year, highlighting how complex offchain structures can still translate into user losses.

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