Axis opens its arbitrage book through a USDC/USDT pre-deposit vault on Upshift

Axis opens its arbitrage book through a pre-deposit vault on Upshift

The Axis Origin Vault is live on Ethereum with a $50M cap, accepting USDT, USDC and USDx. It gives anyone access to a market-neutral trading book that had been open only to a closed set of institutional allocators.

Deposit into the Axis Origin Vault: app.upshift.finance/pools/1/0xAD958C4c0c90bf0216e0f5472F074a9AB30f595F

Market-neutral trading books are hard to buy into. Capacity is limited by how much the strategy can absorb before its own flow moves prices, returns depend on execution quality rather than on market direction, and the allocators who get access tend to be the ones already inside the manager's network. Axis has run that kind of book for eight years, and the balance sheet behind it has been closed to everyone outside that circle.

The Axis Origin Vault, live today on Upshift on Ethereum mainnet, changes the access model. It accepts USDT, USDC and USDx up to a $50M cap, with Axis curating the vault directly and Upshift providing the vault contract, the non-custodial architecture and the deposit rails.

What Axis does

Axis describes itself as a quantitative yield protocol built to bring institutional trading strategies onchain, running market-neutral models that keep prices synchronized across venues and settlement rails. Its first product is USDx, a dollar-linked asset that passes arbitrage profit through to holders, with performance tracked and verified onchain in real time. Axis reports a 36% annualized return, a 4.9 Sharpe ratio and $400M in peak AUM across eight years of running that mandate.

The protocol raised $5M in December 2025 in a round led by Galaxy Ventures, with OKX Ventures also participating, and has been running USDx in private beta on Plasma.

How the Origin Vault works

Deposits open on July 29 and stay open for roughly a week, closing on or around August 5, or earlier if the $50M cap fills first. Depositors send USDT, USDC or USDx into the vault on Ethereum mainnet and hold vault shares against their position for the duration.

When the window closes, the vault mints USDx against the deposited stablecoins and stakes half of it, so each depositor ends up holding 50% USDx and 50% sUSDx. A 30-day lock starts at that point, and depositors withdraw USDx at the end of it.

Yield starts once the window closes and capital is deployed into the Axis engine. Axis reports a base APY of 10% to 20% from that point, sourced from trading performance. During the pre-deposit window itself, depositors accrue Coordinates, the program's record of position size and timing, at 10 per dollar per day with a 2x multiplier applied to pre-deposits. Coordinates carry no cash value on their own.

Why the vault sits on Upshift

A structure like this one runs partly on centralized venues, which is exactly where a vault wrapper earns its keep. Depositors keep self-custody of their position throughout, the vault contract and its parameters sit onchain and stay auditable, and August's policy engine constrains what the operator can do with the capital at the chain, protocol, token and function level. The manager gets to run its own strategy without asking depositors to hand over their assets.

Upshift has processed more than $550M in deposits at peak across over 50 vaults on more than 30 chains, with more than 60,000 depositors. The vault contracts have been through 10 smart contract audits by 6 independent firms.

Risks

The Origin Vault carries the risks of the strategy behind it. Market-neutral arbitrage depends on execution quality and on the solvency of the venues where positions sit, and no level of return is guaranteed. The 30-day lock means capital can't be accessed between the close of the deposit window and the end of the lock. USDx is a synthetic dollar whose peg depends on Axis maintaining backing and reserves, which Axis publishes onchain. Upshift's vault contracts don't carry smart contract insurance.

Always make sure to do your own research and be aware of the above and any other risks before depositing.

Deposit into the Axis Origin Vault: app.upshift.finance/pools/1/0xAD958C4c0c90bf0216e0f5472F074a9AB30f595F

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