RIADeFi
Refusal file · other

Why Ketju rejected KPK (karpatkey)

Memo v1Published by Ketju Research

A registry memo, published verbatim and versioned. Superseded versions are recorded, never edited away. A rejection is a judgment for Ketju's client base and thesis, not a universal safety claim. Not investment, legal, tax, or compliance advice.

The memo

REJECTED ON AN UNRESOLVED ELIGIBILITY QUESTION, NOT ON FIRM QUALITY. KPK is the 2025 rebrand of karpatkey, a genuinely established operator: founded 2020, GnosisDAO's sole treasury manager since 2022, with a multi-year public track record managing treasuries for ENS, Balancer, Aave, CoW Protocol, Lido, Uniswap, Arbitrum, Nexus Mutual, Safe, and dYdX, and a 2024 funding round backed by protocol founders including Stani Kulechov and the Gnosis co-founders. Its non-custodial Safe-plus-Zodiac-Roles architecture is a real, disclosed control model, and GnosisDAO's 2025 approval of KPK's spin-off into an independent Cayman Islands foundation entity is a matter of public record. This is the strongest-credentialed operator in this batch. But this review could not confirm whether KPK's retail-facing curated vaults exclude US persons or carry any other eligibility restriction — the protocol-specific legal disclaimer pages that would answer this could not be rendered — and the one detailed incident account available, KPK's own writeup of the April 2026 Kelp DAO/LayerZero exploit's effect on its curated vaults, is self-published with no independent confirmation of whether any loss was realized. This registry does not record eligibility as open when it is genuinely unresolved.

What would reopen the file

  • The protocol-specific legal disclaimer pages for each vault venue are rendered and confirmed not to exclude US persons
  • Fund-product eligibility and accreditation requirements for direct end-user access are disclosed
  • An independent, non-KPK-authored account of the Kelp DAO incident's actual financial impact on KPK-curated positions is published
  • A primary Cantina audit report is published and linked, resolving the discrepancy with DefiLlama's zero-audit field

Facts on file

Verdict
Rejected
Exposure
other
Chains examined
Ethereum, Gnosis, Arbitrum, Base, BSC, OP Mainnet, Polygon
Memo version
v1
Reviewed
Next review

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