What Are Sky Agents, and Why Does the Structure Matter?

The Sky Ecosystem has deployed over $11.5B billion across stablecoins in the peg stability module, short duration treasury bills, onchain crypto lending, OTC crypto lending and AAA corporate debt.

To understand how Sky allocates capital at scale without concentrating decision-making, you need to understand the Agent Framework: the system of independent economic actors that sit between Sky's protocol layer and the real-world counterparties who use USDS.

The Rulebook: Atlas

Before explaining what Agents are, it helps to understand what constrains them.

Atlas is Sky's constitutional document. Every Agent operates under it. Every Agent Artifact, the governing document specific to each Agent, is fully subordinate to the Atlas. When an Agent wants to originate a new allocation or enter a new market, its Artifact defines how it does so, and the Atlas defines the outer limits of what is permissible.

This matters because the Agent framework is explicitly designed to allow independent actors to operate autonomously. Without a shared rulebook, that autonomy would produce chaos. The Atlas is what gives the system coherence without requiring central control over each decision.

The Agent Framework

Sky's Agent framework distinguishes between several entity types. They are not interchangeable, and the distinctions are not bureaucratic formality. Each type has a specific role, defined access to Sky's infrastructure, and strict accountability.

Sky Core

Sky Core is the protocol layer: the smart contracts, the treasury, the governance mechanisms, and the emergency powers that underpin everything else. Sky Core sets the Sky Savings Rate, collects stability fees paid on loans to Prime Agents, manages the surplus buffer, and retains override authority in crisis scenarios.

Think of Sky Core as the central bank equivalent in this architecture. It sets the policy rate and holds the backstop. It does not originate assets or distribute USDS directly to end users, that is what Agents are for.

Prime Agents

Prime Agents are the entities most people interact with, directly or indirectly, when they access the Sky Savings Rate or see Sky capital deployed into an institutional allocation.

Every Prime Agent operates under a dual mandate.

On the demand side, Prime Agents distribute USDS and sUSDS through their own channels: consumer apps, B2B integrations with wallets and neobanks, institutional frontends. For each unit of USDS or sUSDS distributed, Sky pays distribution rewards to the Prime Agent. The more distribution, the more revenue.

On the supply side, Prime Agents borrow USDS from Sky at the base rate (the Sky savings rate plus 30 basis points) and deploy it into whitelisted allocation venues called Halos. The spread between what the allocation earns and what the Prime Agent pays to Sky is the gross margin on the supply side. The constraint is how much Junior Risk Capital the Prime Agent must post against each allocation, which is set by the Capital Requirement Ratio (more on this below).

Halo Agents

Halos are allocation venues. It is a segregated legal structure that holds the assets or legal claim to the loan backing a specific allocation. When a Prime Agent identifies an opportunity, it originates a Halo for it. The Halo isolates the legal and financial exposure of that allocation from the Prime Agent's other positions and from Sky's broader balance sheet.

This segregation is not administrative tidiness. It is what makes recovery possible if an allocation underperforms. The legal claim is structured before capital is deployed. The Halo defines where the assets sit, who has recourse, and in what order.

Executor Agents

Executor Agents are the compliance and operational layer of the framework. They exist because Prime Agents cannot directly execute operations that interface with Sky's core protocol infrastructure. For those actions, they must rely on Executor Agents.

There are two subtypes. Operational Executor Agents handle day-to-day protocol-level execution on behalf of Prime Agents. They take instructions from the Prime Agent's Artifact and implement them on-chain, strictly within the parameters defined. They also carry Operational Collateral: a financial guarantee covering losses from negligence or misconduct in executing the Prime Agent's strategy. Ozone and Amatsu are the current Operational Executor Agents in the Sky ecosystem.

Core Executor Agents sit above them. Their function is oversight: ensuring that Operational Executors are implementing Prime Agent strategies in line with the Atlas.

The Capital Requirement Ratio: How Risk Gets Priced

The Capital Requirement Ratio (CRR) is the mechanism that connects the quality of an allocation to the amount of risk capital a Prime Agent must post to underwrite it.

When a Prime Agent originates a new Halo, it goes through three assessments before any capital is deployed: technical (smart contract risk and operational execution), legal (enforceability of the claim in a default scenario), and financial (collateral quality, borrower profile, liquidity, and stress scenarios). Each assessment feeds into the CRR assigned to that specific allocation.

Prime Agents hold Junior Risk Capital that sits in a subproxy smart contract. This aligns incentives between the Prime Agent, the Sky Protocol and its user. If an allocation loses value, the Prime Agents Junior Risk Capital absorbs the loss before any impact reaches Operational Executor Agents, the Sky Surplus Buffer and finally depositors.

The CRR is not a fixed number applied uniformly. It is derived for each allocation based on its specific risk profile, set by a Risk Committee following documented auditable methodology.

The Current Prime Agents

Five Prime Agents are currently active in the Sky ecosystem. Each serves a distinct segment, which is by design.

Spark was the first Prime Agent. Spark's focus is retail and DeFi-native distribution: the Spark Savings frontend, SparkLend for lending against ETH and BTC derivatives, and a Liquidity Layer that deploys capital across Morpho, Maple, and other venues. Spark's primary interface on the distribution side is direct-to-user.

Grove is Sky's institutional credit-focused Prime Agent, incubated by Steakhouse Financial. Grove's strategy centers on Collateralised Loan Obligations and tokenised T-Bill strategies, providing Sky's balance sheet with exposure to investment-grade credit assets. Grove operates primarily on Ethereum, with a presence on Avalanche.

Obex focuses on supply-side allocations for institutional counterparties. Obex operates as an incubator with 8 projects in the first cohort. Each project plans to launch Sky-aligned products designed to bootstrap USDS usage, aiming to enable Sky Agents to deploy capital directly into their products.

Osero is the newest Prime Agent incubated by Stablewatch. Osero Earn provides a developer SDK that any neobank, wallet, custodian, or exchange can integrate to offer the Sky Savings Rate to its users. Osero Foundry provides full-stack origination infrastructure for institutional assets: tokenization, anchor funding, AMM liquidity, and isolated lending markets. Osero also runs a direct consumer app for retail depositors who want to access the Sky savings rate through a desktop interface. Osero is working on expanding Sky Protocol to the Plasma ecosystem.

Keel is the capital engine that powers growth and stability across DeFi, tokenized markets, and strategic reserve treasury allocations. This Prime Agent is focusing on USDS expansion within the Solana ecosystem.

No Prime Agent holds a monopoly on Sky's rails, the same base rate is available to all of them.

Why Multiple Agents Structure Makes Sense

A reasonable question: if all Prime Agents access the same Sky infrastructure and the same base rate, why maintain multiple Agents rather than one?

The answer is distribution surface and allocation diversity. Sky's goal is to get USDS and sUSDS into as many hands, wallets, and balance sheets as possible. A single Agent with a single distribution strategy and a single institutional focus cannot do that at scale. Multiple Agents, each optimised for a different segment and a different go-to-market, expand the total addressable surface without competing for the same users. By focusing on different segments Prime Agents are able to diversify the Sky balance sheet.

Where the Framework Is Heading

The Agent framework is active and growing, but it is not finished. The Laniakea upgrade will ensure a standardized infrastructure framework designed to enable capital deployment at an institutional scale across the Sky Agent Network.

What is already live is large enough to matter though: multiple independent Prime Agents, a functioning CRR methodology, and a distribution layer that is expanding across chains and integration types.

The architecture was designed to scale without requiring central coordination.