Kristin Myers: Well, Wall Street is getting a new kind of contract. This month, regulators cleared perpetual futures on individual U.S. stocks, a product that grew up in cryptocurrency. There’s no expiration date, and you never even have to own the stock. Now, my guest has been waiting for this. He worked on Diem, Meta’s stablecoin project, before Washington pushed back and it was sold off.
But now he runs Katana, a blockchain that’s buying the apps built on it instead of just hosting them. And today it’s announcing two more acquisitions. But first, let’s take a look at the company. The road from an idea to the opening bell starts right now.
Wall Street has stock exchanges, lending markets and derivative platforms. But what if you could bring all of that into one digital financial hub? That’s the bet Matthew Fisher is making. He’s the CEO of Katana, a blockchain ecosystem designed to keep trading, lending and liquidity working together.
The idea: instead of relying on outside platforms, Katana integrates the core financial applications it needs, and now it’s expanding. After acquiring the team behind IDEX, Katana launched its own perpetual futures platform, allowing traders to bet on crypto price movements without owning the assets.
Katana says its ecosystem has already surpassed $2 billion in cumulative volume, and with new markets like Chainlink, it’s looking to attract even more trading activity. But here’s the challenge: can Katana turn a collection of crypto applications into a scalable financial ecosystem? And can it compete with the biggest names in decentralized finance? From Startup to Stock Exchange, Katana CEO Matthew Fisher [unclear: “is considering”].
And joining us now is Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations, as I was mentioning to you, on the acquisition of those two new companies. So let’s talk a little bit about them. You’ve announced those two acquisitions today. As of this morning, it’s going to be Sushi Exchange on Katana and also VaultBridge on top of the exchange IDEX in March.
A lot of folks might not even know what I just said. So let’s put this into plain English for anyone that’s not super familiar with Katana, hasn’t been following and doesn’t know any of those words that I just said. What is it? Who is it for? And what was that announcement? Those two acquisitions, what does that do for Katana?
Matthew Fisher: 100%. So Katana is an on-chain financial markets company. We provide a platform for users to come swap their assets, collateralized lend and access leverage on different assets. And now we own the perpetual futures exchange and the spot exchange underneath, expanding into VaultBridge as well, just adding different revenue streams to Katana.
And then I think, looking back on how the industry has developed, there are a lot of blockchains with unclear business models, and kind of how do you make money. A lot of applications come in and develop these new products, and then what happens when they leave? And so I think this whole concept of first-party applications is something that we’re bullish on.
Kristin Myers: So talk to us a little bit. And for those viewers that have been watching me and watching ETF Rundown, we’ve been talking about perps, perpetual futures, quite a bit. Perps and swaps. But for those investors that aren’t as familiar, because futures is very familiar to folks that worked in commodities but less familiar in other assets, talk to us just a little bit about perpetual futures and why it was so important to bring that on board to Katana.
Matthew Fisher: For sure. So perpetual futures are just a contract that tracks the price of something, whether that’s Bitcoin, oil, stocks. But importantly, there’s no end date or expiry. So users can come in, typically deposit stablecoins or US dollars, and decide whether they think an asset is going to go up or down. And as it goes up, they either make money or lose money, and vice versa. And I think it’s been super popular recently in terms of accessing leverage for a lot of global market participants.
In terms of why it’s important for Katana, it’s one of the highest revenue-generating subsectors within crypto, and growing really, really fast. And so I think it’s something that provides another, I guess, sustainable way to generate value for investors.
Kristin Myers: So talk to us a little bit, going further into some of these acquisitions, because a lot of blockchains host apps that are built by other folks and other companies. You guys are actually buying them. Why did you decide to own instead of host?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, I think again, we’re trying to generate value for investors and token owners in the community. But also, by owning the foundational protocols and providing a secure, seamless everyday user experience for those applications, that can then also allow other builders to come in on top and build their own differentiated user experience. Or if you’re an asset coming to Katana, you don’t have to talk to a bunch of people operating in different venues to access utility on your tokens. You can just talk to us and we can help you grow.
Kristin Myers: So what’s the revenue model then for Katana? How are you guys making money? Is it on every single trade, or is it something else?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, exactly. So every trade on the spot exchange and the perpetual futures exchange generates trading fees, which go to the Katana Foundation. On other chains, it usually goes to the application operators there. We also make money from sequencer fees for processing the transactions on the blockchain that we also run. And then with VaultBridge now, the assets that are bridged to Katana are actually lent out on Ethereum mainnet, which provides another revenue stream. Another way to think about it is like stablecoin revenue. Tether and Circle make revenue on the back of their stablecoins. We found a way to make those assets productive as well.
Kristin Myers: Now, for folks that are already on Katana, they use it, they hold its token, what changes for them? Or is this just an expansion of what they’re able to do now?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah. I think in the world of a lot of AI, where everything is moving very fast, one thing that’s really important for users is the security element and having battle-tested protocols. So VaultBridge has hosted hundreds of millions of deposits. The Sushi deployment has been around for several years, similar to Uniswap, and it’s been very battle-tested. Like, if it was going to get hacked, the question is why hasn’t it been hacked by now? And so I think that is super important, the continuity for users. It’s the same smart contracts, but bringing it in-house and operating it allows us to change the economics for investors and for the ecosystem at large.
Kristin Myers: So let’s take a step back, excuse me just for a second, and talk a little bit about the context, because you have been working inside of this space for quite a while. As I mentioned at the beginning, you were first at Diem, that’s Meta’s stablecoin project. It was sold off about four years ago, back in 2022, and that’s because it hit a wall with the regulators. Now, regulators have been working against, however you want to say it, digital assets, cryptocurrency, for quite a while. But a lot has shifted and a lot has changed since you were working at Meta. So now Washington’s going the other way. It seems far more crypto-friendly. Talk to us a little bit about what you have seen change over just the last four or five years within this space and with regulation.
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, for sure. Five or seven years ago, a lot of people had a bunch of concerns about anti-money laundering, that it’s only used for illicit activity. And then as time went on, fast forward to today, there’s BlackRock and everybody on Wall Street really adopting and very bullish on tokenization. Even [unclear: “Nike”] here is going to launch these tokenized securities within a month with one of the crypto exchanges. So I think it’s changed a lot. And everyone looks to the US government to lead, so I think the global regulators will follow their lead. The US, CFTC and SEC have been very innovation-forward.
And in terms of what’s changed since the days of Libra, we had this consortium of partners like Uber, Stripe, Shopify, DoorDash, a lot of these big companies. Basically back then, the regulation kind of turned with FTX and a lot of the bumps in the road, and people wrote blockchain off, and now are coming back. I think the GENIUS Act last year basically created this conversation amongst every fintech where you have to have an answer to your boss: what is our stablecoin strategy? Stablecoins and settlements are the first step, and then there’s a bunch of things that can come after that.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So there’s a lot of competition inside of the DeFi space. Talk to us about how big Katana is today, particularly now with these two new acquisitions. And how are you guys thinking about keeping that liquidity at Katana and not leaving to go to another?
Matthew Fisher: For sure. I think there’s been a bunch of different incentive games played over the past cycle, and caring about specific numbers, and there’s vanity metrics and this and that. What we’ve been more focused on is the activities that actually generate revenue for us. So right now we’re most focused on the perpetual futures volume. We just did, I think, a billion last month in volume.
Kristin Myers: Should you say 300 billion or 1 billion?
Matthew Fisher: 1 billion.
Kristin Myers: Okay.
Matthew Fisher: So we have something to shoot for, about 5 billion right now. But I think we’ve been growing month over month. It’s still a little bit early, since we made the acquisition a few months ago, but we’ve been happy with it so far and are looking forward to a product differentiator still yet to come. And then we also have access to new markets, which we think will continue to drive this space forward.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So talk to me a little bit about what Katana looks like a year from now. You have these two new acquisitions. What is the next 12 months, as you guys are thinking about it?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, for sure. We’re laser-focused on this one ideal customer profile, as we call it. It’s someone that sits in between the normal retail trader and an institution or a prosumer. What we’re trying to go for is what I’m calling a wannabe prosumer, almost, where they understand that there’s money to be made there. They follow strong traders. They usually have one of two issues, either a time or a skill issue. They’re working every day and they don’t have time to manage their own portfolio, or they’re scared of the word liquidation, but they know that there’s money to be made there. And so we’re providing access to these different market maker and institutional strategies, where you don’t have to be a hedge fund to earn like one. In a year’s time, we’ll be providing those similar strategies to everybody and working with distribution partners to further provide and democratize access.
Kristin Myers: So if you want to know why perps are suddenly a Wall Street story, just look at the last eight weeks. In September, Coinbase asked regulators to let it list perpetual futures on individual U.S. stocks, Apple and Nvidia among them. And then at the end of October, the owner of this exchange, the Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, struck a deal to bring perps built on crypto platform Hyperliquid to the United States, pending regulatory approval. Then, on November 3rd, the CFTC cleared perps on individual stocks for the first time. And then two days later, Kalshi went live with more than 50 of them and says users have already traded over $300 million. It’s a product that grew up offshore in crypto, and it is now coming to American markets. So the question for startups like Katana: does that grow the pie, or does it just hand it over to Wall Street?
We’re back now with Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana. So as we were just mentioning, we already went through a little bit around perpetual futures. But what I want to ask you here is about the traders that are using this product. You had just mentioned a moment ago that there is an ideal Katana user profile, somewhere between the retail trader and the institutional investor. I mentioned Kalshi is involved in this, that sort of pipeline from prediction markets over into perps and into perpetual futures. As you’re seeing it, maybe perhaps even with some of your users?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah. I think what’s important is that anything that can be traded will be traded, basically, at this point. And whether it’s happening offshore or onshore is up to the regulators to decide, if they want to have an influence on a safe market environment, that they can have their [unclear: “guardian principles”] involved. Which we’ve seen a lot of encouraging moves on over the past year as well. If you look back to the 2024 presidential election, that’s where a lot of these prediction markets first started taking off. Fast forward two years later, the user experience has gotten a lot better for Polymarket and all these applications. And so I think there’s a ton of growth in the sector. There are obviously benefits to having the most liquidity and the best execution costs. There are also ways for chains like Katana to differentiate themselves with other products too.
Kristin Myers: So I’m curious, who is the typical perp trader, at least particularly on the Katana platform? How old are they, and what kind of trader or investor are they?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, it’s obviously a little harder to understand exactly who your users are when you’re in this blockchain world, in a world with no KYC. But in general, we definitely see that there’s a lot of demand for things like single-stock perps abroad, where they don’t have access to getting exposure to US names. I think event-based trading and narrative-based trading is very, very attractive for a lot of users. As time goes on, I think attention spans and people are gambling more. You see DraftKings still releasing all these moonshot products, and so I think the demand also comes from this.
So when there’s an FOMC meeting coming up, you want to access leverage there without having to actually own the underlying stock. Or when midterms are going a certain way, or with the US-Iran conflict over the weekend, having this 24/7 instrument is very attractive to people on the retail side, but then also for professional investors and market makers, being able to hedge their exposure throughout the weekend, from one Friday close to one Monday open.
Kristin Myers: Now, we’ve been talking about how this was an offshore product, now obviously being brought to American shores. And I know you mentioned you don’t exactly know the entire user profile of Katana users. That’s the whole point of having something be decentralized. However, what is the demand here in the United States versus globally? Do you have any insight into that, considering that this was something that was offshore?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, definitely. I think there’s definitely a demand for it onshore. It’s hard to put exact numbers on it right now. I think it’s still pretty early. But if you look at the other instruments that retail users can access today, with zero-day options and leveraged ETFs and all that kind of thing, like you work on as well, I think perps are just an easier instrument for some of these people to understand. They have the liquidation price, and the price closely tracks the spot price because of the way the funding rate works. And so you don’t have to worry about implied volatility or rollovers. And I think that alone is what the industry is really bullish on, taking those users or giving them another way to complement their overall portfolio.
Kristin Myers: Okay, I’m going to push back for a second, because you just said that you think that perps are easier to understand, and I hear you. And I actually think that for at least a lot of retail investors, it’s a lot of added complexity, right? Prediction markets, of course, are fairly easy to understand because they’re binary. [unclear: “Um, and so I so our professional futures either goes up or it goes down.”] But the fact that you have a leveraged contract that never expires, is that something that is good for most retail investors? Now, you did make it quite specific that your ideal Katana user was somewhere past the retail trader. But for the average everyday retail investor, is this the type of product that they should even be getting involved in?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, I think education and understanding what the risk on the other side is, is what I was trying to get at. With options, I’m more talking about options than prediction markets. I definitely agree that the binary option, in terms of a yes, no or a specific outcome, is definitely easier to understand than the perpetual. But when you’re thinking about options and expiry dates and implied volatility and convexity, not to get too technical with it, I think perps are a little bit easier to understand from that angle.
And then in terms of retail, one thing we’ve struggled with at times is speaking to too many different audiences and trying to serve multiple audiences at once. What this type of customer we’re going for is missing is a brand that’s speaking directly toward them. And so that’s the direction we’re trying to position ourselves for now.
Kristin Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about some of the competition, but also what it means when some of these things go a little bit more mainstream. Until now, as we’ve been saying, a lot of the perps trading has been offshore, but now of course, US venues. You mentioned it, we said it, ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange that owns the New York Stock Exchange, is now going to be one of those venues where you can get access to some of these things. So do you see a lot of that action moving onshore? Do you think some of those traders stay offshore?
Matthew Fisher: Well, I think it’s a global instrument. Everyone is going to use it everywhere. And so I think there’s definitely a lot of activity that will come onshore, trading firms and other people that have multiple entities across the world. You can definitely imagine them coming onshore. What’s more interesting to look at is the Citadels and these other large traditional financial institutions, how they adopt perps and their strategies. From what I know, some of these people on these teams are already using perps on their personal accounts over the weekends and things like this. So we’ll be interested to see how those major trading firms interact with that too.
Kristin Myers: Now, how do you think this changes things for investors as we start to see these big mainstream venues move toward that always-on trading model? Nasdaq is moving to 23-hour market trading next month. Do you think that changes things for investors that previously, if they wanted to seek that, had to also look elsewhere, at other exchanges?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, I think obviously they’re going to have to have risk teams that are more 23/5 than just the typical market hours, which is unfortunate for some people. But one thing that definitely doesn’t change is the volumes and the depth during the normal market hours. Just because it’s going to be open 23/5, and perps will be on the weekends, the liquidity would necessarily be thinner, and so a lot of the action will stay in the normal market hours. I think what changes is there might not be as big of a jump between market close and market open, as things are priced in as news actually happens throughout the night, like when earnings are reported after the bell, and stuff like that. And I think I tried to answer some of what you’re saying.
Kristin Myers: Yeah, no. I’ll have another thought here, and it’s a question that has been asked by a lot of folks that work, particularly in crypto, the more mainstream cryptocurrency has become. So I’m going to ask you this question as well. We mentioned it at the start, after this break, about whether Wall Street is being handed this sort of product that has previously been handled by other companies. So I’m curious to know if that is something that concerns you. As you look around and you start to see these major venues and exchanges saying, hey, we’re going to home in on this space, we’re also going to start to take some market share of what you guys are doing. Do you think that presents competition for Katana? As you know, the New York Stock Exchange and others say, okay, we’re going to get into this too, so other investors can get access to that type of trading.
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, for sure. I think definitely a lot of competition has already started, and a lot more is to come as regulations become more clear. I think there are opportunities for Katana to work with a lot of these companies too, [unclear: “fintech steel banks”]. And there are also different types of participants that already have distribution at the retail layer. If you get that soft retail flow, the market makers and institutions follow naturally. And there are more convenient and different financial apps that exist these days, so it’s not a for-sure thing that they’ll take all of the flow, but they’ll definitely be huge parts of the market. But I think there are opportunities, as you’ve seen with Hyperliquid working with ICE, to work with them too.
Kristin Myers: Okay, so I have to ask you this, because you’re a little bit different than a lot of the companies that we talk to. We’re talking to companies that are moving from the private market into a public offering, but you guys already have a token that is public and publicly available. Now, that’s obviously not exactly the same as an IPO. But does that change, in your mind, the trajectory about whether you would want to consider going public? Or have you thought about going public?
Matthew Fisher: Yeah, no. The team is compensated in tokens. There’s no equity. And so everyone is aligned with, and cares about, the token. And I think with the acquisitions we made today and the different revenue streams, we basically adjust the token mix. So now these token holders that stake the token get access to a portion of the different flows and revenue streams that were mentioned before. And so yeah, no plans to do an IPO or anything like that.
Kristin Myers: So it might never ring that bell behind us, unfortunately. All right. Good to see, though. Token economics is definitely a thing. So I’m going to see, actually, if they ever bother to do something. [unclear: “Yeah. Try to do that instead of actually interesting.”]
Matthew Fisher: Well, I think some of the companies will IPO and release a tokenized stock on the same day. So that’s definitely the future, probably the first step. And then maybe tokens down the road. We’ll see.
Kristin Myers: All right. Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana. Thank you so much.
Matthew Fisher: Thank you for having me.
