Prime BTC and Prime Dollar
Prime BTC and Prime Dollar are the yield instruments an Arch Prime account deploys into. Each gives spot exposure to its base asset plus a return from market-neutral quantitative strategies.
| Prime BTC | Prime Dollar | |
|---|---|---|
| Base exposure | Bitcoin, spot | US dollar |
| Yield source | Market-neutral quantitative strategies | Market-neutral quantitative strategies |
| You are exposed to | Bitcoin's price, and the strategy | The strategy |
| What it is not | A wrapped or synthetic Bitcoin | A stablecoin |
The difference is what happens when Bitcoin moves. Prime BTC carries the price; Prime Dollar does not. Treating them as interchangeable will size a position wrong.
Where the yield comes from
The strategies are market-neutral: they capture spreads between related exposures while hedging out market direction. That is an established institutional approach, not a crypto invention, and it does not rely on any single mechanism.
They are run by Velox Trading, a quantitative trading firm operating under a signed letter of intent with Arch. Velox brings Arch Prime the two prime functions that cannot be written in code — execution and a risk desk — with connectivity across roughly 60 venues.
Arch Network, the infrastructure underneath the account, is a separate system and is unaffected by strategy performance: collateral remains a Bitcoin UTXO under Taproot spending conditions and is never reissued on another chain. The strategy is where the return comes from; Arch Network is where enforcement comes from. They are different systems and they fail for different reasons.
What market-neutral does and does not mean
Does mean: the strategy is not taking a directional view. Its return does not depend on Bitcoin rising.
Does not mean: no risk. Market-neutral books lose money. Related exposures diverge instead of converging, spreads widen, hedges are imperfect, and a venue can halt or fail while a position is open. There is no floor under the yield leg, and none is claimed.
How they behave as collateral
Deployed positions are held as receipts inside the margin account, marked at net asset value, and counted as collateral after their haircut. They are liquidation rank 1 — unwound before Bitcoin, because that is where the levered risk sits.
Two consequences follow, and they are the ones that catch people:
The deployed leg reaches your equity before Bitcoin's price does. In a levered account the binding constraint is not Bitcoin. At 5.0× a 20% impairment in the strategy exhausts the equity behind it, at full Bitcoin value — Bitcoin never moved, the NAV did.
A sale realizes market price, not NAV. The account is marked at NAV; a receipt sold into the market fetches what the book will pay. Those diverge most under stress, which is exactly when a closeout happens.
Concentration
Arch Prime runs one whitelisted strategy today, which means 100% concentration by construction. Deploying is a single concentrated exposure regardless of position size. That is acceptable only because the strategy is hand-underwritten, and it is a real limit rather than a technicality.
Track record
The strategies behind Prime BTC and Prime Dollar are not new — Velox has run them through multiple market cycles. Publishing that record, with the methodology and the drawdown history that the 5.0× leverage ceiling is derived from, is pending Velox clearance and is not included here.
Nothing in this page is a forecast, a target, or a rate Arch Prime expects.
What does not hold
- Prime BTC is not wrapped Bitcoin. It is a position that carries Bitcoin exposure plus strategy exposure.
- Prime Dollar is not a stablecoin. It can lose value. If you want a dollar that only wraps a dollar, that is archUSD.
- Neither is principal-protected, and neither carries a fixed or promised return.
- Venue connectivity is surface area as well as opportunity. Outages, halted markets, changed rules and settlement failures are venue events, and neutrality does not address them.