Silo Protocol, Algorand's 2022 options-vault builder, goes dark

A Launch With Momentum

'Silo Protocol is now live on #Algorand mainnet. Epoch 1 has officially begun.' That was the launch message Aaron Martinez, founder of Silo's parent company HEADLINE, posted in August 2022, when Silo became one of the first projects to bring options-style structured products to Algorand. 'Options Vaults are coming to Algorand,' the project had announced on Reddit at the end of July. An archived copy of the site from August 8, 2022 shows a live minting interface already counting down to an August 26 contract expiration.

Four years later, the picture is different. The domain silodefi.com no longer resolves, the app subdomain is equally unreachable, and DeFiLlama — which still lists Silo in its 'Options Vault' category — flags the protocol's URL as dead while its smart contracts hold roughly $45.77. Silo did not end with a hack, a treasury drain, or a shutdown notice. It simply stopped.

Options Vaults, Defined

Most Algorand DeFi does lending, swapping, or staking. Silo's pitch was that the network had no venue for more sophisticated instruments — multi-pool arbitrage, delta-neutral positions, structured products — and that permissionless vaults could fill the gap. The protocol was 'built on decentralized vaults as a core primitive,' and its archived documentation is specific about the design: 'Silo is a permissionless, decentralized strategy protocol for ALGO and Algorand Standard Assets,' deployed on Mainnet.

The mechanics work like this. A user deposits ALGO or an ASA — an Algorand Standard Asset, the base-layer token standard that needs no smart contract to issue — into a smart contract, which mints a strategy token in return. That token is a cash-settled options position defined by four parameters:

The user flow was concrete. A collateral provider mints strategy tokens and pays a 3%¹ protocol fee; the tokens can then be sold on a third-party DEX for premium — the options seller's income. A buyer holding a token can exercise it before expiration by settling in USDC, paying an exercise fee of about 20² basis points. The site's tagline captured the ambition: 'Silo picks up where TEAL leaves off' — TEAL being Algorand's low-level smart-contract language, which requires manual stack management and offers no type safety.

The People and the Paper Trail

Silo was built by HEADLINE INC, a Texas fintech and media startup and repeat Algorand Foundation grant awardee, with core contributor Philip Gabardo, founder of Alammex, a 2022 cohort company in the Algorand Accelerate accelerator. The team said the contracts were audited by Entersoft Security; DeFiLlama lists two audits. The audit report is also the only substantive file in the project's public GitHub repository, committed on October 13, 2022 with the message 'audit init.'

On-chain, the paper trail matches the documentation. Algorand's base layer lets anyone mint ASAs, and Silo's receipt tokens survive to this day under names that embed their terms — S-ALGO-$0.27-2022.10.25, for instance, a strategy token whose asset record points to app.silodefi.com. The wallet that minted those receipts was first funded on October 23, 2022 by an account that created the protocol's application contracts, and HEADLINE's main account — which holds 114 assets and has created 84 — had opted into those applications. The contracts were Silo's own, deployed on mainnet.

One number in that record is telling. The creator wallet holds essentially 100% of the adjusted supply of the S-ALGO-$0.27 token. The strategy tokens existed; they were never distributed far.

The Numbers Never Arrived

DeFiLlama began tracking Silo in October 2022, and the protocol's Total Value Locked — the dollar value of assets sitting in its contracts — peaked at $1,762 in January 2023 before drifting in the double digits for most of the following three and a half years:

DeFiLlama still files Silo under 'Options Vault,' a worldwide category holding $70.7 million across 18³ protocols; Silo accounts for less than 0.1%⁴ of that total. The gap between ambition and traction shows up in the token as well: HDL, HEADLINE's 25-million-unit ASA displayed on the Silo homepage as its ticker, trades at about $0.0053 with 24-hour volume near $10 and roughly $1,371 parked in its Tinyman pool — the profile of a small community, not an institutional product.

The End: No Announcement, Just a Missing Domain

Silo left no shutdown notice. The GitHub repository has exactly two commits, both from October 2022. Archived snapshots show the marketing site still online in December 2023, and the last Wayback Machine capture of the homepage dates to May 4, 2025. At some point after that, the domain's nameservers stopped resolving — the site, the app, and the docs are all unreachable as of August 2026, even though the domain registration is paid through 2027. DeFiLlama's API now sets 'deadUrl': true for the protocol.

Roadmap items from December 2022 — a first governance period, enterprise-grade APIs, and a Silo V2 featuring an automated market maker (the smart-contract mechanism that lets users trade against a liquidity pool) built around the Black-Scholes options-pricing model, at the time described as '+50% complete' — never shipped.

For the record, descriptions of Silo as an unlaunched Testnet project are wrong. The archived docs state plainly that the protocol 'is currently deployed on Mainnet,' strategy tokens settled on-chain in late October 2022, and DeFiLlama's records begin the same month. Silo ran on mainnet for years; then it went quiet.

What the Experiment Leaves Behind

Silo demonstrated that structured products could be built directly on Algorand's layer-1: cash-settled options contracts, receipt tokens, permissionless deployment, audited and on-chain. What it never demonstrated was distribution. A few hundred dollars of TVL cannot attract the market makers or traders an options market needs, and a US access restriction flagged on the site as 'Not Available in US' narrowed the field further.

The Algorand DeFi ecosystem today holds roughly $28.9 million in total value locked; Silo's remaining stake is a rounding error within it. The audit report remains public, the contracts stay on-chain, and the strategy-token receipts stay legible — a complete record of an experiment that never found its market. And the structured-products gap Silo identified in 2022 is still open. (Readers searching the name will also find Silo Finance, an unrelated lending protocol on Ethereum and Arbitrum; the two are separate efforts.)

Source (10)

• defillama.comSilo Protocol DeFiLlama listing
• web.archive.orgArchived Silo docs (June 2023)
• web.archive.orgArchived Silo site (August 2022)
• github.comSilo Protocol GitHub
• headline.devHEADLINE
• linkedin.comLaunch announcement (LinkedIn, August 2022)
• api.llama.fi
• linkedin.comAaron Martinez's Post - algorand #silo #defi
• github.comIncorrect silo shutdown behavior · Issue #4757 · dotnet/orleans
• defillama.comSilo Finance TVL, Fees & Revenue