> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.keystonefi.xyz/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.keystonefi.xyz/changelog/roadmap.md).

# Roadmap

**ksUSD in one line:** deposit USDC, hold one token, earn carry. Most of the yield is jitoSOL staking, with perp funding and USDC lending on top. No peg to defend, no position to manage.

This is the plain-English version of where we are and what's left before launch.

***

## How it earns

The vault holds two things at once. Staked SOL (jitoSOL), which earns a staking yield. And a short SOL position on a perp venue, which offsets most of SOL's price swings and often pays you to hold it. That payment is called funding.

The short is what turns a SOL-denominated yield into a dollar one, so you collect the staking yield with almost none of SOL's volatility, plus the funding when it's being paid. Staking is the bigger half by some distance. When funding stops paying, the vault parks: it drops the short and holds plain USDC lent on Kamino until funding is worth it again. An on-chain signal decides when to switch and a bot does the work. You never touch it.

In v1 the hedge runs on Phoenix Perps, with margin posted through Ember.

> In a 24-month backtest the worst drawdown was **−0.3%**, through the toughest funding stretch of the period. Yield depends on the regime: about **6% net** when funding is thin like today, up to \~11% when it's rich. Phoenix pays \~0% funding right now, so the vault sits near its \~4% lending floor. *Simulated, not a promise.*

***

## Where we are

Most of the plumbing is built and tested.

**Done.** The vault is one program, one vault, one token, and we've run the full deposit → park → earn → redeem cycle on a copy of mainnet against real protocol state. jitoSOL staking (Jito), USDC lending (Kamino), and USDC↔jitoSOL swaps (Jupiter) are all wired up.

**In progress: the hedge.** The code to trade on Phoenix is written and the live Phoenix program accepts it. Switching it on means enabling margin permissions on the vault's trading account, which we do ourselves through Phoenix's public API in a single transaction. Our script is built and tested up to that send. What's left is proving the full open-and-close round-trip.

Until the hedge turns on, the vault runs safely in parked mode (USDC lending), which is fully proven. Adding the hedge is an addition, not a rewrite.

***

## Getting to mainnet

Two things, running in parallel:

1. **A security audit** by a top Solana firm. This is the hard gate before real money, and good firms book months out, so we're shortlisting now.
2. **A seed raise** ($200–500K) to fund the audit and runway. A DAO treasury pre-committing capital de-risks it and seeds day-one deposits.

When those clear, we deploy with a **$250k launch cap** and open an invite-only private beta.

### Why $250k

$250k is about the most the venue can hold today. We run a permanent one-directional short, so the cap is whichever of two limits binds first:

`cap = min(15% of open interest, 25% of median daily volume)`

On current Phoenix numbers, volume binds — roughly twice as tight as open interest. A clean exit is about a quarter of a day's flow, and a typical Phoenix SOL day isn't deep enough to absorb much more than this.

Note that it uses the **median** day, not the average: a handful of spike days sit inside any 30-day window, and sizing off the mean would badly overstate what the book can actually take. And a **bigger cap would make the product worse.** If most of a large vault can't be hedged, the rest sits in lending and ksUSD becomes a Kamino deposit wearing a wrapper — all of the operational risk, none of the carry.

It also self-corrects: if our own size ever pushed funding below the line, the vault just parks, so it can't run itself into a loss.

*Measured live, never quoted from memory: `npx tsx scripts/phoenix/capacity.ts`.*

***

## After launch

Once there's a real track record, two things scale it.

**Composability.** Get ksUSD accepted as collateral, starting with Kamino, so holding it earns carry and unlocks borrowing. That's what makes deposits sticky. It's the sUSDe playbook.

**Distribution.** A USDC↔ksUSD pool and Jupiter routing for one-click in and out, plus yield-marketplace listings and DAO-treasury allocations.

The cap ramps $250k → $1M → $5M → $25M, each step gated by the same `min(15% OI, 25% of 30-day median volume)` rule, not by demand and not by a date.

**We grow with Phoenix.** That's the whole sizing policy. Each step up needs the venue's median daily volume to be correspondingly deeper, and the largest steps need a second venue to split the short across. Phoenix's SOL-PERP open interest has trended up over recent weeks but swings a lot week to week, so we treat it as a level to measure rather than a trend to extrapolate. We won't put a date on someone else's order book. The vault gets bigger exactly when the venue can hedge it.

***

## Timeline

| When                      | What                                                                                   |
| ------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Now**                   | Audit-firm shortlist · seed raise · anchor conversations · finish the hedge round-trip |
| **Q3 2026**               | Full hedge round-trip proven, mainnet-ready pending the audit                          |
| **Q4 2026 – Q1 2027**     | Audit done · mainnet deploy at the $250k cap · private beta, invite-only               |
| **H1 2027**               | Public launch · USDC↔ksUSD pool + Jupiter routing · first collateral listing           |
| **When the venue allows** | $1M, then $5M → $25M — opened by Phoenix's depth, not by a date                        |

Two clocks. The **dates** ride on the audit slot and the raise, not on the engineering. The **caps** don't ride on dates at all — they track Phoenix's open interest and volume, live. So we won't quote a TVL target for a given quarter: we can promise what we ship and how we size, not how deep someone else's book gets.

***

## Not in v1

* Multiple staking tokens (mSOL, jupSOL): later.
* A second lending venue (Marginfi): later. v1 is Kamino only.

***

## Related

* [Download the full roadmap (PDF)](https://www.keystonefi.xyz/roadmap.pdf)
* [Strategy & Modes](/how-it-works/strategy-and-modes.md) · [Whitepaper](/reference/whitepaper.md) · [Version history](/changelog/versions.md)