Introducing, Keel: Solana's Capital Engine
Keel is an onchain capital allocator, a DeFi liquidity layer, and a catalyst for tokenized asset markets
EDIT: This post was published at Keel's launch in September 2025. Keel's mandate has since expanded — see Keel in 2026, below, for the current strategic direction:
The world’s collateral assets are starting to move onchain, but much of the infrastructure and major enablers are yet to fall into place.
Over the last five years, the market for tokenized assets has grown from $57 million to $30 billion, and, according to financial institutions such as Standard Chartered and BCG, the market is projected to grow to $20-30 trillion by 2034.
Solana’s Breakout Point
Driven by demand for tokenization, onchain finance is at a breakout point. However, with demand for tokenized assets comes demand for onchain lending, liquidity, and critical financial enablers. In this area, Solana needs more.
Solana is positioned as a leading infrastructure for onchain capital markets due to its successes across robustness, latency, throughput, and cost efficiency — proof of its ability to enable both market interactions and settlement to take place on the same layer.
Yet, if Solana is to achieve the vision of internet capital markets then technology alone is not enough - liquidity catalysts and enablers are required.
The Chicken, the Egg, and the Liquidity Layer
Solana faces a sequencing challenge: onchain finance needs to scale to attract the larger pools of capital, but the large pools of capital require scale to be deployed.
This means enabling:
Robust lending and cross-asset liquidity
Rates that remain stable and competitive
Institutional scale demand for tokenized asset issuances
In the realm of tokenized assets, smooth and profitable operations are hindered by the liquidity delays and limitations of traditional financial rails, which conflict with the atomic, always-on nature of DeFi markets.
And across Solana DeFi, liquidity is concentrated, leading to spikes in borrow and lending rates.
Scalable capital and liquidity will be the enablers for Solana’s onchain financial markets to reach the next stage of growth and maturity.
Keel is Solana’s Capital Engine
Powered by Sky (formerly MakerDAO), the issuer of USDS, and one of DeFi’s most proven protocols, Keel is purpose-built to provide the structural support that Solana’s financial markets require to scale.
A $2.5bn Catalyst for Growth
As an onchain capital allocator with an initial roadmap of $2.5bn, Keel will kickstart the capital allocation flywheel, enabling conditions for more capital to enter the Solana ecosystem.
A Value Multiplier
By plugging into Sky’s infrastructure, Keel is empowered to be a multiplicative force for the Solana ecosystem — utilizing over-collateralized debt to support credit creation and improve liquidity.
A Liquidity Layer
The Keel liquidity layer will be integrated directly with Solana’s largest DeFi protocols and tokenized asset issuers, dynamically reallocating stablecoin liquidity to provide the stability and depth required to operate at scale.
Areas of Focus
These are the initial areas of focus for the Keel Capital Engine, and some of the benefits it will aim to generate for the Solana ecosystem:
Stablecoin Lending
Deeper, more liquid stablecoin lending markets - enabling leverage on high quality collateral and the ability to borrow in much larger sizes, with greater capital efficiency.
Stablecoin Swaps
Greater depth and stability for stablecoin swaps - by providing swap liquidity for leading stablecoin pairs, Keel reinforces ecosystem depth and peg stability.
Liquidity and TVL Bootstrapping
Support for bootstrapping new issuances and DeFi products from zero to one with substantial stablecoin reserves vs third-party capital.
Savings
Enabling a predictable, stable, and continuously compounding yield, with native staking and redemption free of fees or lockup, for individuals through to institutions.
RWA Yields, Redemption, and Secondary Liquidity
Removing friction for tokenized assets and RWAs at scale by allocating at size into tokenized yield-bearing assets and strategies, and improving onchain liquidity, redemptions, and liquidations by bridging traditional finance with always-on DeFi markets.
Join us in taking Solana’s Capital Markets to the Next Stage
Whether you’re a builder, an issuer, or a follower, track the progress of Solana’s Capital Engine on X and stay up to date with our latest developments on Substack.