Permissionless Prime Brokerage

What is a prime broker?

In traditional finance, a prime broker is the intermediary that extends credit to hedge funds and institutional traders. They provide leverage, custody assets, settle trades, and manage margin. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan dominate this market.

The catch: access requires institutional-grade relationships, KYC/KYB, legal agreements, and minimum account sizes in the millions.

Amplifi as DeFi's prime broker

Amplifi provides the same core services — leverage, margin accounts, and credit extension — in a permissionless way.

• No KYC or credit score. Anyone with a wallet and USDC can access leverage.
• No minimum account size. Deposit as little as $2.
• No bilateral trust. Lending pools extend credit to trader's margin account because Amplifi risk engine enforces restriction on use of funds and liquidation policies.
• TEE-enforced custody. Your funds live in your own TEE wallet. Amplifi cannot move funds outside of approved trading operations and liquidation.

How it works

Traditional prime brokers extend credit because they control the assets and can liquidate if needed. Amplifi achieves the same outcome through TEE-private key encumbrance: a TEE managed keypair controls the deposit wallet, enforcing spending policies and executing liquidations programmatically.

Why this matters

The cost of automated trading is falling fast. With AI, agentic systems and semi-professional traders are running strategies that used to require a desk at a hedge fund. As Citadel CEO Ken Griffin commented, "work that we would usually do with people with master's and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months is being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days."

However, access to prime brokerage services (margin, cross-venue collateralization, leveraged trading) which provide capital efficiency is still limited to institutional traders.

Our mission is to close that gap. By making prime brokerage tools permissionless, we lower the entry barrier for the next generation of traders, whether human or agentic. The same way DeFi made financial access permissionless, Amplifi makes the credit and margin layer permissionless.