> 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/reference/roadmap.md).

# Roadmap

**ksUSD in one line:** deposit USDC, receive and hold ksUSD, 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.
* **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.

> Backtested on Phoenix's own funding across every day the venue has existed, the worst drawdown was **−0.392%** — carried through a month in which funding averaged −14%. Yield: **5.04% net**. Staking sets the floor; funding is the topping on top of it. The window is 286 days, so treat it as a young venue's record rather than a through-cycle one. *Simulated, not a promise.*

***

## Where we are

**The program is finished.** What's left is a soak test, an audit, and the money to pay for it.

We've run the whole money path on a copy of mainnet, against real protocol state, in both modes. Parked: deposit → lend → earn → redeem. And hedged: buy jitoSOL through Jupiter, open the Phoenix short, close it, unwind cleanly. jitoSOL staking (Jito), USDC lending (Kamino), and USDC↔jitoSOL swaps (Jupiter) are all wired and proven.

The last piece landed on 23 August: the hedge now reads real Pyth price accounts rather than a test stub, so the rehearsal uses the same price plumbing mainnet will. The test suite also checks it *refuses* bad prices — stale ones, ones from the wrong feed, ones with too much uncertainty attached.

One step happens after we deploy rather than before: Phoenix has to switch on the vault's permission to post margin. Our contact there has agreed to do it once the program is live on mainnet. Until it happens the vault runs parked on Kamino lending, which is fully proven and is a real product on its own.

***

## 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 **$500k launch cap** and open an invite-only private beta.

### Why $500k

$500k 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:

**Whichever is smaller: 15% of open interest, or a quarter of a median day's volume.**

On current Phoenix numbers, open interest binds — roughly twice as tight as volume. Earlier in August it was the other way round, which is the point of taking whichever is tighter rather than picking one and trusting it.

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 against the venue, never quoted from memory.*

***

## 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 $500k → $1M → $5M → $25M, each step gated by that same rule, not by demand and not by a date.

**We grow with Phoenix.** That's the whole sizing policy. Open interest is the side that binds today, so each step up needs the venue's book 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 · a 30-day hands-off run on devnet     |
| **Q3 2026**               | **Reached.** Both modes proven end-to-end on a copy of mainnet. Mainnet-ready pending the audit |
| **Q4 2026 – Q1 2027**     | Audit done · mainnet deploy at the $500k 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 — which is done.
* **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 USDC lending venue: later. v1 is Kamino only, with no venue scaffolding in vault state.

***

## Related

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