1. Agreement to these Terms
These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a legal agreement between you and the operators of the Kestrel website and related interfaces ("Kestrel," "we," "us," or "our"). By accessing or using the website, application, interfaces, documentation, or other services that link to these Terms (collectively, the "Services"), you agree to be bound by these Terms.
If you use the Services on behalf of an entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity to these Terms. If you do not agree to these Terms, or if you are not eligible to use the Services, you must not access or use the Services.
2. What Kestrel is
Kestrel provides information and user interfaces that help you interact with decentralized, non-custodial smart contracts deployed on the Solana blockchain (the "Protocol"). The Services are not a broker, dealer, exchange, bank, custodian, investment adviser, fiduciary, or financial institution.
We do not hold your private keys, recovery phrases, wallets, or accounts, and we do not take custody of your assets in a Kestrel-controlled wallet. When you deposit an asset, it is transferred by you, through your own wallet, into the Protocol's on-chain smart-contract accounts.
Those assets are held by the Protocol's smart contracts. However, the Protocol's strategies are actively managed: Kestrel operates automated services that direct on-chain operations (such as deploying capital, rebalancing, borrowing, swapping, and managing position health) by calling the Protocol through privileged operator keys. These services can only act within the limits enforced by the smart contracts and cannot unilaterally transfer your deposited assets to Kestrel for its own account, but they do control how the strategies are executed. See Section 3 (How the Kestrel tokens work) and Section 6 (Digital asset and DeFi risks).
You are solely responsible for reviewing and approving every transaction before signing it. Once submitted to the blockchain, transactions are generally irreversible.
3. How the Kestrel tokens work
Kestrel is a platform for tokenized DeFi strategies. The Protocol issues yield-bearing tokens that package an on-chain strategy into a single token you can hold. When you deposit an underlying asset, the Protocol mints you a corresponding token that represents a claim, at the current on-chain redemption price, on the Protocol's holdings for that strategy.
Each token pursues its own strategy, and strategies differ by token and may change over time. Depending on the strategy, the Protocol may, for example, supply assets to lending markets, borrow against collateral, use leverage, swap between assets, provide liquidity, stake, or allocate across other on-chain protocols. Strategies generally depend on third-party protocols, swap venues, and price oracles. You should review the description of a given token's strategy before transacting.
The Protocol is actively and continuously managed by automated operator services (for example, services that refresh prices, rebalance positions, and manage strategy and position health). These services act through privileged operator keys defined in the smart contracts. Certain functions can also be paused by a circuit breaker.
By default, yield accrues into the redemption price of the token rather than being paid out as a separate distribution. This means the number of tokens you hold generally stays the same while the amount of the underlying asset each token can be redeemed for is intended to increase over time. Increases are not guaranteed, and the redemption value can also stay flat or decline.
4. No investment, financial, legal, or tax advice
All information provided through the Services, including strategy descriptions, APY, yield, TVL, prices, and projections, is for general informational purposes only. Nothing in the Services is investment, financial, legal, accounting, tax, or other professional advice, and nothing should be relied on as a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, stake, lend, borrow, provide liquidity, redeem, or otherwise transact in any digital asset.
You are solely responsible for evaluating whether any transaction, strategy, token, or protocol is appropriate for you. You should consult your own advisers before making financial, legal, or tax decisions.
5. Eligibility and restricted persons
You may use the Services only if you are at least 18 years old (or the age of majority in your jurisdiction, if higher), can form a legally binding contract, and are not barred from using the Services under applicable law. You must comply with all laws, rules, and regulations that apply to you.
You may not use the Services if you are located in, organized in, or ordinarily resident in any jurisdiction subject to comprehensive sanctions, embargoes, or similar restrictions, or if you are listed on any sanctions, restricted party, or blocked persons list maintained by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, United Nations, or any other applicable governmental authority.
You may not use the Services to evade sanctions, engage in unlawful activity, conceal the source or ownership of assets, or transact with any wallet, protocol, service, or person that you know or should know is associated with illegal or prohibited activity.
6. Digital asset and DeFi risks
Digital assets, decentralized finance protocols, and blockchain networks involve significant risks. These include, without limitation, price volatility, illiquidity, smart-contract bugs or exploits, oracle failures or manipulation, validator or network outages, congestion, transaction delays or failures, front-running, MEV, slippage, regulatory action, and partial or total loss of funds.
Individual strategies carry their own risks. Depending on the strategy, these may include, without limitation, the use of leverage and borrowing (which can force deleveraging at unfavorable prices or result in liquidation of Protocol positions), lending and counterparty risk, swap and slippage risk, liquidity-provision and impermanent-loss risk, staking or slashing risk, and asset depeg risk (including for any stablecoin the Protocol borrows or holds). While the Protocol is designed to manage strategy and position health automatically, it cannot guarantee that loss will be avoided.
Strategies depend on third-party protocols and infrastructure, including lending platforms, decentralized exchanges and swap routers, price oracles, and the underlying blockchain. A failure, exploit, depeg, downtime, or change in any of these third parties can cause delays, losses, or loss of funds.
The Protocol is actively managed through privileged operator keys. Misconfiguration, operational error, or compromise of those keys, or of the automated services that use them, could adversely affect a strategy and the value or redeemability of your tokens.
Yield, APY, TVL, redemption price, balances, estimated redemption amounts, and other data shown through the Services may be delayed, incomplete, inaccurate, or sourced from third parties. Past performance does not indicate future results, and any displayed APY or yield is variable, not guaranteed, and may change at any time.
You accept all risks arising from your use of the Services, your wallet, the blockchain, the Protocol's smart contracts, and any third-party protocols.
7. Assumption of risk; no fiduciary relationship
You acknowledge and agree that you use the Services and interact with the Protocol entirely at your own risk. You are solely responsible for your decisions to buy, hold, or redeem any token and for any resulting gains or losses. To the maximum extent permitted by law, you assume all risks described in these Terms, including partial or total loss of funds.
Nothing in these Terms or the Services creates any agency, partnership, joint venture, trust, or fiduciary relationship between you and Kestrel. Kestrel does not act as your broker, dealer, adviser, or fiduciary and owes you no fiduciary duties.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, you release Kestrel and its contributors, affiliates, service providers, and personnel from claims, demands, and damages arising out of or relating to the Protocol's on-chain operation, third-party protocols, market movements, or the acts or omissions of other users.
8. Buying, holding, and redeeming tokens
Buying a token deposits your collateral into the Protocol and mints you the corresponding yield-bearing token at the current on-chain price. Selling (redeeming) burns your token and returns the underlying collateral at the current on-chain redemption price.
Redemptions are settled by the Protocol's smart contracts, not by us. When the Protocol holds enough readily available (unlent) collateral, a redemption can settle promptly. When it does not, your redemption may be queued and processed asynchronously as the Protocol unwinds positions to free up collateral. In that case, funds may take additional time (often a short period, but not guaranteed) to arrive in your wallet, and asynchronous redemptions are generally processed in the order received.
We do not guarantee instant liquidity, any particular settlement time, or that redemption will be available at any given moment. Redemption amounts depend on the Protocol's on-chain price at the time of processing and on applicable fees.
9. Fees
The Protocol may charge fees set on-chain per token, which can include a fee when minting (buying), a fee when burning (redeeming), and a performance fee charged on yield generated by the strategy. Fee levels are defined by the Protocol's smart contracts and may change.
A portion of mint and burn fees may be redistributed to existing token holders, and performance fees may be split between the protocol and the token's curator. Any fees are in addition to blockchain network fees, priority fees, and swap or slippage costs that you incur when transacting.
10. Wallets, keys, and transaction responsibility
You are responsible for securing your wallet, private keys, seed phrases, devices, and credentials. We cannot recover lost keys, reverse transactions, restore access to wallets, or retrieve lost digital assets.
You are responsible for verifying transaction details, wallet addresses, token mints, amounts, fees, slippage, routes, permissions, and approvals before signing. You should not sign any transaction you do not understand.
You are responsible for network fees, priority fees, Protocol fees, third-party fees, and any other costs associated with transactions you initiate.
11. Third-party protocols and services
The Services and the Protocol rely on or interoperate with third-party services, including wallets and wallet adapters, RPC providers, indexers, price and yield data providers, analytics providers, lending platforms, decentralized exchanges and swap routers, price oracles, block explorers, content delivery networks, and cloud infrastructure providers.
We do not control and are not responsible for third-party services, protocols, data, content, policies, or practices. Your use of third-party services may be governed by their own terms and privacy policies, and their performance is outside our control.
12. Prohibited conduct
You agree not to use the Services to violate any law, regulation, sanctions restriction, court order, or third-party right; to engage in fraud, market manipulation, money laundering, terrorist financing, ransomware, theft, phishing, or other abusive activity; to interfere with or disrupt the Services; to bypass access controls or security measures; to introduce malware or harmful code; or to scrape, overload, reverse engineer, or exploit the Services except as permitted by law.
We may restrict, suspend, block, or limit access to the Services if we believe your use violates these Terms, creates risk for other users, or exposes us or others to legal, security, operational, or reputational risk. Because the underlying blockchain and smart contracts are permissionless, we may be unable to prevent direct on-chain interaction outside our interface.
13. Beta features and availability
Some Services and Protocol features may be experimental, in beta, incomplete, or subject to change. We may add, modify, suspend, or discontinue any feature at any time without notice.
We do not guarantee that the Services will be available, secure, uninterrupted, accurate, or error-free. The Services may be unavailable because of maintenance, network congestion, outages, third-party failures, blockchain issues, or events outside our control.
14. Intellectual property
The Services, including website content, design, logos, trademarks, text, graphics, software, and other materials, are owned by Kestrel or its licensors and are protected by intellectual property laws. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and use the Services for lawful purposes.
Open-source software, if any, is governed by the applicable open-source license. Nothing in these Terms limits rights granted under those licenses.
15. Taxes
You are solely responsible for determining whether taxes apply to your transactions and for reporting, withholding, collecting, and remitting any taxes to the appropriate authorities. We do not provide tax advice and may not provide tax reporting forms.
16. Disclaimers
To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Services and the Protocol are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise. We disclaim all warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, availability, security, and reliability.
We do not warrant or guarantee any smart contract, digital asset, blockchain network, wallet, protocol, third-party service, yield rate, price, redemption, settlement time, or transaction outcome.
17. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Kestrel and its contributors, affiliates, service providers, and personnel will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, data, digital assets, private keys, opportunities, or business interruption, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability for any claim arising out of or relating to the Services or these Terms will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid directly to us, if any, for use of the Services in the three months before the claim arose, or (b) one hundred U.S. dollars.
18. Indemnification
You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Kestrel and its contributors, affiliates, service providers, and personnel from and against any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of or relating to your use of the Services, your transactions, your violation of these Terms, your violation of law, or your infringement of any rights of another person.
19. Governing law
These Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or the Services are governed by the laws of [GOVERNING JURISDICTION], without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.
20. Dispute resolution; arbitration and class-action waiver
Informal resolution first. Before starting any formal proceeding, you agree to contact us and try in good faith to resolve the dispute informally for at least 30 days.
Binding arbitration. To the maximum extent permitted by law, any dispute not resolved informally will be resolved by final and binding arbitration administered by [ARBITRATION ADMINISTRATOR / RULES], seated in [ARBITRATION SEAT], rather than in court, except that either party may seek injunctive or equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction for intellectual-property or unauthorized-access matters.
Class-action and jury-trial waiver. To the maximum extent permitted by law, disputes will be brought only on an individual basis and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative action, and you and Kestrel each waive any right to a jury trial.
If any portion of this section is found unenforceable, the remainder will continue to apply to the fullest extent permitted by law.
21. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we may provide notice by updating the "Last updated" date, posting notice through the Services, or taking other reasonable steps. Your continued use of the Services after updated Terms become effective constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.
22. General
Entire agreement. These Terms, together with any policies referenced here (including the Privacy Policy), are the entire agreement between you and Kestrel regarding the Services and supersede any prior agreements on that subject.
Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions will remain in full force.
No waiver. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, or as otherwise permitted by law.
Force majeure. We are not liable for any delay or failure to perform caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including blockchain or network failures, third-party outages, denial-of-service attacks, natural disasters, or governmental action.
No third-party beneficiaries. Except for the Kestrel parties entitled to disclaimers, limitations of liability, and indemnities under these Terms, these Terms create no third-party beneficiary rights.
Electronic communications. You consent to receive communications and notices electronically, and you agree that electronic communications satisfy any legal requirement that such communications be in writing.
23. Contact
Questions about these Terms can be directed to the Kestrel team through official channels listed on kestrel.finance or through the official Kestrel social accounts.