Pythiad: Stay Sharp with Katana Yield Strategies
A Katana Gives You an Edge in the Markets
Katana is here to cut through the legacy complexities of yield generation for individuals, institutions, and DAOs. Managing risk has never been easier and more sustainable!
Katana offers a suite of automated vault strategies (think structured products) for sustainable yield-generating opportunities. Pyth assists Katana in price settlement at the end of its vaults’ auction periods: more specifically, Katana’s DOVs are built on the Zeta Markets FLEX stack, which incorporates Pyth’s price feeds to automatically settle options contracts.
We’re proud to support a fellow disrupter in pushing the frontiers of DeFi. Democratized access to automated strategies? Permissionless building on a base yield layer open to all? That’s what it means to be #PoweredByPyth.
Let’s start off easy. What is Katana?
Katana is building the yield generation layer for DeFi. This means offering a comprehensive suite of yield products across the spectrum of risk, enabling users to access the best risk-adjusted yields in DeFi from a single platform.
Currently, we offer automated covered calls and cash-secured puts on over 11 unique crypto assets, and we’ve traded over $500 million in option volume through the Katana platform! We aim to expand our strategy suite as new opportunities present themselves and offer the most competitive execution coupled with the single best user experience for our community.
What’s the founding story behind Katana?
Katana is built by a team of seasoned DeFi builders and fellow degens. We have been active users of DeFi since its earliest days and were particularly early builders in the Solana ecosystem.
Katana was founded just six days before the Ignition Hackathon deadline, where we decided to enroll with a subset of a previous idea we had built in an earlier hackathon. In those six days, we built a fully functional structured products protocol and frontend from scratch and managed to squeeze into the Ignition submission deadline by just a couple minutes! We were fortunate to have won the Grand Prize and used that as a positive external signal to continue building out Katana full time and growing our community in parallel.
How do your vaults work and who are they for? Are there special vaults that we should look forward to soon?
Katana vaults are simply pools of capital that then execute a specified automated strategy.
The pools are separated by strategy and asset, enabling a user to select which combination they would like to access. The covered call and cash-secured put vaults both operate on a weekly round structure, where assets are locked for the entirety of the week in order to mint the option tokens which are then sold to market makers. Users can initiate a deposit or withdrawal at any time, and the funds will simply be queued and processed at the end of the cycle.
There is a lot more to look forward to in terms of future vaults! The Katana team is eyeing interesting opportunities wherever possible and are keen to identify and package the best risk-adjusted yield strategies for our users.
What is the Katana Dojo?
The Katana Dojo is the single best repository to sharpen your skills and wield Katana with success.
The dojo covers key protocol topics and teaches users about each foundational pillar from scratch. User education is critical to understand and use Katana optimally, and we are committed to establishing ourselves as the leading protocol on this front. The dojo is an evolving resource, and if anyone has any additional recommendations, please feel free to shoot them our way!
You recently announced the launch of Katana Treasury–a full-stack solution for DAOs: yield generation, risk management, and analytics. Why DAOs, and what does this mean for DAOs going forward?
Katana Treasury is designed specifically for the DAO and encompasses all the core features of optimal treasury management.
For DAOs, the implications of adopting Katana Treasury include a more transparent, risk aware, and productive DAO treasury. DAOs have grown to enormous sizes in recent years, yet the sophistication of treasury management still remains relatively primitive. Most DAOs sit idly on their funds, failing to turn their funds into productive capital. Additionally, these DAOs are also relatively opaque with their fund management and are very exposed to downside risk which is far from ideal when being the sole resource for ongoing operation.
Having identified these clear issues early, we believe that Katana Treasury can usher in a new paradigm of DAO treasury management. This will enable DAO leaders to better manage their funds and their community members will simultaneously hold DAO leaders to a higher standard, benefitting all stakeholders together.
Any last words for your Samurai and the community?
Katana only exists to serve the Samurai. As such, we value the Samurai as a close-knit family that not only uses but actively engages with protocol ideas, updates, and feedback. It is a passionate, lighthearted, and intellectually rigorous community that exists to see the success of Katana and help it realize its mission to become the yield generation layer for DeFi together.
If you are already part of the Samurai, it is a pleasure to see you here and if you aren’t, we welcome you with open arms and would love to have you join our community in Discord. Stay strong Samurai, we will build ourselves out of this bear together.
We can’t wait to hear what you think! Feel free to join the Pyth Discord, follow Pyth on Twitter, and join the Telegram to learn more and ask any questions you may have. You can also learn more here.
