Operator

The Operator is the entity that runs a strategy day to day. It is the actor with discretion (the one making the active-management decisions that generate returns), but that discretion is tightly bounded by the strategy's risk policy and the pre-approved instruction set.

Responsibilities

• Execute and maintain the strategy: open, resize, and close positions, swap tokens, harvest rewards, and rebalance across protocols and chains to deliver strong risk-adjusted returns.
• Move liquidity: allocate idle capital from the Machine to Calibers and bridge it between the Hub and Spokes.
• Settle redemptions: free up accounting-token liquidity and finalize the redemption queue.
• Keep accounting fresh: re-account positions so the share price stays accurate.
• Propose new opportunities: author new instructions and submit Root Updates for the Risk Manager to publish.

The Operator works toward the strategy's published mandate, and is incentivized by performance fees to maximize the long-term share price.

Trust assumptions

Makina assumes Operators are competent and economically motivated to perform, but does not assume they are infallible or honest. An Operator's keys could be compromised, its software could have bugs, or it could act maliciously. The protocol is therefore designed so that even a fully hostile Operator cannot cause large or fast losses.

What the Operator cannot do

The Operator never has custody in the ordinary sense. Its actions are constrained on every axis:

• Execution is limited to pre-approved instructions, and cannot call arbitrary contracts.
• Swaps may only output approved base tokens.
• Bridging is allowed only to approved chains over approved bridges, within a max-loss limit.
• Loss caps and cooldowns bound every position-management action and every swap.
• It cannot withdraw user funds, send assets to arbitrary destinations, change its own limits, or mint shares to itself outside the fee mechanism.

Together these bounds mean an Operator cannot drain or wreck a strategy in a single transaction or a short burst. The damage rate is capped, which buys the Security Council time to detect anomalies, trigger Recovery Mode, and strip the Operator of its powers. The Makina Foundation runs active monitoring across strategies to surface unusual behavior quickly.