Katana's revenue buys back KAT and stakers get all of it, starting Nov 17

After ~18 months, I am still bullish on Katana. Why? Well, they are one of the few chains actually making money. One problem with that was that most of that money went back into growing the ecosystem (Yearn vaults, AMM pools, trading competitions), and people holding KAT only saw little upside.

That just changed. Now, a cut of the fees from Katana's swap, perps, Vault Bridge and the sequencer now funds open-market KAT buybacks, and 100% of the KAT that gets bought back goes to avKAT stakers. I actually like this model so much more than the standard "buy and burn" model because it actually rewards people deploying into the ecosystem.

Here's what that looks like using last month's revenue:

• Swap: 50% of $21.8k = $10.9k
• Perps: 5% of $160.9k = $8k
• Vault Bridge: 5% of $41.4k = $2.1k
• Sequencer: 30% of $11.2k = $3.4k

That's roughly $25k of KAT bought on the open market every month, all of it going to stakers. And that's at last month's activity. Every extra swap, perp trade & bridged dollar on Katana adds to it.

This works because Katana owns the pieces generating the fees, and there are three of them now.

Swaps on Katana used to run through Sushi's deployment. Katana took that over as Katana Swap, so the swap fees stay with the chain instead of going to an outside team. That's another part of the stack they own now.

The perps engine was acquired from IDEX, which was running an onchain order book back in 2017. It's done over $6.5B in volume.

And Vault Bridge is the yield layer. It puts bridged money to work instead of letting it sit, and it's generated $4M so far, all of it reinvested into the ecosystem.

Most chains rent these pieces, so the fees leave. Katana owns all three, so they stay. Earlier this year I posted that chains owning their whole stack would outperform chains that only build infrastructure, and now Katana owns three parts of its stack and sends the revenue to the people staked in it.

As someone staked in avKAT, the changes I'm really happy about is the unstake time reduction & even more upside for staking. Stake unwind goes from 45 days to 7.

Note: vKAT and voting are sunsetting, so there's one way to earn on KAT now: stake it into avKAT. If you're holding vKAT, you can convert in one click starting 11/17.

Here's the bullieving this is the one change that will spark a Katana run and I can retire my bloodline.