What Is Haiku (haiku.trade) | The Execution Engine That Pushes Multi-Step DeFi Through in One Go

Haiku (haiku.trade) is a service that combines DeFi operations such as bridging, swapping, lending, and depositing into LPs into a single execution flow. Users specify the assets they currently hold and the assets and allocation they ultimately want. Haiku then constructs the route required to reach that target state.

It follows an “All-or-Nothing” execution model, meaning the entire operation is considered unsuccessful if any intermediate step fails. The $HKU token has not yet been launched, and users can currently earn only a points system called Karma.

## What Is Haiku?｜A Cross-Chain DeFi Execution Engine

Users decide which assets to provide and what final asset allocation they want. Haiku handles route discovery and execution.

![Haiku homepage. Multiple protocol lines converge on a chip-like graphic featuring an origami crane logo, alongside the headline “Define the Outcome. Not the Steps.” and a live-status banner showing self-reported cumulative volume and API success rate](//images.ctfassets.net/oqq040lo889r/VjGeOtnVwWjjccVuNmQEt/b763148f717af2dee3fb9512c3a4418f/shot_top.png)

*Image: Screenshot of the [official Haiku homepage](https://haiku.trade/) taken on August 27, 2026*

| Item | Details |
| --- | --- |
| Chains | Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana, and others (counts differ depending on the official source and API) |
| Category | Cross-chain DeFi execution engine |
| Stage | Mainnet live. $HKU has not yet launched, and Karma Season 0 is ongoing |
| User interfaces | Trading and portfolio screens in the app. Available by connecting a wallet |
| For developers | REST API, embeddable Widget, and MCP server for AI agents |
| Operator | Haiku Trading Limited (British Virgin Islands) |
| Audit | Smart contract audits by Hashlock (v2 in September 2025, most recently a UniswapV3 audit in February 2026; v1 and a dApp penetration test were conducted in February 2025) |

The number of supported chains differs depending on the source. The official homepage lists 22, while the documentation support table lists 18.

When we counted the official API token list on August 27, 2026, it contained 24 chains—23 EVM chains plus Solana—and 18,785 tokens.

What Haiku aims to eliminate is the manual process of opening a bridge, then a lending protocol, then a DEX, and moving across multiple interfaces to complete each step separately.

One example on the official homepage starts with USDC on Arbitrum and builds a delta-neutral LP position on Base. Haiku claims that manually bridging funds, supplying and borrowing on Aave, swapping assets, and providing liquidity on Aerodrome would require eight steps and 35 minutes, while Haiku can complete the process in one minute.

However, if the goal is simply to execute a single swap cheaply, services such as 1inch or Jupiter are more straightforward. If you only want to view balances across multiple chains, a wallet such as [Zerion](https://candydrops.xyz/ja/projects/zerion) is sufficient.

Haiku becomes more relevant when multiple DeFi operations need to be combined across chains.

One particularly compatible use case is entering yield opportunities distributed across multiple protocols. Even if users identify a higher-yielding vault or LP, if it exists on another chain they would normally need to bridge assets, swap into the required tokens, and deposit them into the target position one step at a time.

Haiku can construct these operations backward from the desired final position. In addition, the developer-facing Haiku MCP includes functionality for searching yield opportunities across integrated protocols and passing the resulting positions directly into Haiku's quote and execution flow.

In other words, Haiku's value is not limited to turning multiple operations into “one click.” Its broader potential lies in acting as an execution layer that connects assets users currently hold with investment destinations distributed across multiple chains and protocols.

## Declare the Final State Instead of Listing the Steps

Haiku is described as declarative because of the way users express their intent. With a conventional DEX, users issue instructions one by one, such as “swap A for B.” With Haiku, they specify the result: “I want to end up holding these assets in these proportions.”

![Diagram from the official Haiku documentation. A user intent goes through optimization, is decomposed into components such as swaps, lending, borrowing, and LP positions, and is assembled into a single unsigned transaction](//images.ctfassets.net/oqq040lo889r/2pl9d2l87grpMbVr0Y0lMu/99ac8b93d50a0cb10be65f85cccaa640/fig_declarative_execution_flow.jpg)

*Image: From the [official Haiku documentation (Diagrams)](https://docs.haiku.trade/haiku/haiku-intents/diagrams), retrieved August 27, 2026*

Haiku calculates the route required to close the gap between the user's current holdings and target holdings, then combines approvals, bridges, swaps, deposits, borrowing, and other operations into a single execution. According to the official explanation, if the required conditions cannot be satisfied, the entire execution is rejected, helping avoid partial execution or funds being stranded midway through the route.

The difficult part is what happens behind the scenes. Haiku needs adapters for individual protocols, must search routes across multiple chains, construct transactions according to available liquidity and prices at that moment, and safely stop execution if the required conditions cannot be met.

At the same time, multichain support and route optimization are not unusual features in this category. Haiku's official documentation explicitly compares the service with [Definitive](https://candydrops.xyz/ja/projects/defintive), CoW Swap, LI.FI, and Enso, and argues that the difference is not simply the number of supported chains or protocols, but whether execution is imperative or declarative and derived backward from the target state.

However, this comparison demonstrating Haiku's claimed advantage was created by Haiku itself. We could not confirm a third-party comparison that independently verifies the claim. The figure stating route calculation takes less than 200 milliseconds is likewise a self-reported metric.

## Four Execution Strategies and Fees That Are Not Clearly Disclosed

The app offers four execution strategies. Users can choose between immediate execution, waiting for a specified price, splitting execution over time, or allowing Haiku to adapt execution based on liquidity.

![Haiku TRADE screen. A WETH/USD candlestick chart appears on the left, while the right side shows INPUT ASSETS and OUTPUT ASSETS baskets and a MARKET ORDER settings card with Max slippage set to 0.30%](//images.ctfassets.net/oqq040lo889r/3Kb9kbzQIgGQbViDfO05WV/add3bd3c22bec16a0c0edbb7bffe7bf2/shot_app_trade.png)

*Image: Screenshot of the [official Haiku app (TRADE)](https://app.haiku.trade/trade) taken on August 27, 2026*

| Execution strategy | What it does | Configurable range |
| --- | --- | --- |
| MARKET | Executes immediately using the best available route | Default maximum slippage is 0.30% and can be changed |
| LIMIT (Beta) | Waits for execution at a specified rate | 24-hour expiry, with retry and price-improvement settings |
| TWAP | Splits execution over time to reduce market impact | 1 hour to 1 day or custom duration, 2–48 slices, limits of 0.1/0.3/1% |
| GUNSHI | Adjusts timing and route based on actual liquidity | Up to 5 days using presets, four urgency levels, limits of 0.1/0.3/1% |

GUNSHI and LIMIT are not described in the documentation and appear to have been implemented in the app first.

The more important issue is pricing. We could not find a published fee rate on the official website, in the documentation, or on the pre-wallet-connect app screen. The documentation does not include a pricing page. The $HKU page only states that holding more $veHKU results in greater fee discounts, without disclosing either the base fee or specific discount rates.

Before connecting a wallet, the total cost field in the order panel also remains displayed as “--”.

The official FAQ does not claim that Haiku itself reduces gas prices. Instead, it states that combining multiple operations into a single execution often lowers the total cost compared with manually executing each step separately.

### Can It Be Used from Japan?

Section 1, “Eligibility,” of the Terms of Use revised on March 16, 2025 lists the United States and 27 countries and regions as restricted jurisdictions. Japan is not included.

However, the terms also do not explicitly state that Haiku is offered specifically to users in Japan. Circumventing geographic restrictions through a VPN or similar method is prohibited.

👉 [Check Haiku's execution strategies and supported chains in the official app](https://app.haiku.trade)

## Karma Rewards and a Breakdown of the Top 100 Accounts

The system currently awards points called Karma. The official blog states that Karma is expected to be connected to future $HKU allocations and tier-based benefits.

| Program | Reward | Conditions / period |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Karma (Haiku) | Points. Expected to be converted into $HKU allocations and tier benefits | Connect a wallet, create a Haiku Sigil, and trade afterward. No stated deadline |
| Referral (Haiku) | Up to 20% of the Karma earned by referred users, plus tier-up bonuses whose amounts are undisclosed | Referred user must complete at least 3 trades and reach at least $250 in volume |
| Partner NFT multiplier (Haiku and partner communities) | Multiplier on trading Karma and one-time rewards. Haiku's own Haikuties NFTs provide up to 3x and 11,000 Karma | Hold an eligible NFT and activate the partnership in the app |

The source for the third row is not the official blog or documentation, but constants embedded in the app implementation. The official blog lists four ways to earn Karma—trading volume, intent complexity, referrals, and daily streaks—and does not mention these NFT multipliers.

> **Editor's observation**: On August 27, 2026, we queried the official leaderboard API endpoint without authentication and aggregated Karma, trade counts, multipliers, and streaks for the top 100 accounts returned. The endpoint returns a fixed maximum of 100 entries, so the analysis is limited to those 100 accounts.

Of those 100 accounts, 92 had multipliers associated with partner NFTs. The breakdown was 21 accounts at 3x, 68 at 2x, one at 1.5x, two at 1.2x, and eight at the default 1x multiplier.

Three wallets ranked within the top 100 with more than 40,000 Karma despite showing zero trades. The cutoff for 100th place was 41,059 Karma, while the top account had 2.66 million Karma.

Fourteen accounts currently had active streaks of at least one day, with the longest current streak at 17 days. Meanwhile, 41 wallets had previously achieved streaks of at least 30 days. The same dataset also contained two volume values whose number of digits appeared clearly abnormal.

This API does not allow us to independently aggregate total platform volume, so the more than $40 million in cumulative volume displayed on the official homepage could not be externally reconciled.

The rules for how $HKU will ultimately be allocated are also not fully consistent across official sources. The official blog says Karma will be connected to future Haiku token allocations.

Meanwhile, the $HKU documentation describes airdrop eligibility in terms of “beta testing, product feedback, and community participation” and does not directly mention Karma. It only states that the details of the initial distribution will be determined by the Haiku Core Contributors.

## $HKU Allocation and the Team's Rebrand from Mozaic

$HKU has not yet launched, but its fixed supply and allocation have already been published.

| Item | Details |
| --- | --- |
| Ticker | $HKU (not launched as of August 27, 2026) |
| Total supply | Fixed cap of 1 billion tokens |
| Allocation | 21.34% migration allocation for holders of the predecessor protocol, 20.00% ecosystem, 16.25% investors, 15.00% team, 2.70% airdrop allocation, and others |
| Main utility | Locking into $veHKU for governance rights, fee discounts across products, and yield boosts for vaults |
| Exchanges | None. An unrelated ERC-20 with the same ticker exists, so users should avoid confusing the two |

![$HKU supply allocation donut chart. Of the fixed 1 billion supply, 21.34% is allocated to migration from the predecessor protocol, 20.00% to the ecosystem, 16.25% to investors, 15.00% to the team, 7.50% to protocol-owned liquidity, 6.72% to product incentives, 5.50% to LPs, 4.00% to advisors, 2.70% to the airdrop allocation, and 1.00% to the insurance fund](//images.ctfassets.net/oqq040lo889r/2kevboveSJpl2otJDrRwq2/427685a910e2ae2cf8e20d8c8babbc71/tokenomics.png)

Half of the 2.70% airdrop allocation becomes unlocked at TGE, while the remaining half unlocks quarterly over 12 months.

The 21.34% migration allocation—roughly eight times larger than the airdrop allocation—is reserved for holders of the predecessor protocol, with eligibility determined by a snapshot taken on January 24, 2025. Users joining today cannot qualify for this migration allocation.

Haiku Vaults, which are referenced in the tokenomics as a target for yield boosts, were not visible in the app as of August 27, 2026.

### Rebranding from Mozaic and the Founder's Starting Point

Haiku's predecessor was Mozaic Finance, an AI-based yield aggregator co-founded by Calum Roberts in 2021.

In January 2025, Mozaic DAO proposal MIP-13 put the rebrand to Haiku and a redesign of the tokenomics to a vote.

However, the current Haiku documentation does not explicitly name its predecessor. As a result, the current Haiku documentation alone does not confirm that the 21.34% migration allocation specifically applies to Mozaic holders.

Roberts previously worked as a crypto derivatives trader. In the announcement of Haiku's pre-seed round, he described the underlying problem as one where DeFi already has powerful financial primitives, but its execution UX remains broken.

The same announcement argues that in TradFi, a trader can specify an outcome such as “build a delta-neutral position,” while in DeFi the user is forced to manually execute a sequence of lending, borrowing, swapping, and redepositing operations.

Haiku's declarative architecture essentially turns that problem statement directly into the product's input model.

| Item | Details |
| --- | --- |
| Founder | Calum Roberts (Founder & CEO, based in Sydney) |
| Investors | Big Brain Holdings (lead), Auros, Frostlight, Daedalus Syndicate, and Biconomy CEO Ahmed Al-Balaghi |
| Funding | $1 million pre-seed round announced on December 4, 2025 |

## Editor's View｜Would Haiku Still Be Used Without Karma?

Haiku is betting that users constructing multi-step positions across multiple chains will stop executing every step manually and instead specify only the final position they want.

If that thesis is correct, execution should continue flowing through Haiku even if Karma incentives and future $HKU distributions disappear.

Yield farming is one of the clearest use cases for this model.

Yield opportunities are fragmented across chains, protocols, and pools, while APYs constantly change. Even after finding an attractive destination, users may need to bridge assets, swap them into the required tokens, and redeposit them into a vault or LP.

Haiku can automate the sequence between the user's existing assets and the target investment position.

The developer-facing Haiku MCP goes one step further by exposing `haiku_discover_yields`, which searches yield opportunities across multiple protocols. Users or agents can identify candidates based on APY, TVL, category, and other conditions, then pass the returned identifier into the quote flow to construct an executable route to the position.

At present, Yield Discovery is not positioned as a core feature of the general user-facing app. Even so, the ability to handle both “finding a yield opportunity” and “moving capital into it” through the same execution infrastructure is one of the more interesting aspects of Haiku's product design.

If it can route capital across multiple chains and protocols directly into investment destinations, Haiku starts to resemble an onchain capital-allocation layer rather than merely a tool for bundling DeFi operations.

On the other hand, current usage data does not yet establish whether users will continue to use Haiku without points incentives.

Among the top 100 leaderboard accounts, 92 held partner-NFT multipliers, while only 14 currently maintained an active daily streak.

Developer adoption also remains at an early stage: the MCP server recorded 344 downloads over the most recent month we checked, while the public repository's latest update was May 9, 2026.

The fact that some app features are available before they are documented also suggests that product development is moving faster than documentation and information maintenance.

What matters next is not simply the number of Karma participants. The more important questions are whether trading activity remains after incentives weaken, whether Yield Discovery leads to actual position construction, and whether more third-party products begin integrating Haiku through its MCP, Widget, or API.

## How to Complete Your First Small Trade

1. Open app.haiku.trade and connect a supported wallet.
2. Create a Haiku Sigil to activate your account. Your referral link is also generated here.
3. Select the input assets and desired output allocation, then choose MARKET as the execution strategy.
4. Check the maximum slippage, displayed total cost, and minimum received amount before executing.
5. Open KARMABOARD to check your ranking, multiplier, and streak.

👉 [Build your first route by following the steps in the official Haiku app](https://app.haiku.trade)

## Summary

$HKU has not yet launched, and it has not been determined how many $HKU tokens a given amount of Karma will ultimately correspond to. For users participating only for points, the distribution rules therefore remain uncertain.

However, Karma is not the core of Haiku's product.

Its central proposition is the ability to route users from assets they currently hold into DeFi positions distributed across multiple chains and protocols, combining bridging, swapping, lending and borrowing, and LP deposits along the way.

Yield farming is especially fragmented because discovering an investment destination and moving assets into it are normally separate processes. Haiku MCP already demonstrates a mechanism connecting yield discovery with execution, and whether that design expands further into the broader user experience will be one of the key areas to watch.

The first thing worth testing directly is whether an operation that would normally require multiple websites can actually be completed entirely through Haiku.

**Sources**

1. [Official Haiku website (2026)](https://haiku.trade/)
2. [Official Haiku app trading screen (2026)](https://app.haiku.trade/trade)
3. [Official Haiku documentation: Tokenomics (2026)](https://docs.haiku.trade/haiku/usdhku-and-haiku-dao/tokenomics)
4. [Official Haiku documentation: $HKU and Haiku DAO (2026)](https://docs.haiku.trade/haiku/usdhku-and-haiku-dao/usdhku)
5. [Official Haiku documentation: Terms of Use (2025)](https://docs.haiku.trade/haiku/legal/terms-of-use)
6. [Official Haiku documentation: Why Haiku vs Alternatives (2026)](https://docs.haiku.trade/haiku/api-and-integrations/why-haiku-vs-alternatives)
7. [Official Haiku documentation: FAQ (2026)](https://docs.haiku.trade/haiku/api-and-integrations/api-support-and-faqs/faq)
8. [Official Haiku blog: Haiku Karma (2025)](https://blog.haiku.trade/haiku-karma)
9. [Official Haiku blog: Pre-seed announcement (2025)](https://blog.haiku.trade/pre-seed-announcement)
10. [Official Haiku API token list (2026)](https://api.haiku.trade/v1/tokenList)
11. [npm haiku-mcp-server (2026)](https://registry.npmjs.org/haiku-mcp-server)
12. [Hashlock Haiku audit report (2025)](https://hashlock.com/audits/haiku)
13. [Official Haiku blog: Haiku MCP (2026)](https://blog.haiku.trade/haiku-mcp)
14. [Official Haiku MCP Server GitHub](https://github.com/haiku-trading/haiku-mcp-server)