Trading Strategy Overview
Axis's market-neutral trading engine earns its return from structural fragmentation across venues, currencies, and settlement systems, capturing price dislocations of the same or related exposure. Two strategies are the bread and butter: cross-venue arbitrage and cross-currency arbitrage. This fragmentation across venues and assets is Axis's structural edge, a durable, market-neutral yield source that does not rely on any single mechanism.
Alongside the two core strategies, funding rate arbitrage plays a supporting role: for Axis it is primarily a way to hedge the spot inventory those strategies hold, not a primary source of yield, the funding trade has been well arbitraged across the industry over many years. OTC/RFQ is treated as a future expansion built on Axis's execution infrastructure rather than a live product, and Axis offers no institutional lending. Axis's strategies execute on centralized venues; the protocol does not run onchain arbitrage. Current attribution across the active strategies lives on the Transparency Dashboard.
The basic arbitrage loop
The simplest cross-venue setup pairs a purchase where an exposure is cheaper with a sale or hedge where it is more expensive. The displayed difference is only a gross spread; it becomes a realized result only after both legs execute and all costs are included.
Strategy map
Cross-venue arbitrage
Buy BTC at $60,000 on one exchange and sell at $60,050 on another
Both legs remaining executable after fees, slippage, transfers and settlement
Partial fills, latency, trapped inventory, venue and custody failure
Cross-currency arbitrage
Buy BTC in USD and sell BTC in TRY where a premium exists
FX conversion or hedge, local liquidity, banking access and settlement
FX mismatch, capital controls, local-market dislocation and counterparty failure
Funding rate arbitrage
Hold long spot BTC and an equal short BTC perpetual while positive funding is paid to the short
Funding staying favorable, basis behavior, margin and borrow or collateral availability
Funding reversal, basis divergence, liquidation, hedge drift and venue failure
OTC/RFQ
Request an executable bilateral quote for a defined block, then compare or pair it with an available market hedge
Quote validity, credit, legal terms, hedge execution, custody and settlement
Counterparty default, information leakage, failed hedge and settlement delay
The cross-venue and cross-currency rows are the fragmentation core, Axis's bread-and-butter and structural edge. Funding rate arbitrage is shown for completeness, but for Axis its main role is to hedge the spot inventory those strategies hold rather than to drive returns; it is also not the same as basis trading. Funding is the periodic payment between perpetual longs and shorts; basis is the price difference between related instruments. A funding strategy may also carry basis risk, but the intended return driver described here is funding. OTC/RFQ is a roadmap direction rather than a current strategy.
What Axis does not do
Axis does not run onchain arbitrage strategies.
Onchain markets, automated market makers, transaction-ordering opportunities, and intent or solver systems can host arbitrage and market-neutral structures. Axis's trading engine executes on centralized venues instead. Concretely, Axis does not arbitrage automated market makers, does not trade onchain spot, and does not treat pool rebalancing, ordering-based extraction, or intent-based execution as a source of return.
Onchain settlement appears in Axis only where the protocol itself settles onchain, minting and redeeming USDx for example, not as a venue for the desk's trading strategies.
This is a current scope decision, not a permanent exclusion. Onchain perpetual venues, Hyperliquid among them, run order books and funding mechanics of the same kind the desk already trades on centralized venues, and are a plausible extension. Any such extension would carry its own venue, custody, settlement, and execution risks, and would be described here before it is relied on. Nothing here commits Axis to adding a venue, or to a date.
Choose a strategy topic
Cross-Venue Arbitrage covers exchange-to-exchange and regional-to-global structures.
Cross-Currency Arbitrage explains quote-currency premiums and the FX hedge boundary.
Funding Rate Arbitrage explains the spot–perpetual funding structure and how it differs from basis trading.
OTC/RFQ explains bilateral liquidity and RFQ execution.
Delta Neutrality explains what directional hedging removes, and what it leaves behind.
For execution mechanics, see Centralized-Venue Execution, where Axis's strategies run.
From spread to user reward
A quoted spread is not profit. Realized results depend on both legs executing, all costs, financing, settlement, hedge performance, and the ability to exit. A realized strategy result is also not yet sUSDx yield: only USDx rewards delivered to the vault by the reward manager (fundRewards, gated by REWARD_MANAGER_ROLE) enter its accounting.
Read How Rewards Reach sUSDx for that boundary.
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