3 weeks ago by Abhi | Catalysis
Mainnet Announcement: https://x.com/0xcatalysis/status/2044053623328649584
Over the last 18 months, @dhruvbodani and I have been building Catalysis with one simple vision: to build something meaningful with genuine impact.
Today, @0xcatalysis goes live on Ethereum mainnet as DeFi's first vault-native risk coverage infrastructure.
From having nothing but the vision statement to actually writing about going live, the journey is real.
Along the way, we have,more than once, had to stop, rethink and start over.
Now, as we are launching our mainnet, I’m writing this.
This isn’t a history lesson or a postmortem. It’s my way of recognizing the journey, the effort, the wrong turns, and the decisions that actually got us here.
At this point, we had already internally pivoted from building a security abstraction layer to building coverage infrastructure. For the full story on the pivot, please read this.
I spent the next few months in New York 🇺🇸.
The goal was simple: figure out what would actually make sense for us to build and what wouldn’t.
Talking to TradFi allocators, DeFi teams & risk curators, absorbing as much I could on what these folks need, what they'd tried, and what solutions they point-blank refused to touch and why.
Joining the dots of almost every conversation, one concern was turning into a pattern: "We need coverage that's fairly priced and scalable” .
New York gave me the demand signal. What it didn't give me was the path.
That’s what took us to Hong Kong 🇭🇰 in December.
We had a rough idea: Bridge onchain coverage into the traditional insurance world.
Take the capital efficiency of restaking, wrap it in structures that traditional risk underwriters understood, and go from there.
What we needed to: validate and stress-test this idea.
This is exactly why, in December, we went to Hong Kong for InsurTech Insights Asia, a conference for those working with risk and building its future.
The conference was full of people who had been doing reinsurance and institutional risk transfer for 20, 30 years. Everyone here knew the system inside out.
I spent a week in those rooms: listening, asking questions, figuring out traditional insurance, parties involved, and everything in between.
We were there because we saw a path: bridging onchain coverage into traditional insurance world is a trillion dollar opportunity.
I came back with one clear conclusion: “bridging onchain coverage to traditional world was going to take a decade.”
slow adoption cycles heavy regulations long lockups asset volatility problems
All real problems. All unsolvable at our stage.
For a 5-person team, a multi-year bet with no near-term product to show is just a slow death.
That forced us to reset.
Look, at this point, we had raised a pre-seed and built a small, lean team.
We had already pivoted once and didn’t have the luxury of being wrong on our second shot. Or even experiment for long.
Hong Kong pointed us back to where we actually belonged. Onchain. DeFi.
The terrain we knew inside out. So we went back to DeFi and asked some questions from first principles.
- What does coverage in DeFi actually need to look like?
- Is there demand now?
- What can a small 5-person team realistically build, ship on time and scale?
We started generating ideas.
And then, one by one, we started killing them.
We explored multiple directions. Most of them didn’t survive first contact with reality.
Here’s a slide from back then. I still am bullish on solving all these. Just NOT NOW.
a. **Covered Lending **was one of the first ideas
It made sense on paper. We reduce collateral requirements and unlock capital efficiency.
But underwriting institutional credit onchain turns out to be super complex, expensive, and slow to get right.
b. We looked at Asset Custody next
We couldn't figure out how to underwrite custody breaches and key compromises.
If you can't price the risk, you can't sell coverage. Killed.
c. Stablecoins came up as well
Coverage against depegs. But the market wasn’t there yet.
Yield-bearing stablecoins were and are still a too small a market and dominated by assets that didn't need our help.
d. RWAs and offchain risks
We'd already learned this lesson in Hong Kong. Too early, too slow, too regulated. We shelved it for now.
e. Vault infra as just-in-time liquidity
The idea was to help vaults avoid holding idle reserves. It was interesting, but it didn’t solve a strong enough problem on its own.
Each of these ideas could have worked. But, we told ourselves: Not now. We need to focus.
And when everything else was cut away, one idea remained.
And when everything else was cut away, one idea kept us awake: Risk coverage for DeFi vaults. Natively embedded, not external. Built for institutions.
I'll be honest: I'm personally more bullish on this than anything we've ever looked at.
Let me trying putting my conviction in words:
6a. Why DeFi vaults? Why risk coverage
DeFi vaults are becoming the default entry point for institutions into onchain capital markets.
Some facts & numbers:
Veda suggests vault TVL alone will cross $15B by EOY 2026.
Morpho deposits have already crossed $11B with even the Ethereum Foundation deploying ETH directly into Morpho Vaults.
Apollo Global Management, a global financial giant with ~$940B AUM, are coming onchain with Morpho.
The capital and demand are both institutional and real.
Yet there is still no native coverage solution built for vaults. Nothing onchain, nothing deterministic, and nothing at a promising scale.
6b. That gap became ours to fill.
This is why solving for and building vault-native risk coverage fits our constraints.
The demand is here Lives fully onchain Works on vaults (a DeFi surface that we know works)
More importantly, this unblocks institutional capital from being deployed onchain.
Well, to be honest, this wasn't as obvious when we started. But now, it is the only one that makes sense and keeps us moving forward.
Risk coverage native to the vault itself. Enforceable onchain. This way risk could be priced and underwritten in a way that actually matched how capital flows in DeFi.
But knowing the idea wasn't enough. We had two hard problems to solve before any of this was real.
7a. Underwriting capital: Where does the capital that backs coverage actually come from?
Till today, restaked capital had 3 unique properties:
it's already committed,
already slashable,
sitting idle looking for a productive use case.
It was a primitive that could be repurposed for underwriting.
EigenLayer (@eigencloud ) was where that capital lived. And we already had experience with restaking. So it became the foundation for everything underwriting capacity.
7b. How do you actually price vault risk?
Enter Credora (@CredoraNetwork ).
We built our underwriting framework on top of their real-time DeFi risk ratings data. For the first time in DeFi, we could effectively price risk and offer coverage for vaults.
With both pieces in place, this started to feel real.
Then came the first real signal.
EigenYields came in as our first capital delegation on EigenLayer.
Soon after, curators like Gauntlet and others started getting interested.
Catalysis went from an idea to a solution we could actually build, backed with capital, and ready for go-to-market.
Today, Catalysis is live on Ethereum mainnet.
Covered Morpho vaults with upto $10m worth of coverage* (backed by cbEth), curated by Gauntlet, are live.
Risk coverage is onchain, enforceable, and backed by real delegated capital.
Pre-seed, small team, 18 months. We are here.
We killed multiple ideas before landing on one we could actually build and get distribution for.
Now, as we are on mainnet, one thing became clear: “If we were to make this work, our solution had to hold under real conditions.”
Coverage only matters if it actually pays out.
And that means the system behind it has to be secure, reliable, and verifiable. For this to happen, we have put a few things in action:
Multiple rounds of audits with top-tier security firms like Certora (@Certora ) and Sigma Prime (@sigp_io ) because we refused to compromise on security.
Working with Guardrail (@guardrailai ) for real-time security monitoring and alerting for our post-mainnet deployment.
None of this is cheap, but cutting corners here was never an option.
Throughout this process, we stayed close to the people we’re building for.
Constantly getting feedback, refining assumptions, and making sure this actually solves a real problem.
So this is where we are.
Coverage is no longer an external layer or a promise. For institutions that have been sitting on the sidelines, you can now define your downside before you deploy.
That's what we at Catalysis made possible and we're just getting started.
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