Inside Makina: A Technical Architecture Overview

April 14th, 2025

Why Technical Design Matters

DeFi has brought markets onchain, but it hasn’t yet brought true asset management with it.

Despite the progress DeFi has made in lending, trading, and yield primitives, most onchain strategies remain shallow, rigid, or dangerously opaque. Protocols either over-index on single purpose vaults with limited flexibility, or they offer powerful execution without robust risk controls.

Makina reframes asset management not as a product but as a programmable system.

It’s not just another yield aggregation protocol, it’s the execution engine behind a new class of programmable, governable, and risk-managed onchain strategies.

From the ground up, Makina’s architecture is designed to:

Maximize composability and security across chains.
Enforce risk controls without sacrificing flexibility.
Provide users with transparency, liquidity, and real ownership over their capital.
Enable sophisticated capital allocators, from funds to AI agents, to operate efficiently.

In this post, we’ll walk through the core design of Makina:

How Machines, Calibers, Instructions, and Operators fit together, and why this modular foundation unlocks a fundamentally better model for onchain asset management.

Core Components of the Makina Protocol

Machines: Strategy-Specific Vaults

Makina defines the notion of a Machine as a strategy specific vault. The Machine is the main touch point for users. It handles minting and redeeming, share price calculation and the risk engine.

The Machines are always deployed on the hub chain for global governance and accounting.
It accepts one accounting token (e.g. USDC, WETH) for minting and redeeming.
It issues ERC-20 Machine tokens representing shares in the strategy.
It manages allocations to Calibers and orchestrates accounting.
It hosts a Risk Policy that governs the strategy execution.

In the initial phase of the protocol, Machines must receive governance approval before activation.

Calibers: Cross-Chain Execution Environments

Calibers are isolated execution engines, deployed on any chain with bridging and oracle support. A Caliber:

Holds funds, accounts for local positions, and interacts with external protocols.
Only allows the Operator to execute pre-approved Instructions, signed and submitted with a proof.
Communicates back to the Machine for accounting and risk reporting.

Each Caliber maintains:

A local accounting token (1:1 with the Machine).
A registry of base tokens and active positions.

Calibers validate every Instruction against an onchain Merkle root of pre-approved Instructions.

Operators: Strategists with Defined Mandates

Each Machine has one Operator responsible for managing the strategy execution. Operators:

Execute Instructions to allocate capital within the defined Mandate.
Earn management and performance fees tied to NAV growth.
Must comply with the Risk Policy. They are required to post a bond at risk of slashing in the event of violating a rule of the Risk Policy.

Operators can be humans, DAOs, or agentic systems but they can only operate within a pre-defined ruleset, enforced onchain.

Risk Manager: Protecting Machine Tokens Holders’ Interests

Each Machine has a designated Risk Manager, responsible for ensuring that the Operator acts honestly and in the best interests of Machine token holders. The Risk Manager performs the following functions:

Managing updates to the Machine’s Mandate, approving new Instructions and Risk Policies.
Triggering Recovery Mode when necessary.
Maintaining the Machine’s risk parameters.

Security Council: Ensures Both the Operator and Risk Manager Act Honestly.

Each Machine has a designated Security Council, responsible for reviewing pending timelock transactions submitted by the Risk Manager.

At a high level, the Security Council has the following responsibilities:

Reviewing updates to the Machine and vetoing any threatening update.
Triggering Recovery Mode in response to security threats.
Taking over control of the Machine in the event of a Recovery Mode.

Instructions & MakinaVM: Programmable Execution With Guardrails

Makina introduces a novel instruction model executed through MakinaVM, a generalized onchain execution engine.

Instructions are Merkle-verified and atomically executed bundles of calls.
Support math, conditionals, multicall logic and flash loans for more complex external protocol interactions.
Only Instructions included in the current Merkle root set in the Caliber can be executed.
The MakinaVM interprets and verifies each command with granularity down to calldata parameters.

This design enables composable, upgradable execution without giving Operators raw access to arbitrary contracts, and without requiring the deployment of custom smart contract adaptors for each external smart contract.

Risk Policy: Optimistic Constraints Enforced by the Community

Makina enforces risk management rules via a novel optimistic risk control system.

Each position has a set of risk attributions, which can represent any type of risk exposure (e.g. Curve, USDC, Base, Stargate).
Each attribution has a governance-set max exposure cap (expressed in basis points of TVL).
Over-allocation can be challenged by anyone with a set of Merkle proofs.
If valid, the Operator is slashed, and part of the bond is awarded to the challenger.

This mechanism ensures risk caps are respected with minimal overhead and without a need for real-time enforcement.

Makina calculates share price through periodic accounting phases:

Calibers run accounting Instructions to size each position locally on each chain.
Values are relayed to the Machine on the hub chain through Wormhole CCQ.
The Machine collects data from all Calibers and computes aggregate NAV.
Share price is then calculated as Net Asset Value divided by the number of outstanding shares.
Performance and management fees are applied via share inflation and split between the Makina protocol and the Operator.

This mechanism of onchain accounting provides full transparency and reduces trust assumptions on the Operator.

Machine Tokens: Liquid ERC-20 Shares Representing Strategy Ownership

When users allocate capital to a Machine, they receive ERC-20 tokens that represent their pro-rata share of the strategy. Machine tokens:

Are fully composable across DeFi.
Are priced to reflect changes in NAV which are periodically updated.
Enables secondary market liquidity, integrations, and DeFi-native UX.

Machine tokens are the user-facing representation of ownership in a secure, non-custodial strategy. They abstract all the complexities away from the user, who can just hold a single token and have full exposure to the underlying strategy.

In Summary: This architecture doesn’t just scale across strategies and chains, it scales across time.

Makina isn’t just another vault protocol, it’s a modular DeFi execution engine designed for the next era of capital allocation onchain.

By decoupling strategy design, execution, risk, and governance into composable components, Makina enables a fundamentally new approach. One where Operators run on enforceable mandates, users retain transparency and liquidity, and governance ensures guardrails without slowing down execution.

As markets mature, strategies evolve, and agents become more autonomous, Makina remains adaptable: from yield farming today to AI-managed treasuries and institutional-grade structured products tomorrow. Makina is the trust-minimized foundation for onchain asset management.

Follow Along:
Website: makina.finance
Twitter: x.com/makinafi
Discord: discord.gg/makinafi
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