DeFi is broken.

Unproductive liquidity comes onchain but earns no yield (three out of every four dollars on most Ethereum Layer-2s are just sitting there). Worse yet, users divide liquidity across various apps, all competing for more. But that means no single app has deep enough liquidity for major trades, leading to worse spreads and worse user experience.

Katana, incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, was designed to fix DeFi’s problems. 

Instead of launching with dozens of protocols competing for the same liquidity, Katana concentrated everything to core apps and assets: Morpho for lending, Agora for native stablecoin, etc. Sequencer fees and app revenue cycle back into chain-owned liquidity rather than leaking out. Bridged assets start earning the moment they arrive.

All of this depends on underlying chain infrastructure that could make it work, processing nearly $10K per minute in cross-chain volume through Polygon Trails alone, a cross-chain solution for 1-click transactions, with over $100M flowing through to date.

We built Polygon CDK to give institutions and developers maximum choice in chain design. This is how Katana confronted the problems of popular chain architectures and used the modular, ZK-secured Polygon CDK to build a chain that helps fix DeFi. 

The Problem

Katana's yield model is where the infrastructure story starts.

Users deposit specific assets like USDC (or ETH, USDT, WBTC) into Vault Bridge on Ethereum. Their assets get put to work in yield strategies on L1, managed by Gauntlet and Steakhouse. In return, users get a vbToken on Katana that represents their deposit. That vbToken earns yield and works across Katana's DeFi apps. When they want out, they redeem it 1:1 for the original asset.

The yield is real because it comes from Ethereum strategies, not from printing tokens. It also means the chain infrastructure has to earn depositors' trust from day one.

The entire model depends on depositors trusting that their assets on Ethereum are safe and that vbTokens are always redeemable. On a brand new chain with no track record, that trust requires two things:

First, the chain needs fast finality. Optimistic rollups, used across chain frameworks like Arbitrum and Base, offer a 7-day challenge window. When real assets are locked on L1 against the chain's state, seven days of uncertainty is not reassuring, especially from a chain nobody has used before.

Second, the bridge carrying between Ethereum and Katana (and any other chain) needs a security model that’s proven cryptographically, so depositors trust nothing but math. No economic games. 

Building a proving system and a credible bridge from scratch would have taken months. 

Katana went from private mainnet in May 2025 to public launch at ETHCC Cannes in late June. Here’s how.

The Solution

We built Polygon CDK to be modular and composable by design. Pick your client, pick your proving system, connect through Agglayer for unified liquidity across crypto. 

Security, bridging, and cross-chain settlement all handled at the protocol level.

Katana became the first Agglayer chain built on CDK OP Stack, with Conduit as the implementation provider, kicking off Agglayer's multistack era. The chain runs at 800 mgas/s, 40k TPS, at fractions of a cent per transaction. Here is what CDK handled so the Katana Foundation didn't have to build it from scratch.

CDK: proven finality, not optimistic assumptions

CDK on Agglayer provides validity proofs: the chain proves every transaction is correct before settling to Ethereum. Katana's proofs are generated by the Succinct Prover Network, which powers the ZK backend for CDK OP Stack chains. 

Finality drops from seven days (for an optimistic chain) to under an hour, at proving costs as low as $0.005 per transaction.

The math proves every transaction, independently.

Agglayer: bringing unified liquidity

Agglayer’s unified bridge transfers native assets across connected chains, rather than wrapped variants. 

The pessimistic proof system verifies that no connected chain can withdraw more than its deposits, regardless of what happens to that chain. It assumes any connected chain could be compromised, and proves safety anyway. Most bridges work the other way: assume everyone is honest and deal with problems after the fact.

Because Katana connected to Agglayer natively as part of the CDK build, there was no separate bridge integration, no extra trust requirements bolted on. The bridge that Vault Bridge depends on came with the infrastructure. 

Katana also connects to LayerZero, giving it access to both Agglayer and LayerZero distribution, the widest interoperability and distribution any chain in the ecosystem has today.

Polygon Trails: cross-chain access to a chain with no prior user base

Katana's app supports bridging from more than 75 chains. But getting capital onto a new chain still requires users to source gas, navigate a bridge interface, and find the right vault. That friction limits deposits to people who already know where they're going.

Polygon Trails, part of a recent acquisition, handles this. Integrated into Katana's deposit flows, Trails lets a user pick a source token, confirm once, and it takes care of the rest: routing across chains (CCTP for USDC, LayerZero OFT for USDT), landing the deposit in the correct vault on Katana. No bridge interface. No gas acquisition. If the flow fails, funds revert automatically.

The Binance Wallet and OKX Earn integrations extended this further, routing exchange-native capital directly into Katana's Morpho vaults without users leaving the exchange interface. Different ways in, same yield layer, all settled via Agglayer underneath.

The results speak for themselves. On KAT TGE day, Trails was processing nearly $10K per minute in volume at peak, sustaining $68K per hour even after the initial rush. Trails has now crossed $100M in total volume bridged to Katana.

The Results

Katana went from private mainnet in May 2025 to public launch at ETHCC Cannes in late June with $232M in pre-deposits already committed.

This timeline matters for institutions evaluating Polygon CDK.

Seven weeks from private mainnet to a public launch carrying hundreds of millions in deposits. The Katana Foundation did not build a proving system or negotiate bridge security. They did not have to integrate cross-chain routing one partner at a time. 

CDK made the execution layer a configuration decision. Agglayer made bridging a native capability. Trails made cross-chain deposits a single-click flow. All three come as part of what we offer.

Katana’s configuration is available to any team building with Polygon CDK.

We call this the Open Money Stack: execution, bridging, and access in a single deployment decision. Katana is what it looks like in production.

Get in touch to start building with Polygon CDK