Katana, a new decentralized funding (defi) -focused blockchain incubated by industry’s heavyweight polygon and GSR, shared on Wednesday that its private mainnet has gone live.
The new LAG-2 blockchain will combine “All liquidity in a set of protocols and collect dividends from all potential sources,” the team shared in a press release sent to Coindesk. Katana’s goal is “to drive a self-supporting defi engine for long-term growth,” it said.
Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, told Coindesk that Katana showed up to tackle Defi Fragmentation, where digital assets are distributed across different apps and ecosystems, making certain types of investment difficult.
Katana was built using Agglayer – Polygon’s platform for building interoperable blockchains. “One of the things we want is a super deep liquidity nap on the agglayer so any chain can take advantage of it,” BOIRON said. “When you look everywhere in crypto, what you realize is that there is actually no chain built very well to actually have deep liquidity.”
Katana aims to improve blockchain -liquidity – including lending, trading and dividend -bearing strategies – by integrating with popular apps like sushi, a larger decentralized exchange and morpho, a popular decentralized loan ecosystem.
Polygon Labs, the team behind the Layer-2 network, helped design the chain while the GSR, the crypto market, advised about the user experience and lends liquidity to help get the platform from the ground. “We provide liquidity on the chain-or ‘fat’ to ensure that people can actually use the chain on day one,” said Jakob Palmstierna, president of GSR.
Currently, Katana is open to a limited group of users. It includes a pre-redephase that allows users to park their ETH, USDC, USDT and WBTC to get a chance to win Kat Tokens, the network’s new government and utility token.
Although the activity is limited on this private step, early deposits are incitamated through a lootbox style reward system. Katana’s public mainnet is expected to arrive in late June.
Read more: Polygon starts the aggregator program, successful projects will air drop up to 15% native token to pole stakers
