Agentic Finance for Everyday Users | Chris

Loyal is a non-custodial agentic finance platform built on Solana by a team with AI and neuroscience PhD backgrounds. The team originally approached crypto through a privacy and verifiable compute lens before pivoting to automating financial tasks without requiring users to surrender custody of their assets. Chris, the founder, argues that smart wallets are effectively nonexistent on Solana outside of the Squads ecosystem. On EVM chains, Coinbase and the Base team pushed smart accounts as an onboarding tool and made account creation cheaper on Base than on Solana. Solana lacked an equivalent large centralized provider motivated to onboard users at scale, leaving smart account development to smaller startups that did not reach their potential.

Traditional private key wallets including Phantom and Backpack are free to create but limit automation because granting an agent access to a private key means surrendering full custody of those funds. Chris cites a real incident where a former head of AI at a firm had an OpenAI agent miscalculate a token amount and send roughly half a million tokens to the wrong address as evidence of the risks of uncontrolled agent access. He does not believe agentic finance can survive long term on centralized servers. Squads v4 is the standard multisig smart account for Solana. Smart policies extend the spending limit concept by letting users whitelist specific accounts, instructions, or program IDs to give narrow permission scopes to a vault, with all policies enforced on-chain and no backend components, making the system fully self-custodial and verifiable even if an AI agent misbehaves. Smart accounts on Solana currently cost 18 cents per account, which Chris considers still expensive but improving.

Loyal's first automation targets users paid in stablecoins who lose yield by waiting several days before deploying funds, which Chris estimates can cost roughly 25 percent of potential annual yield. The example automation monitors wallet balance, deploys anything above 500 USDC into a Kamino lending pool, and checks hourly whether routing to a higher-yielding pool such as pyUSD justifies swap fees. Kamino's prime market vault typically yields around 5 to 6 percent, and active hourly yield routing can add approximately one additional percentage point of APY. Chris estimates that combining the auto-deposit and yield-routing policies could generate an additional 500 to 700 dollars per year for a user saving around 3,000 dollars per month, with no manual action required. The policy framework is composable rather than fixed smart contracts, allowing policies to be chained together and extended to AI agents with custom scoped permissions, including a portfolio rebalancing use case where an agent maintains a 60 percent cash, 20 percent BTC, 20 percent Solana allocation within on-chain constraints.

Chris frames the target user as ordinary people who would prefer a straightforward 7 to 8 percent APY over access to meme coins or prediction markets. His broader goal is invisible crypto where users do not need to actively think about the underlying infrastructure, analogous to how people use a bank. He does not believe agentic finance as daily trading with an edge is realistic, arguing even human daily traders are rarely successful. Chris also criticizes the X402 payment standard for adding at least one second of latency per transaction, making it infeasible for semi-real-time use cases. He argues subscription-style spending limits, such as authorizing an app to withdraw up to 20 dollars within 30 days, better match user psychology than per-request micropayments and are more consumer-friendly because they prevent unexpected wallet withdrawals.

The team built the Seeker app on React Native and targeted Seeker phone users first because they are self-selected active crypto users already exposed to stablecoin yields and manual transaction friction. The team launched with only two automations deliberately, choosing to observe real user behavior before expanding features. The near-term roadmap at the time of recording included smart accounts, auto swap and yield routing, DCA and limit orders, and a potential Secret Season launch across four consecutive weeks.

The team raised through MetaDAO, moving to San Francisco in mid-August and raising by October. The raise hit the 500 thousand dollar minimum on the first day, and in the final 24-hour stream grew from 20 million to 30 million and then to 70 million, attributed partly to pro-rata refund mechanics common in MetaDAO raises. Chris chose a token-based structure specifically because it was the only mechanism that protected against bad actors pressuring traditional investors to shut down a privacy-focused product, and because keeping all company finances on-chain means no government or agency can debank the project or coerce its investors, a concern informed by the Tornado Cash case. Buybacks were an unexpected governance event that benefited token holders wanting to exit but left long-term investors less satisfied because capital left the team's hands. Chris also describes tokens as an effective talent acquisition tool because engineers can verify compensation terms on-chain and share in upside through token unlock schedules.