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Why Crank

Crank is what you get when you build DeFi infrastructure for the users who are actually coming next: AI agents. Not a wallet with a chatbot bolted on, not a toolkit that hands an agent raw transaction builders and wishes it luck -- a full trading platform where the agent is the first-class user and the human stays sovereign over the keys.

Three things, together, in one place. Each exists somewhere in some form. Nowhere else do they combine.

1. Non-custodial, structurally

Crank never holds, stores, or accesses a user's keys or seed phrase. This is not a policy -- it is the architecture. Every value-bearing tool returns an unsigned transaction; signing happens in your process, with your keys, every time. There is no deposit step, no platform balance, no withdrawal queue, nothing to freeze and nothing to lose in a platform failure.

That constraint propagates everywhere: venues that would require custody stay switched off; autonomy is delegated through scoped signing sessions the operator can kill instantly, never through key handover; the platform earns a technology service fee on actions it performs, not a spread on assets it holds.

2. Agent-first rails

Most "AI x DeFi" tooling gives an agent the same primitives a human developer gets and calls it done. Crank builds the things an agent actually needs to trade well and safely:

  • One surface, everything tradeable. Spot, perps, shorting, leverage, tokenized equities, lending, liquid staking, flash loans, and 17 strategy types -- one MCP connection, 180+ tools, structured {"ok": ...} envelopes an agent can parse without heuristics. The same registry is exported for OpenAI, Gemini, LangChain, and OpenAPI callers.
  • Safety as infrastructure. Token authenticity verification before any transaction is built; USD-notional policy checks (spend caps, daily limits, allow-lists) enforced server-side ahead of every action; a program allow-list on every constructed transaction; jurisdiction and sanctions gates on regulated primitives; post-trade verification that confirms what actually landed on-chain; a global kill switch. Guardrails an operator can trust an autonomous process with.
  • Graduated autonomy. Agents start propose-and-approve and earn within-policy autonomy through scoped signing sessions -- capability grows with evidence, and the operator holds the off switch at every stage.
  • An economics layer that pays builders. Reads are free. Actions carry a transparent, volume-tiered technology service fee, with staker discounts and fee-shares for referrers, integrators, and strategy authors whose clones get used. The people who make the platform better participate in its revenue.

3. The Hive

The deepest difference. Every agent on Crank feeds and draws from a collective intelligence pool: outcomes are harvested through a differential-privacy engine, distilled into fleet-wide insights, and served back to every agent as free reads. Signals are graded against realized outcomes. Strategy leaderboards are built from anonymized live performance. New agents start from the fleet's evidence instead of from zero.

Stateless toolkits cannot follow. A swap tool can be copied in a weekend; a privacy-protected corpus of graded, fleet-wide trading outcomes can only be grown -- and it grows with every agent that joins. That is a network-effect moat in a category that otherwise competes on tool count.

What Crank is not

Honesty is part of the value proposition:

  • Not a fund, not an adviser. Crank provides rails and historical, fleet-level evidence. Agents and their operators make their own decisions. No managed accounts, no discretion over anyone's assets, no promises about future performance.
  • Not custody with extra steps. There is no configuration in which Crank holds your funds.
  • Not finished. The platform is in staged rollout: some capabilities on this site are marked rolling out or coming soon, and we mark them honestly rather than demo-wallpapering over them. What is marked live is live.

The one-paragraph version

Crank is the trading platform for the agentic era: every market of Solana DeFi behind one MCP connection, hard safety rails an operator can delegate autonomy to, keys that never leave the user -- and a collective mind that makes every agent on the platform smarter with every trade the fleet makes.

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