What is Kintsu?

Kintsu is a composable liquid staking protocol on Monad. You stake MON, you get sMON in return, and that sMON keeps earning network rewards while you put it to work across DeFi. It's built for people who want their MON to do two jobs at once: secure the network and stay liquid in the apps they actually use.

The problem with native staking

Native staking is great for the chain. It's not great for you.

Once your MON is staked with a validator, it's locked. You can't lend it. You can't pair it in a liquidity pool. You can't post it as collateral. If a better yield opportunity shows up tomorrow, you're stuck waiting through a cooldown before you can move.

That's the tradeoff every proof-of-stake network forces on its users. You either earn staking rewards, or you stay liquid. Pick one.

Liquid staking removes that tradeoff. You get a token that represents your staked position, and that token works anywhere ERC-20s do.

How Kintsu works

There are four moving parts. The whole thing runs on-chain.

1. You deposit MON into the Kintsu staking contract.
2. You receive sMON. The amount you get is based on the current redemption ratio (more on that below).
3. Your MON is delegated to validators through the DAO-governed registry. KSU holders allocate weight to validators they trust.
4. Network rewards flow back into the pool every era. The redemption ratio of sMON to MON goes up. You don't need to claim, restake, or do anything.

When you want your MON back, you redeem your sMON through the unstaking flow. There's a batched cooldown enforced by the network, then your MON shows up in your wallet.

sMON is reward-bearing, not rebasing

This part trips people up, so it's worth being clear.

Your sMON balance doesn't grow. The supply of sMON stays fixed. What changes is how much MON each sMON is worth.

If you deposit 100 MON when 1 sMON equals 1 MON, you get 100 sMON. A few months later, after the pool has earned rewards, that same 100 sMON might redeem for 105 MON. The token didn't multiply. The exchange rate did.

This is the same model wstETH uses on Ethereum. It plays nicely with DeFi because lending markets and DEXes can price the token without dealing with surprise balance changes.

What makes Kintsu different

Plenty of liquid staking protocols exist. Here's what's specific to Kintsu.

• DAO-governed validator registry. No hand-picked operator set. KSU holders vote on which validators get stake delegation, and how much. Validators compete by offering competitive rates and uptime.
• KSU plus DAO NFT governance. You stake KSU into a DAO NFT to participate. One KSU equals one vote. Burn the NFT when you want to unstake. Staked KSU earns yield in the meantime.
• Monad-native. Kintsu wasn't bridged in from Ethereum or Solana. It was built for Monad, which means it benefits from parallel execution and low fees out of the box.
• Built for composability. sMON is the layer the rest of Monad DeFi builds on. Lending, LP positions, vaults, perps collateral. The point of liquid staking is that the token has somewhere to go.
• Audited. Spearbit and Nethermind reviewed the contracts. Reports are public.

Who built Kintsu

Kintsu is built by Water Cooler Studios, a team focused on infrastructure for high-performance chains. The protocol is open source and the contract addresses are published in the docs.

Start using Kintsu

If you've read this far and you have MON in a wallet, two next steps:

1. Stake your MON to get sMON.
2. Or, if you want the full walkthrough first, read How to stake MON on Monad.

Comparing options? See Kintsu vs Lido for how the Monad-native LST stacks up against the largest LST on Ethereum.

For deeper protocol details, the Kintsu docs cover contract architecture, the unstaking flow, and how the DAO works.