karpatkey (rebranded kpk in 2025) is a non-custodial, on-chain manager for DAO treasuries. Most DAO tools answer “where does the money sit” (custody) or “how does a vote move it” (execution); karpatkey answers a different question — what should an idle treasury actually do. It is the active-management layer that sits on top of a Safe: it designs an allocation strategy, deploys treasury assets into vetted DeFi positions, rebalances them, and reports the results, all without ever holding the DAO's keys. It grew up inside GnosisDAO, which it was founded in 2021 to serve, and became the reference name for “professional treasury management, done on-chain and non-custodially” (kpk).

The non-custodial model

The whole design turns on one constraint: the manager must be able to work the treasury without being able to take it. karpatkey solves this with a proxy Management Safe paired with the Zodiac Roles Modifier — an open-source module that grants an address a role: permission to call only pre-approved functions on pre-approved contracts, with pre-approved parameters. ENS's own mandate describes the setup in exactly those terms — management runs through “a proxy Management Safe and the Zodiac Roles Modifier” (CoinDesk).

In practice the DAO keeps its assets in its own Safe and hands karpatkey a role that can, say, supply to a specific Aave market or add liquidity to a named pool — but cannot transfer funds to an outside address, cannot touch unapproved protocols, and can be revoked by the DAO at any time. The manager's discretion is bounded by code, not by trust. This is what “non-custodial” means here: the worst a compromised manager can do is move money between whitelisted DeFi positions, never out the door. It is the same permission-scoping idea that Zodiac brings to governance execution, applied to treasury operations.

Mandates and track record

karpatkey's credibility rests on the size and prominence of the treasuries it has run. Beyond its origin at GnosisDAO, its best-known mandate is the ENS Endaoment — the endowment ENS created to fund development independent of registration revenue. In a November 2022 community vote (1.76M votes to 1.3M for “none of the above”), ENS selected karpatkey, working with Steakhouse Financial, to manage an endowment proposed to start near $52M and scale toward $69M, invested through “low-risk, medium-complexity DeFi strategies” over a USDC-and-ETH base (CoinDesk). Its client roster has since grown to include Balancer, CoW Protocol, Aave, Lido, Nexus Mutual and Safe.

By the time GnosisDAO moved to spin it out, karpatkey reported having executed more than 7,000 DeFi transactions and managed over $2.6B in DAO treasuries without a reported loss or hack (The Block). Those figures are the sell: an active strategy is only worth running if the operational risk it adds stays smaller than the yield it earns.

From service to protocol: the kpk spin-off

In 2025 karpatkey stopped being a unit of one DAO and became its own. Under GIP-92, GnosisDAO voted to spin karpatkey off as an independent entity and deploy a governance token; the rebrand to kpk and the launch of the KPK token followed on 15 May 2025 (The Defiant).

Freed from a single mandate, kpk has generalised its playbook into a product: curated, non-custodial vaults that apply the same role-scoped, policy-bounded automation to DeFi protocols and, increasingly, to retail depositors — including agent-powered vaults launched on Morpho in late 2025 (kpk). The trajectory is a familiar one in DAO tooling: a bespoke service, proven on a flagship treasury, hardens into reusable infrastructure.

Where it fits in the stack

On the DAO tooling stack, custody (Safe) and execution (Zodiac, on-chain governors) answer where funds live and how a vote moves them. karpatkey occupies the layer above: once the treasury is safely held and governable, someone still has to decide what to do with it. For a nine-figure endowment sitting in stablecoins, doing nothing is itself a costly decision — the treasury-management problem of turning a static balance into sustainable runway. karpatkey's contribution is to make that active management delegable without making it custodial, so a DAO can hire professional allocation without handing over the keys.

How Caper approaches this

karpatkey exists because the mainstream DAO treasury is a Safe that most DAOs don't have the mandate or expertise to actively manage, so they delegate that work to an outside manager and bound the delegation with Zodiac role permissions. A caper removes the seam that delegation spans. The treasury is a protocol-controlled vault inside the contract, not an external Safe with a manager attached: assets move only through an on-chain proposal that members vote on and that executes permissionlessly — a PAYOUT to fund something or an INVEST to deploy capital — with vote weight (t·v)/(V·T) combining tokens held and the earned, soulbound record of past voting. There is no manager address to grant a role to, and no discretionary allocation between votes; the same weighting also sets a member's pro-rata share on exit. The trade-off is deliberate and honest: a caper forgoes the professional, actively-managed yield karpatkey delivers in exchange for having no external manager and no custody boundary to trust — every treasury move is a governed, on-chain act by definition. For a treasury that wants active DeFi management, karpatkey remains the reference; a caper is the answer for one that wants the treasury and the vote that moves it to be the same thing.

References

• kpk, About and Articles.
• CoinDesk, Ethereum Name Service Selects Karpatkey DAO to Manage Its Endowment Fund (2022).
• GnosisDAO, GIP-92: Should Gnosis DAO spin-off karpatkey DAO and deploy the KPK Token?
• The Block, GnosisDAO approves Karpatkey's spin-off to become independent entity with KPK token.
• The Defiant, kpk launches KPK Token and updated DAO governance structure (2025).
• Gnosis Guild, Zodiac Roles Modifier.