What Is Catswap
Catswap is a unified trading protocol built on Solana: one contract, one pool, one vault.
Spot swaps, leveraged trading, and derivatives all share the same in-pool liquidity, instead of being split into isolated markets the way traditional exchanges separate spot, margin, and contracts. Every unit of liquidity an LP deposits serves all trading forms at once — capital is committed once and works on every side.
The Problem We Solve
Today's on-chain trading infrastructure splits the world into "spot DEXs" and "derivatives DEXs":
- Spot AMMs (Uniswap, Raydium, Meteora) have depth, but only spot;
- Perpetual protocols (dYdX, Hyperliquid) have leverage, but build liquidity separately, and their pricing depends on external oracles.
The result: fragmented liquidity, halved capital efficiency, and oracles as the largest attack surface. In 2022 alone, oracle manipulation attacks drained roughly $403 million from DeFi protocols across 41 incidents (Chainalysis estimate); Moonwell/Mango and similar cases are on record.
Catswap's answer is to fuse the two layers into one: the pool itself is the market, prices form directly from in-pool trading, and leverage is built on top of that liquidity — no external price feed, no second liquidity build-out.
Three Design Choices
- No external oracles — prices form directly from real trades in this pool. What you need to trust shrinks to the minimum set verifiable on-chain.
- All trading shares one pool — spot, leverage, and derivatives share the same liquidity; one pool of capital serves every use case.
- Manipulators pay the LPs — price benchmarks, fee structure, and position limits are layered defenses; a manipulator pays at every layer.
Supported Assets
Our most important target market is stock tokens — tokenized stocks trading spot, margin, and perpetuals in the same pool, with LPs protected by mechanism (Stock Tokens, a roadmap capability).
The protocol itself is designed for all types of on-chain fungible assets (except NFTs): mainstream tokens, newly issued tokens, stablecoins, and eventually real-world assets (RWA). Different asset classes have different liquidity and risk profiles; the protocol adapts through a parameterized family of mechanisms rather than one fixed parameter set for everything.