链上金库机制、格局与风险解析

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Onchain Vaults: Mechanics, Landscape and Risk

By: Tanay Ved, Senior Research Associate

Key Takeaways

• Vaults are non‑custodial smart contracts that pool deposits into yield‑generating strategies, offering a transparent and composable alternative to traditional funds and structured products.
• Vaults have grown into core onchain infrastructure, underpinned by the ERC‑4626 vault standard and modular lending protocols as stablecoins, tokenized RWAs, and yield‑bearing assets have expanded.
• Morpho, Sky’s sUSDS, and Ethena’s sUSDe highlight how vaults span savings products, delta‑neutral strategies, and curated lending, each with its own yield sources and risk profile.
• Vault curation is emerging as a specialized function, with firms managing billions in assets and actively shaping collateral, liquidity, and oracle risk across vaults.

Introduction

Vaults have emerged as a core primitive in the onchain ecosystem, aggregating capital into yield generating strategies with exposure to lending markets, staking protocols or tokenized real world assets (RWAs). Like professionally managed investment funds or structured products, vaults pool capital into predefined portfolios targeting different risk profiles, but operate with greater transparency, composability and capital efficiency.

As the pool of productive assets expands onchain, from stablecoins, to yield-bearing tokens and RWAs, vaults have become the natural aggregation layer for this capital. Adoption is accelerating, with asset managers like Bitwise joining vault curation, Kraken embedding vault strategies into its “DeFi Earn” product, while protocols like Morpho, Spark, and Aave are evolving the underlying infrastructure. At the same time, vaults are not without tradeoffs, making risk management and curator design crucial to the growth of the vertical.

In this issue of State of the Network, we provide an overview of onchain vaults, the ERC-4626 token standard that underpins them, and understand the role of protocols, markets and risk curators. We also highlight the risk dimensions of vault curation and how they shape the emerging vault landscape.

What are Vaults?

At their core, vaults are non-custodial smart contracts that aggregate capital and execute yield-generating strategies, automating what would otherwise require active monitoring and management of assets across protocols. Depending on how they are structured, vaults can supply assets into lending markets, facilitate delta-neutral strategies, stake/restake assets to earn validator rewards, or allocate to tokenized instruments for off-chain returns.

The diagram below is a simplified illustration of the key participants and capital flows in a typical vault structure, from depositors and curators to the underlying markets where yield is generated.

At the center is the vault smart contract (ERC-4626), which handles deposit intake, share issuance, and accounting. Curators or strategy managers configure the vault’s risk parameters and allocation logic, while capital is deployed into underlying markets. Depositors interact with a single interface regardless of the complexity of the underlying strategy, made possible by a shared technical standard that underpins most vaults in the ecosystem today.

ERC-4626: A Common Interface for Vaults

In 2022, a tokenized vault standard called ERC-4626 was introduced as an extension to the ERC-20 token standard. This provided a uniform interface for deposits, withdrawals, share issuance and accounting, eliminating the need for custom implementations. Today, it underpins the functionality of vaults across lending markets, savings products and interest bearing tokens.

In exchange for assets deposited into an ERC-4626 vault (eg., USDC, WETH), users receive shares representing their proportional claim on the vault’s underlying assets. These shares can be redeemed to withdraw the assets plus any yield earned. The number of shares received depends on the amount deposited and the current exchange rate (the ratio of total assets to total shares outstanding).

As the vault generates yield, the asset balance grows while shares remain fixed, causing the exchange rate to appreciate. Each share becomes redeemable for progressively more of the underlying asset over time. Illustrating a simple example:

• 1,000 USDC deposited into a USDC vault
• Exchange rate at deposit: 1.0 (user receives 1,000 shares)
• After one year at 4% APY, exchange rate appreciates to 1.04
• 1,000 shares redeemed for 1,040 USDC

Vault Market Landscape

Interest Bearing Stablecoins

The most widely adopted vault products today are yield bearing stablecoins, tokens that accrue interest passively through the ERC-4626 share mechanism. Sky’s Savings USDS (sUSDS) and Ethena’s staked USDe (sUSDe), are the two biggest examples, with combined supply exceeding $9.4B.

sUSDS functions as Sky’s savings vault, with Spark protocol allocating USDS into RWA instruments, stablecoins like USDC, onchain and OTC lending markets to provide a stable savings rate. It functions as the onchain equivalent of a money market fund. Ethena’s sUSDe takes a different approach, capturing funding rates through delta-neutral hedging across crypto and increasingly RWAs. Both tokens appreciate in value against their underlying asset over time through the ERC-4626 exchange rate mechanism described above.

Source: CM Network Data Pro

Their supply trajectories reflect the difference in their strategies. sUSDS has grown steadily as a result of a diverse basket of underlying yield including RWAs, while sUSDe has been more sensitive to funding rate regimes and broader crypto market conditions. As a result, Ethena is actively expanding collateral backing towards: overcollateralized institutional lending, liquid RWAs and non-crypto futures exposure.

Curated Lending Markets

While yield-bearing stablecoins embed a fixed strategy into the vault itself, protocols like Morpho separate the vault layer from the strategy or curation layer entirely. Morpho Vaults are ERC-4626 compliant lending vaults where independent curators such as Gauntlet, Steakhouse Financial, or Bitwise define risk parameters, collateral eligibility, and allocation limits. Depositors supply a single asset (e.g. USDC) and earn borrower interest as curators allocate that capital across lending markets like BTC/USDC, WETH/USDC, and others.

Source: Morpho Protocol Docs

This modular infrastructure is increasingly powering products built on top of vault rails. Coinbase leverages Morpho to offer BTC-backed loans directly within its consumer app, Kraken embeds vault strategies into its DeFi Earn product, and Bitwise became one of the first traditional asset managers to enter vault curation on Morpho with a non-custodial USDC vault.

Comparison Table of Vault Examples

Beyond Morpho which is the largest in the category with $11.5B in deposits, Spark underpins Sky’s sUSDS as its primary lending and allocation layer, while Aave v4 moves from unified liquidity pools toward isolated, vault-based markets with modular risk parameters.

Vault Curation and Risk Management

Vault curators sit between infrastructure and depositors, performing a crucial role similar to fund or risk managers in traditional finance. Yet the risks they manage are fundamentally different given the non‑custodial, composable, 24/7 nature of onchain markets. Curators determine approved collateral, loan‑to‑value (LTV) ratios, allocation caps, liquidation thresholds, and parameters such as oracle configurations.