kpk

kpk is an asset manager that works on-chain for decentralized organizations and, more recently, for fintech apps and individual depositors through DeFi vaults. Its website groups the business into three products: bespoke treasury mandates, curated vault strategies and tokenised on-chain funds.

The firm was founded in 2020 as karpatkey by Marcelo Ruiz de Olano and Alejandro Romero, under Gnosis incubation, to manage the GnosisDAO treasury. Its about page says GnosisDAO approved a spin-off in 2025, when karpatkey renamed itself kpk. Ruiz de Olano is chief executive and previously led OpenEthereum, the team maintaining the former Parity Ethereum client; Romero is chief operating officer; Santiago Gonzalez Zerbo, chief technology officer since October 2021, is also listed as a co-founder.

kpk says it closed a $7 million funding round in October 2024, with angels including Joe Lubin and Stani Kulechov. The website is run by the Karpatkey Foundation, whose terms are governed by Cayman Islands law, and the vault disclaimers name KPK Digital Assets Inc. as curator. The company does not publish a street address, and it has no token.

In a treasury mandate the assets never leave the client. The DAO keeps its funds in its own Safe multisig and grants kpk a narrow role through the Zodiac Roles Modifier, which lists the exact contracts, functions and parameters kpk may call. ENS DAO has put kpk's permissions over its Endowment to on-chain votes, so changes to what kpk can do are themselves governance decisions.

kpk's treasury page describes three stages: a financial diagnostic, an investment policy statement (IPS) drafted with the client that sets allowed assets and risk limits, and execution through on-chain policies, followed by monthly, quarterly and annual reporting. It also lists token liquidity work such as protocol-owned liquidity, buybacks and managing a client's market makers.

The September 2026 report, published on 20 October, covered five DAO mandates with combined assets of $163.05 million, up from $151.74 million at the end of August. Part of the rise came from a reporting change that brought dYdX's buyback account into scope.

Earlier clients listed on kpk's timeline include GnosisDAO, Lido, Uniswap, Arbitrum and Safe. Aave also appears there, but Aave's December 2024 renewal of its financial service provider named TokenLogic alone, so that mandate looks to have ended.

Since 2025 kpk has acted as a risk curator: it chooses which lending markets a vault can lend into, sets caps and keeps liquidity buffers, on Morpho, Gearbox and Symbiotic. Anyone with a wallet can deposit into these vaults, subject to the jurisdiction restrictions in the disclaimers. The docs sort them into Prime and Prime Core vaults, which lend only against blue-chip collateral and keep high withdrawal liquidity, and Yield vaults, which accept a wider set of collateral such as yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenised private credit for a higher rate. DefiLlama counted about $218.5 million under kpk as curator on 25 October 2026.

Each vault is run from its own Curator Safe (2 of 5 signers), with a separate Security Council Safe (5 of 8) that owns Morpho vaults and can veto pending changes. Automated agents can act only through scoped calls, and Morpho changes sit behind 3, 7 or 14-day timelocks depending on the function. Optional cover underwritten by Nexus Mutual and distributed by OpenCover is available on some vaults; kpk states it does not bear the risk or guarantee payouts.

The funds product issues ERC-20 shares priced by an on-chain NAV calculator and runs under whitelisted actions on Safe accounts. kpk says this infrastructure was audited by Cantina.

Treasury fees are negotiated per client and are not published as a schedule. One mandate does show its cost: kpk's H1 2026 review for ENS put its fees at $221,275 for January to June, about 0.50% of assets annualised, against $1.37 million of yield.

Vault fees are set per vault and shown on each vault's docs page. Examples as of October 2026: the KPK EURe Yield vault on Arbitrum and the ETH Prime vault on Ethereum charge a 0% performance fee, and the YO Ecosystem vault charges 5%. Depositors in kpk's Gearbox pools pay no fee; an interest fee of 20% (10% on some credit managers) is charged to borrowers on top of their rate.

For a DAO, the main risk is a bad allocation inside the permissions it granted. kpk cannot withdraw a client's funds, but it can move them into any protocol on the allowed list, and losses there would be the client's. kpk's ENS review says no principal has been lost since the mandate began in March 2023; during the April 2026 rsETH event it pulled the Endowment out of Aave as a precaution and later returned.

For a vault depositor, the risks are those of the underlying lending markets: bad debt if collateral falls faster than liquidations, oracle failures and, in Yield vaults, exposure to newer collateral including tokenised private credit. The disclaimers say kpk vaults are not registered with any financial regulator. Withdrawals are served from idle balances and a designated liquidity market, so in a stressed market a withdrawal can wait until borrowers repay or the curator reallocates. An audit or cover policy reduces but does not remove these risks. For how kpk's public record compares, see how kpk compares with other treasury and liquidity managers.

In the sources opened in October 2026, including kpk's reports, the ENS forum and DefiLlama, we found no hack or loss of client principal attributed to kpk.

kpk grew from one DAO client into a multi-product manager.

• 2020: karpatkey founded to manage the GnosisDAO treasury.
• 2022: GnosisDAO approves it as sole treasury manager; it wins the ENS Endowment tender; the Balancer mandate begins.
• August 2023: monthly ENS Endowment reports start on the ENS forum.
• 2023: new mandates with Aave, CoW Protocol, Lido and Uniswap, according to kpk.
• 2024: Arbitrum, Nexus Mutual, Safe and dYdX added as clients; $7 million round closed in October.
• 2025: GnosisDAO approves the spin-off; karpatkey becomes kpk and launches curated vaults.
• September 2026: wARS Yield vault goes live on Arc mainnet on 16 September.