karpatkey: The Story So Far...

As ever, the start of a new year is the perfect time to reflect and take stock. A moment to appreciate what’s brought us here, and what will carry us forward.

2025 is going to be a transformative year for karpatkey. We’re excited to share the many exciting things we have in store for our community, contributors and partners. But before embarking on those plans, we wanted to take a moment to appreciate our past.

Some may think they already know our story. karpatkey is blessed that so much of our history is memorialised in the records of the organisations we serve. But the story of our earliest days has largely been left untold. Until now...

Risk

Marcelo Ruiz de Olano was just 28 when he had his first brush with death. As a young professional making his way to work one morning, his world was rocked by a sudden phone robbery gone wrong, and a kitchen knife piercing his heart. For a moment, he thought it was all over...

Around that time, Marcelo was working at the oil and gas giant Chevron, engineering detailed financial models to support major capital projects. Until the robbery, he lived a comfortable and well-managed existence, occupied by his budding career and reputation for sound financial decision-making. In fact, Marcelo’s only real source of frustration at that time came from managing a near-constant thirst for adventure.

...a trauma like that really changes a person. For Marce, the risk-reward calculations at the centre of his universe promptly disintegrated. As his heart recovered from major surgery, the realisation slowly sunk in that life was too fragile to be held so tight.

So, Marce adapted. He left his promising career behind, jetted off to Asia and turned his hand to financial arbitrage to finance his adventures. Around 2016, he discovered Ethereum and became enthralled by a deep passion for decentralised and neutral financial infrastructure. That passion led him to OpenEthereum, a project funded to build Ethereum’s resilience through client diversity. And it inspired Marce to work alongside the Foundation and the Gnosis founders in building core infrastructure for Ethereum.

Around this time, decentralised finance (“DeFi”) flourished, showing itself to be a far superior alternative to the patchwork of global currencies and financial systems that digital nomads like Marce are inevitably enwrapped by. As OpenEthereum merged into another team, Marce faced a crossroads in his journey. But the unquestionable promise of these technologies inspired him to take the ultimate plunge, and found his own business.

As he set off down this path, Marce sought support from his closest friend at University - Ale. The pair had met at university and bonded over shared passions, including finance and investing. After graduating, Ale had also achieved a promising corporate career building on his skills in managing complex operations in Mercadolibre, Latin America's largest tech company. Like Marce, he had become interested in Ethereum, and felt the allure of decentralised finance as an extension of his existing interests. In supporting Marce with his plans for a new venture, Ale was soon convinced to leave his traditional career behind to join him and pursue an exciting and uncertain future.

The two turned their attention to security, inventing a physical device to store and protect private keys. They dived ever deeper into the world of Ethereum and DeFi, participating in a range of emerging crypto-native organisations. Eventually, the pair landed on their most promising opportunity yet — supporting Gnosis to manage the significant funds in its treasury. So the pair founded karpatkey: a DeFi treasury management operation built to actively deploy and manage treasuries into DeFi opportunities.

Looking back now, it’s easy to see that struggles with risk and uncertainty sit at the heart of Marce’s story. Each decision that led karpatkey to where it is today stems from Marce’s own sense of security and the trials that challenged it. That’s not to say that risk tolerance alone is what guided Marce, but rather that karpatkey’s story is all about careful management of risk.

Agency

Though managing risk is a core thread that runs throughout karpatkey’s story, it’s far from the only force that established our trajectory. karpatkey’s arrival at precisely the right time and place was also driven by the compelling nature of what blockchains and DeFi had to offer the world.

If we had to pick one word, it would be “agency”.

Agency is the ability to control actions. To the individual, it’s about empowerment to act freely without undue pressure or influence. For organisations, agency refers to a person’s ability to act freely on behalf of the whole. And in DeFi, agency most commonly refers to the ability to control our own financial destiny through self-custody.

In 2012, Marce was banned from Paypal. He had been making use of dual accounts in the US and Argentina to cleverly manage his finances. He had caught on to a range of novel arbitrage opportunities in commodities, stocks and bonds that existed between his US, Argentine and European accounts. Marce had been actively profiting from these opportunities using Paypal as his “middle man”. Sadly, Paypal had other ideas...

For the first time in his life, Marce learned the pain of being unceremoniously debanked and stripped of his agency. With funds frozen in locked accounts, and no viable alternative to meet his needs, he struggled to fight back. Unsurprisingly, his trust in traditional financial institutions was permanently shaken.

Throughout his subsequent travels in Asia, Marce carried the scars of this distrust openly. While he juggled currencies and banking systems to earn his way from one country to the next, he carefully guarded what wealth he’d earned from his corporate life, thinking critically about each counterparty he entrusted. In his eyes, no one else could be fully relied on to protect his financial independence.

And yet, soon after he discovered the early iterations of DeFi, Marce took the bold (and somewhat ironic) leap of depositing his entire net worth into novel onchain protocols. Evidently, his skepticism of custodial finance had shifted into a newfound trust in trust-minimised systems. It only took a few months of casual experimentation with early applications for Marce to appreciate the value on offer: DeFi was empowering meaningful agency, and had the potential to restore the balance of power in favour of the individual... it was the solution he never knew he needed.

In setting up karpatkey, Marce and Ale were willing to bet that others would feel the same; DeFi could empower all kinds of people and organisations to realise their agency. And they were right...

In late 2022, karpatkey threw its hat in the ring to manage a new endowment for the ENS DAO. Amidst a field of professional fund managers and large financial institutions, the team were a small fish wagering on the value of a truly DeFi-native approach. To the surprise of many, the field was promptly cut down, as many other proposals were promptly exposed for the centralisation at their core. Though many were willing to preach DeFi, few — it appeared — were willing to live by it.

karpatkey won the trust of the ENS community by preserving and respecting their right to self-custody. They proved that principle could be protected by building solutions to bypass the need for trust. These solutions allowed karpatkey’s team of treasury operators to consider and suggest solutions for effective management, without requiring the ENS DAO to trust or surrender control. At its core, this approach recognised the autonomy that true DAOs like ENS hold sacred.

But though other organisations have gradually reached the same conclusions, our industry remains a long way from its full potential. That’s because, at the cutting edge of innovation, what you need to be successful is not just to be right... you need the right time; or, at the very least, to survive until the time is right.

Resilience

karpatkey was fortunate that Marce understood the importance of simply surviving from its earliest days.

Throughout his upbringing in Argentina, Marce had seen strong institutions and incredible individuals brought down by unstable economics and political turmoil. Even after the robbery threatened his life, Marce never resigned to just giving up. From travelling the world, to starting up businesses, to making bold wagers on novel technology: Marce was always forced to measure any big ambitions with a strong pinch of perseverance.

Looking back with the benefits of hindsight, it can be easy to think that things were obvious or easy. For example, some may take for granted the diversity of Ethereum clients that now protect our consensus. Marce, on the other hand, will never forget the days fighting for his vision to maintain even one good alternative Geth at OpenEthereum. In much the same way, many will say that non-custodial asset management was an obvious solution that anyone could have capitalised on. But few lived with the risk and uncertainty that karpatkey faced in its early years as it built its reputation. Real resilience requires strong belief...

In the very early days, Marce and Ale were blessed by their relationship with the Gnosis founders, which had taken root during Marce’s days with OpenEthereum. Gnosis became karpatkey’s first and largest client, a position they’ve retained to this day. But the karpatkey-Gnosis relationship wasn’t, as some may assume, a traditional “spin-off” story. The two shared no contributors, entities or assets. karpatkey was bootstrapped entirely by the founding team, with a later investment from GnosisDAO helping to accelerate growth beyond the first year. And Gnosis couldn’t offer a backstop if karpatkey failed. Either Marce and Ale would succeed at generating value, or the treasury would need to go another way. Instead, the foremost of Gnosis’ contributions to karpatkey was the trust, credibility and reputation that it displayed to the world. Without this, karpatkey would have struggled to stand on its own feet.

As is typical for projects in the Gnosis ecosystem, these challenges pushed the young karpatkey to build resilience through technical solutions, aiming to bypass the limitations of human behaviour. karpatkey moved early to become power users of Safe smart wallets (then “Gnosis Safe”). And the team worked closely with Gnosis Guild to build applications on top of advanced permissions and safeguarding technologies. Ultimately, karpatkey developed its own tooling and software, from advanced financial models and its repertoire of approved, pre-formulated DeFi strategies. Over time, this evolved into bespoke bots and agents, aimed at delivering niche functionality for the increasingly complex needs and ambitions of Gnosis. And karpatkey succeeded in its mission to grow Gnosis’ treasuries.

In more recent years, we have come to understand how some of those early moves to prioritise resilient financial management would become our secret sauce. By 2022, karpatkey had expanded to serve more DAOs, just at the same time that many of the get-rich-quick projects of the last cycle were imploding under strained market conditions. Amidst the collapses of Terra-Luna and FTX, a sudden mindset shift rippled across the industry. Many of the formerly invincible central players suddenly retreated to defend their reserves and hunker down for winter. Suddenly, prudent management, experienced hands, and a clean track record became very much en vogue. karpatkey’s brand of secure and sustainable yield became all the rage.

Throughout the bearish conditions of the last 2 years, our growing team has thrived in cultivating new relationships and close partnerships with many of the industry’s foremost organisations. Even now, as the industry gradually recovers to more bullish sentiments, that core theme of resilience remains at the heart of karpatkey’s mission. We know that our industry is stronger together, and building a more robust financial system will require deep-rooted collaboration. And we understand that a permanent improvement to the global financial system will require some consolidation around shared best practices and scale economies. Put simply, we’ve realised the value we must bring to the world.

karpatkey

As we reflect on kpk (formerly karpatkey) ’s journey, it’s clear that the road that brought us here has been a long and difficult one. It can be easy to assume that success was always assured, but those who walked the path know that the truth is anything but. And though Marce and Ale hoped and believed in their vision, no one could ever really have known where it was going to take them.

There’s a lot of value to be had in knowing your story... in understanding what drives your people, and what you collectively stand for. karpatkey aspires to help build an open and resilient financial system made by and for the people from the ground up. karpatkey believes in the value of personal agency, and finance as a tool to empower individuals throughout their lives. And karpatkey respects the ceaseless struggle of risk, and the role of careful decision-making and risk management in attaining enduring change.

Though we know that things are bound to keep changing as karpatkey grows and evolves, we hope this piece serves as a reminder of where we came from, and what we stand for. This is the story of what made us karpatkey...

Now, it’s time to turn the page.