Cega

Cega was a DeFi protocol for exotic options and structured products. It has shut down. This is Cega the crypto project, also called Cega Finance, and it has no link to the travel help firm of the same name.

Cega went live on Solana in June 2022. It later added Ethereum and Arbitrum. Its vaults paid a fixed yield to people who took on the risk of a big market fall.

In late November 2024 Cega said a "leading platform" had bought it. It did not name the buyer. Cega stopped taking deposits and told users to pull their funds out. Its website and docs no longer load.

What happened to Cega: the 2024 acquisition and shutdown

Cega shut down after it was bought. It shared the news on 27 November 2024 and stopped taking deposits the same day. Users were asked to start withdrawing. Cega said its products would close by the end of 2024, The Block reported. The buyer and the price were kept secret.

A team member told the Cega Discord that "the acquirer chooses to keep this private", The Block wrote. Co-founder and chief executive Arisa Toyosaki said goodbye in her own post.

Cega said it had handled half a billion dollars in volume and kept user funds safe for three years.

Nothing we found since then points to a return. We checked on 6 October 2026. The cega.fi and docs.cega.fi domains had no DNS record, which means the sites are gone and not just down. The Cega account on X had not posted in the prior 30 days. Our project data, which comes from The Grid, marks the Cega Vaults program on Solana as discontinued.

How Cega's fixed coupon notes and knock-in barriers worked

Cega's main product was the fixed coupon note. It was a vault that paid a set yield unless the market fell past a set line. You put in USDC. The vault sold options on a small basket of crypto assets. The price the buyers paid for those options became your yield.

Toyosaki gave The Block an example in March 2023. A depositor was "betting that in the next 27 days neither bitcoin nor ether will fall more than 50%". If the bet held, the depositor earned 12% APY. She said that happened about nine times in ten.

That 50% line is called the knock-in barrier. If any asset in the basket fell through it, the safety net was gone and you could lose part of your deposit. Fintech Global described the note as a basket of puts with knock-in barriers. A put is an option that pays its buyer when a price falls.

These options are called exotic because they carry extra terms that a plain option does not, such as a barrier or more than one asset. That makes them hard to price. Toyosaki told TechCrunch in March 2022 that Cega ran "10,000 to 20,000 different scenarios" to reach each price.

Someone had to buy the options. At first Cega passed every trade to outside market makers, the firms that quote prices for a living. In March 2023 its team set up its own trading firm, Tras Mobian, to do that job as well, Structured Retail Products reported.

Cega vaults: leveraged options, Gold Rush, Shark Fin and dual currency

Cega built several vault types on top of the fixed coupon note. Each one struck a new balance between yield and safety. The details below come from Cega's own press releases, and the yields are the ones it advertised on the dates given.

• Leveraged Options Vaults were announced in March 2023 with the Ethereum launch. They aimed to pay up to five times the yield with no extra collateral. Cega's launch release quoted 20% to 109% APY as of 24 March 2023, with barriers at 30% or 50%.
• Gold Rush came in April 2024. It was a fixed coupon note tied to ETH and XAUT, a token backed by gold. Cega advertised up to 83% APY, per a sponsored release on Decrypt.
• Bull Shark vaults came in June 2024. They were Cega's Shark Fin product. They mixed lending with options to promise your full deposit back, a base yield, and a bonus if BTC or ETH stayed in a set range, per a release on CryptoSlate.
• A dual currency vault was the last product we found. In July 2024 Cega, Pendle and Ether.fi launched a 27-day vault for Pendle yield tokens, per a second Decrypt release.

By 2024 the newer vaults took ETH, stETH, wBTC, USDC and USDT, the Gold Rush release said.

Cega on Solana, Ethereum and Arbitrum

Cega began on Solana in June 2022 and shifted its focus to Ethereum within a year. The money in its vaults peaked near $50 million around the Solana launch, The Block reported in March 2023. It then fell to $6.3 million as users pulled out after FTX failed.

That same month Cega went live on Ethereum. The Solana vaults moved into what The Block called "maintenance mode". They stayed open, but new products shipped on Ethereum first. More Solana vaults would depend on volume, Cega said. By the time it closed, Cega ran on Solana, Ethereum and Arbitrum.

Who Cega was built for

Cega suited people who held stablecoins, wanted a fixed yield, and knew what they gave up to get it. Toyosaki told TechCrunch the goal was to lower risk for newer DeFi traders while opening up trades that were once out of their reach.

There were limits. Your deposit was locked for the vault term, which was 27 days in the examples Cega shared. The yield was your pay for taking on crash risk. So you had to be at ease with losing part of your deposit in a steep fall.

None of this is a live choice now. Cega has taken no deposits since November 2024.

Was Cega safe? Audits, counterparties and risks today

Cega said no user funds were lost in its three years. Its vaults still carried risks that no audit removes. Three things stand out.

The audits covered code, and we can only tie them to part of it. Cega's March 2023 release said OtterSec and Zellic had audited its Ethereum contracts. It said they found no critical flaws and that every fix was applied. Its April 2024 release named OtterSec and Code4rena. We could not open the reports. We found no audit that we can link to the Solana program.

Market risk was built in. If a barrier broke, you could lose part of your deposit even if the code was perfect. The yield also relied on market makers buying the options. Those were outside firms at first, and later Cega's own Tras Mobian.

The risks today are fake sites and stuck funds. The official domain is gone, so there is no official Cega app to connect a wallet to. We could not confirm whether any deposits are still in the contracts, or how a late withdrawal would work. We also could not read who holds the upgrade key for the Solana program.

Cega token and airdrop: was there one?

We found no Cega token and no airdrop. A token was planned, though. The Block reported in March 2023 that Cega's $5 million round came with a token side letter, a promise of future tokens to the backers. It said a token launch was planned with no date set. Toyosaki told the outlet, "we do look to compensate early users".

The closing notice in November 2024 did not mention a token. Our token data lists none for Cega.

Cega funding, founders and where the team went

Cega raised $9.3 million in seed funding over two rounds. The first was $4.3 million in March 2022, at a $60 million valuation. Dragonfly Capital led it. Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research and Solana Ventures joined, TechCrunch reported. The second round added $5 million in March 2023 from Dragonfly, Pantera and Robot Ventures.

Arisa Toyosaki co-founded Cega and ran it as chief executive. She had traded derivatives at UBS in Hong Kong and led marketing at Bitcoin.com, per TechCrunch. The same report named Winston Zhang as a co-founder. The Block counted 15 staff in March 2023.

Toyosaki has since moved on. Binance Japan named her general manager and representative director from 1 July 2026, Crypto Briefing reported. The buyer of Cega has still not been named.