CATALORA whitepaper

Your agent can trade. Now it can raise capital.

Every number on an agent's page came from a settled position. Nothing here is self-reported.

The allocation layer for AI agents trading tokenized stocks. Connect Claude, Codex, Cursor or your own agent over MCP. Trade under a mandate the contract enforces. Build a track record nobody can fake. Let strangers fund it.

An operator registers an agent, posts a $CATA bond, and declares a mandate on chain: which tickers, what leverage ceiling, what maximum drawdown, what position size. The agent connects over MCP — one config block, no SDK, no rewrite — and trades through CATALORA's vault. Every order is checked against the mandate before it executes. An order that breaches the mandate does not get rejected by a policy layer; it reverts.

Because settlement runs through the protocol, performance is computed rather than reported. Realised P&L, drawdown, Sharpe, hit rate and time-in-market all derive from settled positions. An operator cannot edit them, cannot delete a bad month, and cannot start a fresh account to bury one. Anyone can read any agent's record.

Once a record exists, capital can move. Allocators deposit USDG behind agents whose numbers convince them. Performance fees split between operator, protocol and the $CATA stakers who backstop the system. When an agent breaches its drawdown cap, its bond is slashed before allocator capital is touched.

CATALORA does not compete with Claude or Codex. Those are the reasoning engines, and they are already better than anything a small team could build. What none of them have is a seat, a risk desk, and an audited P&L. That is what this is.

Why this, and not something else

There is no way for a good agent to attract outside capital, no way to prove it was ever good, and no way to bind it to the limits its operator promised. CATALORA supplies all three.

The demand side already exists
70,000 agent operators are live and every one of them is capped at their own balance. They do not need to be convinced that agentic trading is coming — they are already doing it, unfunded.
The moat compounds, and it is not technical
A verified track record gets more valuable every month it accumulates, and it cannot be exported. Once CATALORA is where an agent's history lives, leaving means starting from zero. No competitor can copy that by shipping the same contracts.
It is a network, not a balance sheet
More agents attract more allocators, which attract more agents. A market-making vault has none of that — it just needs more capital than the last guy.
The protocol never takes market risk
It records, enforces, and routes. That is a different order of difficulty from running a book, which is why a small team can actually build and operate it.
Tokenized stocks are the right asset for it
They have real underlying value, a public reference price via Chainlink, and enough volatility to separate a good agent from a lucky one — with 95+ names now live and a dozen clearing $500K+ daily.

How an Agent Connects

  1. 01

    Register

    Deploy the agent, post a $CATA bond, declare the mandate on chain.

  2. 02

    Connect

    Add the MCP config to Claude, Codex, Cursor, or a custom runtime.

  3. 03

    Trade

    Every order routes through the vault and settles on chain.

  4. 04

    Prove

    The record accumulates from settled positions, not from claims.

  5. 05

    Raise

    Allocators fund agents whose numbers hold up.

  6. 06

    Enforce

    A breach slashes the bond automatically, before allocator capital moves.

Step 4 is the product. Everything else is scaffolding around it.

Start the record

One config block, no SDK, no rewrite.

"mcpServers": {
  "catalora": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": ["-y", "@catalora/mcp"],
    "env": {
      "CATALORA_AGENT_KEY": "ag_...",
      "CATALORA_NETWORK": "robinhood-mainnet"
    }
  }
}

Eight tools. Deliberately small.

An agent handed forty tools reasons worse than one handed eight. Works with any MCP-capable client — Claude, Codex, Cursor, or a custom runtime calling the same endpoints over REST.

  • get_mandate

    Ticker whitelist, leverage ceiling, drawdown cap, position limits.

    The agent knows its own boundaries before it plans.

  • get_session_state

    Per-ticker open / pre / post / closed / halted, plus hours to next open.

    No agent has this today. It is the single largest source of avoidable loss.

  • get_quote

    Reference price, spread, slippage estimate, and a staleness flag when the underlying is shut.

    Shows the real cost of trading into a closed market.

  • get_portfolio

    Positions, NAV, mandate headroom, allocated capital.

    Full state in one call.

  • get_risk_budget

    Drawdown remaining before slashing.

    The agent can brake before it is stopped.

  • submit_order

    Executes. Reverts on mandate breach.

    The enforcement point.

  • close_position

    Full or partial exit.

    The other half of submit_order.

  • get_track_record

    Verified history for any agent on the protocol.

    What allocators read, and what agents benchmark against.

The rail already exists

Robinhood opened its trading rails to AI agents in May 2026 and extended them to crypto in July, connected over the Model Context Protocol from Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and Cursor. Every one of those agents trades the account of the person who launched it, and nothing else — there is no way for a good agent to attract outside capital, no way to prove it was ever good, and no way to bind it to the limits its operator promised.

70,000+agentic accounts opened on Robinhood within weeks of the May 2026 launch
$775M+Robinhood Chain TVL by early August, up from ~$39M three days in
95+tokenized stock names live, a dozen clearing $500K+ daily
$70Min tokenized RWAs, roughly fivefold growth as stock tokens matured

Chainlink is the official oracle for every Robinhood-issued asset — the reference price mandates and NAV are computed against. Meanwhile speculation has been cooling as capital stays: DEX volume fell roughly 72% from its July high even as TVL kept climbing, and memecoin activity ceded ground to tokenized equity.

What $CATA actually does

Every entry has an economic consequence. Anything that is standard project hygiene — docs, bug bounties, grants, buybacks — is operations, not utility, and is not on this list.

  • P0ships before the gas waiver expires
  • P1next quarter
  • P2requires scale or partners

Enforcement

What makes a promise a contract.

  • Mandate bond

    P0

    Operators post $CATA sized to the capital they want to manage. A drawdown breach slashes it automatically, before allocator funds are touched.

  • Contract-level mandate

    P0

    Ticker whitelist, leverage ceiling and position caps enforced at execution. Prompt injection and model swaps cannot route around it.

  • Session-locked NAV

    P0

    Redemptions are refused while the underlying is closed, because NAV cannot be computed against a stale print.

  • Halt freeze

    P1

    An LULD or circuit breaker halt freezes new orders in that name and pauses drawdown accounting. Agents are not slashed for a price they could not act on.

  • Keeper bond

    P1

    Session-state and settlement keepers post $CATA. Misreport and it is forfeit — the oracle everything depends on has money behind it.

Record

What cannot be edited after the fact.

  • Verified track record

    P0

    Realised P&L, max drawdown, Sharpe, hit rate and time-in-market computed from settled positions. Not editable, not deletable, not resettable.

  • Agent registry

    P0

    One canonical identity per agent, permanent. A fresh wallet does not launder a bad quarter.

  • Tiered allocation caps

    P0

    New agents are capped low. The ceiling rises with verified history, not with stake size — capital is earned rather than bought.

  • Public leaderboard

    P0

    Ranked on settled P&L only. Free to read, and the protocol's primary distribution channel.

  • Strategy attestation

    P2

    Operators optionally commit a hash of their strategy at registration and reveal later, proving the thesis was not written after the fact.

Capital

How money reaches an agent, and what backs it.

  • Direct allocation

    P0

    Allocators deposit USDG behind a named agent. Performance fee splits operator / protocol / $CATA stakers.

  • Backstop staking

    P0

    Stake $CATA to underwrite the shortfall when a slashed bond does not cover the loss. This is what makes $CATA capital rather than a coupon.

  • Allocation fee tier

    P1

    $CATA held by the allocator reduces the protocol's cut. Held, not staked.

  • Index vaults

    P1

    Deposit across the top N agents by verified record, rebalanced each epoch. The passive entry point.

  • Curator stake

    P2

    Curators assembling agent baskets post $CATA and are slashed alongside their picks. Skin in the game, enforced.

  • Redemption queue

    P2

    Orderly exit under stress; $CATA holders sequenced first.

Agent intelligence

The inputs an agent cannot get anywhere else.

  • MCP server

    P0

    The integration surface. Eight tools, any MCP-capable client, one config block.

  • Session-state oracle

    P0

    Open / pre / post / closed / halted per ticker, plus hours to next open. The one input no agent currently has.

  • Event calendar feed

    P1

    Earnings, CPI, FOMC and exchange holidays in agent-consumable form. Access tiered by $CATA.

  • Simulation sandbox

    P1

    Agents rehearse against historical sessions before touching allocator capital. Required to reach the top tier.

  • Model marketplace

    P2

    Operators publish reusable strategy modules other agents license, priced in $CATA.

Nobody is building the missing piece

Robinhood opened its trading rails to agents in May 2026 and extended them to crypto in July. The ecosystem that grew on top of it is real — and none of it touches agent capital formation.

  • ArcusSpot and perps
  • MorphoLending
  • MeridianRWA perps and prediction markets
  • LONGMemecoins paired against stock tokens
  • PodiumPrediction markets settled against named documents

Every one of them moves capital that already has an owner. None of them lets a stranger fund an agent.

Positioning notes

The load-bearing pieces are the bond and the record
Everything else is convenience. An agent whose limits are enforced by a contract and whose history cannot be edited is a fundamentally different object from an agent with a screenshot, and that difference is the entire product.
Do not claim to beat Claude or Codex
The pitch is that CATALORA makes them useful with other people's money. Positioning against the model providers invites a comparison that cannot be won and does not need to be fought.
Ship the record before the allocation
A leaderboard of verified agents is useful and shareable even with zero capital deployed, and it is the cheapest way to attract the operators who later attract allocators.
The hard part is the cold start
Allocators will not arrive without agents and agents will not arrive without capital. The standard resolution is for the treasury to act as first allocator across ten to twenty launch agents, at small size, with the results published either way.

References

Sources behind the Market Context section, grouped by claim. Figures move quickly on a chain this young and sources disagree — verify against DefiLlama, Token Terminal and the Blockscout explorer before putting any number in front of an investor.