Altura, a decentralized finance protocol co-founded by former Fidelity and PwC staff, has announced the launch of an onchain gold arbitrage strategy aimed at retail investors. The product targets annualized returns of 20% and was announced in a release shared with Cointelegraph on Thursday. The company says it has raised $4 million in funding and has already facilitated the movement of approximately 185 kilograms of gold, representing around $28.5 million in cumulative transaction volume.
The product pools user deposits into a vault that recycles capital through short-duration physical gold trades. Altura distinguishes its offering from platforms such as Robinhood or Revolut, which provide passive exposure to gold prices, by claiming to tokenize the underlying arbitrage process itself. Depositors do not hold direct title to bullion but instead gain exposure to returns generated by the trade flow.
Matthew Pinnock, co-founder and chief operating officer of Altura, said the goal is to bring an institutional-style gold strategy onchain in a way that retail investors can actually access. He noted that high capital requirements, legal complexity, and counterparty risk in traditional bullion arbitrage have historically kept smaller investors out of this type of trade. The strategy, he said, was previously used exclusively by institutional commodities desks.
Gold purchased on behalf of Altura by its trading partner Inessa is tokenized at acquisition, with those tokens escrowed through each trade. Custody transitions are recorded via dual cryptographic signatures, according to Pinnock. Altura also works with Aurellion Labs and air-cargo specialist Zeal Global, which partners with Inessa, to execute and verify trades.
Pinnock described the strategy as structured to be close to delta-neutral, meaning returns are derived 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 price movements. He acknowledged that yields would compress if pricing inefficiencies narrow over time.
The launch arrives as spot gold trades near record levels following a surge to an all-time high above $3,300 an ounce, though prices have since pulled back. Altura’s offering reflects a broader shift in tokenized real-world assets, where projects are moving beyond passive commodity exposure toward packaging institutional trading strategies as onchain yield products. Tokenized asset and RWA protocols grew to roughly $17 billion in total value locked in December 2025, according to data from DefiLlama.
Despite growing interest in real-world DeFi yields, risks in the sector remain notable. A joint report by RWA.io and Veritas Protocol 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 prior year. The findings highlight how complex offchain structures can still translate into direct losses for users, even when underlying assets are physical commodities.
Originally reported by CoinTelegraph.
