I’ve been watching institutional crypto desks wrestle with the same frustration for years. You stake your Solana or Avalanche, the rewards start rolling in, and then a trade opportunity appears that requires collateral. Suddenly you’re forced to choose: unstake and wait, or sit on the sidelines. That friction just got a practical answer.
P2P.org And Arkis Open Staked Positions To Trading
On August 13 the two firms confirmed that Arkis clients can now post staked Solana and Avalanche positions as collateral without first exiting the staking contracts. The positions remain active, continue generating protocol rewards, and sit inside a single Arkis account where margin is calculated against the overall risk of the book rather than isolated venue-by-venue.
That last point matters more than it first appears. Traditional prime-brokerage setups often force a fragmented view of risk. Here the staked asset and any trades it supports live under one roof. The broker looks at the aggregate exposure and decides how much leverage the client can still take. It’s a cleaner picture, and for desks that already run multi-strategy books it removes an administrative headache.
How The Integration Actually Works
Clients stake through P2P.org’s non-custodial validator infrastructure. Once the position is live they select it inside the Carry Trades section of Arkis Alpha. The platform then shows which strategies will accept that particular staked asset as collateral and displays the economics before any capital is committed. No guessing, no hidden haircuts revealed after the fact.
P2P.org handles the staking and validator side. Arkis handles credit, collateral valuation, and portfolio-level risk. The division of labor is deliberate. As Artemiy Parshakov of P2P.org put it, collateral is only as good as the operator standing behind it. Once an institution starts borrowing against a staked position, staking stops being a passive balance-sheet item and becomes an active credit decision.
Collateral is only as good as the operator standing behind it.
– Artemiy Parshakov, P2P.org
I’ve found that institutions care less about marketing language and more about operational track records. P2P.org states it has never recorded a slashing incident since 2018 and currently secures more than ten billion dollars across forty-plus proof-of-stake networks. Those numbers are company-provided, of course, but they form part of the underwriting conversation Arkis runs before accepting the collateral.
Why Validator Quality Now Affects Margin
Putting a staked asset into a margin account introduces risks that cash or unstaked tokens simply do not carry. Networks can slash for double-signing or prolonged downtime. Extended offline periods can also cut expected rewards, which in turn changes the economic value of the position supporting an open trade.
Arkis does not ignore those factors. Its risk framework treats the quality of the staking operator as a margin input. Slashing history and historical downtime feed directly into the collateral valuation. In other words, the better the operator’s track record, the more efficiently the staked position can be used.
Oleksandr Proskurin, chief product officer at Arkis, noted that a growing share of institutional books already sits in yield-bearing assets, yet many credit providers have been slow to treat those positions as part of the portfolio they margin. The integration places the staked asset alongside every other position for margin purposes rather than isolating it.
Arkis itself reports having deployed more than two hundred fifty million dollars in institutional credit since 2022 without recording bad debt. Again, that figure comes from the company and has not been independently audited in the announcement, but it forms part of the context clients will weigh.
Keeping Capital Productive Instead Of Idle
Without an arrangement like this, a fund that wants to use a staked position as collateral usually has to unstake first. Unstaking periods vary by network and can last days or even weeks. During that window the position stops earning, and the opportunity that prompted the trade may disappear. The new setup leaves the stake intact while Arkis uses it to support other activity.
Rewards continue to be determined by the underlying protocol. Network conditions, the size of the stake, validator performance, and protocol rules all still apply. Using an earning asset as collateral does not magically remove liquidation risk or slashing risk. A sharp drop in the token’s market price, a sudden change in margin requirements, or a validator penalty can still reduce the support under an open position.
Perhaps the most interesting distinction is what this is not. It is not restaking. Restaking typically exposes an already-staked asset to additional sets of slashing conditions by securing extra services. Under the Arkis structure the position serves purely as financial collateral inside a prime-brokerage account. The companies have not indicated that Solana or Avalanche assets are being restaked to secure another network.
Practical Limits And Open Questions
At launch the integration covers only Solana and Avalanche. Neither firm has publicly committed to a timeline for additional proof-of-stake networks. Clients who hold other staked assets will still face the old unstaking friction for now.
Geographic access also remains opaque. P2P.org describes its infrastructure as non-custodial, which aligns with certain U.S. staff statements on protocol staking where token owners retain ownership and control of private keys. Yet the announcement does not claim specific clearance for U.S. institutions or confirm that the Arkis product has been reviewed under U.S. securities law. Whether geographic restrictions apply to Arkis Alpha is likewise undisclosed.
In my experience, institutional legal and compliance teams will still run their own analysis. A non-custodial label is helpful, but facts and circumstances always matter. Arrangements that layer extra services or commercial terms can fall outside the scope of earlier staff views.
Broader Pattern Of Embedding Staking Into Institutional Workflows
This is not P2P.org’s first attempt to place its validator services inside existing institutional systems. Earlier work connected the firm’s infrastructure to custody platforms and marketplace interfaces used by regulated entities. The goal in each case appears consistent: let institutions keep operational control while still accessing staking yield.
The Arkis integration simply extends that logic into the trading and credit layer. Instead of treating staking as a separate silo, the staked position becomes one more line item in the margin calculation. That shift feels incremental rather than revolutionary, yet incremental improvements often matter more to desks that already manage size.
Risk managers will still ask hard questions. How frequently is validator performance reassessed? What happens to margin if a network upgrades and changes reward dynamics? How transparent is the haircut methodology when market volatility spikes? Those details will determine whether the product sees broad adoption or remains a niche tool for a handful of sophisticated accounts.
What Changes For Day-To-Day Portfolio Management
Imagine a desk that already runs a delta-neutral carry book and also holds a meaningful Solana stake. Previously the stake sat outside the margin picture. Now it can support additional inventory or relative-value trades without forcing an unstake. The capital stays productive on two fronts at once: protocol rewards continue, and the position frees up balance-sheet capacity elsewhere.
Of course the reverse is also true. If the token price falls hard or the validator underperforms, the margin cushion shrinks. Clients will need real-time visibility into both market risk and operator risk. Arkis claims its framework already incorporates the latter; the market will test how robust that claim proves under stress.
I’ve seen too many products launch with elegant risk models that later reveal blind spots once real volatility arrives. The absence of bad debt so far is encouraging, yet past performance is never a guarantee. Desks that adopt the product early will effectively become the live stress test.
Operator Standards Become Part Of Credit Underwriting
One subtle but important shift is that staking operators are now being evaluated the way traditional counterparties are evaluated. Uptime history, slashing incidents, client concentration, and operational resilience all feed into the credit conversation. That raises the bar for every validator that wants institutional capital.
P2P.org’s public statements emphasize a clean slashing record and scale across many networks. Whether those claims hold under independent scrutiny will matter. Credit providers tend to dig deeper once the numbers get large. An operator that looks fine at five hundred million under management can look different at ten billion.
For clients the practical takeaway is simple. Choosing a staking partner is no longer just about advertised APY. It is also about how that partner’s operational quality will affect the margin efficiency of the entire account. A few basis points of extra yield can be wiped out by a heavier haircut if the operator’s risk profile is weaker.
Liquidation And Slashing Still Sit In The Background
No amount of elegant packaging removes the core risks. A staked position used as collateral can still be liquidated if the account’s overall margin falls below maintenance levels. Separately, the underlying network can slash the stake itself. Those two failure modes operate on different clocks and different rule sets, which can make recovery more complicated than a simple cash-collateral default.
Clients will need clear playbooks for both scenarios. How quickly can a partially liquidated position be restaked? What happens to accrued but unpaid rewards during a margin event? Who absorbs the cost if a network-level penalty coincides with a forced unwind? These operational details rarely appear in launch announcements, yet they determine whether the product is truly usable under pressure.
In my view the firms that answer those questions in writing and with concrete examples will earn more lasting trust than those that simply highlight the upside of dual utility.
Looking Ahead Without Overpromising
The integration is live today for Solana and Avalanche inside Arkis Alpha’s Carry Trades section. Expansion to other networks is possible but not scheduled. U.S. access remains an open compliance question. The product solves a real operational friction for the desks that already hold large staked positions and also need trading flexibility.
Whether it becomes standard infrastructure or stays a specialized tool will depend on how the risk model performs when markets get ugly and how transparent the operators remain about any incidents. For now the door is open. Institutions that have been sitting on yield-bearing stakes while watching opportunities pass can finally put those positions to work without first breaking them.
That does not eliminate the need for careful underwriting. It simply moves the conversation from “can we even use this stake as collateral” to “how much margin efficiency does this particular operator and network combination actually deliver.” The second question is harder, and more useful.
The practical reality is that most institutional capital still prefers clean, liquid, low-operational-risk collateral. Staked assets introduce extra variables. The firms that succeed will be those that make the extra variables measurable, manageable, and priced transparently. P2P.org and Arkis have taken a concrete step in that direction. The market will decide how far the step carries.
Until more networks are supported and more independent performance data accumulates, the product remains best suited to desks that already understand both the trading side and the staking side of the equation. For those desks the ability to keep capital earning while it also supports trades removes a genuine inefficiency. For everyone else the usual caution still applies: understand the full risk stack before you lean on it.
I’ve long believed that the next wave of institutional crypto infrastructure will look less like flashy new protocols and more like quiet plumbing that lets existing strategies run more efficiently. This integration fits that description. It does not invent a new yield source. It simply stops forcing capital to choose between earning and trading. In a market that still wrestles with capital efficiency, that counts as progress.
Whether the progress sticks will be visible in the next serious volatility episode. Until then the product is live, the claims are public, and the desks that need the flexibility can begin testing it with real size. That is usually how these things move from announcement to infrastructure.
