Adrian Cachinero Vasiljević (Steakhouse): "Vaults lag stablecoins. Stablecoin adoption is the leading indicator for vault adoption.”

Steakhouse describes itself as the largest independent vault curator. What does a curator actually do, for a reader who comes from traditional finance and has never touched DeFi?

Fundamentally, we connect stablecoin savers to stablecoin borrowers, in a non-custodial and risk-transparent way. That's the whole thing. Where it gets more abstract is the further a financial institution sits from stablecoins. For an institution like Coinbase, which is very heavily stablecoin-based, it's obvious why this is valuable. For someone like Robinhood, very active in crypto but still fundamentally a traditional financial institution, it's reasonably clear. For a bank, where stablecoins compete with deposit products, it's far more abstract. The customer has to first be persuaded that stablecoins are going to be an increasing part of monetary transactions. Once you believe that, you want to offer savers a product they can use to interact with borrowers, and a vault is a smart way of doing that.

"We spend very little time worrying about the name. We get into the customer's actual problem."

"Vault curator" is jargon. Does the terminology get in the way when you're talking to institutional clients?

It's industry jargon like a lot of others, and I don't lose sleep over it. We spend far less time dwelling on the name than on helping the customer think through what their problem is and how we solve it. When you have a large deposit base of stablecoins, a vault is a very useful way to make those deposits sticky and productive, particularly because many of the new stablecoin regulatory frameworks prohibit sharing the reserve yield of the underlying stablecoin. So we provide a useful service there. That's what the conversation is about, not the label.

"Vaults lag stablecoins. Stablecoins are the leading indicator."

Vaults used to be a crypto-native product. Has the user base changed?

Honestly, not as much as people assume, not yet. The furthest we've come are integrations like Coinbase and Robinhood, and those are a reasonable proxy for non-DeFi-native, if not entirely non-crypto-native, users. What's striking is they brought a significant amount of net-new stablecoins into lending that weren't there before. That tells me there's real value in abstracting away the complexity; that's what lets a stablecoin saver find somewhere to park their holdings for longer. On Coinbase we're talking hundreds of thousands of users; Robinhood is approaching that. But this only makes sense inside the stablecoin frame. If stablecoins aren't part of your universe, the value is very hard to parse. Vaults lag stablecoins. Stablecoin adoption is the leading indicator for vault adoption, logically.

And what drives stablecoin adoption itself?

Two angles. One is cost and speed versus a wire or a SWIFT transfer, but that's a marginal argument in most of the developed world. SEPA in Europe is instant and free; ACH and wires in the US work fine. People still use checks in France and the US. These behaviors have enormous inertia, so the efficiency gain has to be gigantic to overcome it. The stronger argument is expansion of access. And it's not the bottom-of-the-pyramid emerging market; it's a shipping broker in the GCC, a large manufacturer in Thailand. Wealthy, middle-to-upper-income economic actors who still rely on wire transfers but for whom stablecoins are a vast improvement in working capital and daily cost. That's the beachhead. And behind that beachhead sits vault adoption, because once people use stablecoins, they need regular financial products, and vaults are, in our view, the best way to create them.

"Vaults are credit software. Wherever there's credit creation, you can embed one."

What's the total addressable market, and who becomes the dominant buyer over the next couple of years?

I'd frame it as a percentage of stablecoin float that vaults could address, and we're still in a single-digit, sub-10% penetration environment. So even if stablecoin float stayed completely flat for five years, there's significant growth ahead, and it won't stay flat; stablecoin growth lifts the base for everyone. We're firmly in a fast-expansion phase. I don't buy the idea that it ends up as just Aave and Steakhouse. The flexibility of the medium means it gets used in many contexts. Everyone fixates on the fintech-integration, earn-program angle; that's one aspect. We view vaults as credit software: wherever you encounter credit creation, you can embed a vault. As for the buyer, strictly speaking, our large customers are distributors, but the end user today is still very much retail. The next five years is where I expect a lot more wholesale capital management: institutional balance sheets using this infrastructure to mediate credit.

Beyond retail, who are the biggest institutional users right now?

Ethena is a very large user. Beyond that it's funds and hedge funds, which move in and out between trades rather than holding long-term, plus longer-term DAO treasuries and individual whales. We don't know every user, but we know a good share of them. There was also one NASDAQ-listed company we identified as a Steakhouse user. The natural evolution is that DAO treasuries mature into corporate treasuries: idle balances from traditional finance.

There's a wave of new protocols letting anyone spin up a vault. I saw one at the Solana event in Belgrade that lets a retail user become a curator on Jupiter's lending markets. Doesn't the market consolidate hard eventually?

The low barrier to entry is one of the most attractive features of the segment, precisely because it lets a lot of competition in. Strictly speaking, no one has to use a Steakhouse vault; you can roll your own and do your own allocations. That's fair. It's just a lot more work than it looks. Beyond that, there's a real multiplicity of use cases: Aave mostly targets on-chain degens, we mostly target institutional integrations. There's room for everybody, even today. And consolidation only really accelerates when market growth slows and there's less excess margin to go around. For that to bite, you'd need overall stablecoin growth to decline and vault penetration within stablecoins to be very high. We are very, very far from either.

Landing Coinbase and Robinhood, how did that change your TVL, and did wholesale capital arrive alongside it?

If you look at our TVL charts, there have been periods of volatility, flushes of mania into various points programs, up quickly and down quickly. But the long-term trend is a slow slope up and to the right that doesn't stop, and it hasn't gone faster or slower with or without Robinhood. We're grateful for both partnerships, but I read the consistency as a reflection of accumulated brand trust in Steakhouse, the output of a long sequence of not making bad decisions. We had a theory about which players the vault product suited; the theory is proving correct, and we're well positioned to argue we're the leading player in that segment. We expect these integrations to continue.

"USDT is so useful people forgo the yield entirely. That won't last forever."

Where does Tether fit? It has little incentive to comply with GENIUS or MiCA.

Tether is an interesting case. Having outgrown the regulatory environment, I don't think it has much incentive to adhere to GENIUS or MiCA, and that's not where its user base or future growth sits anyway. The fact that they still don't pay interest is, to me, an expression of how useful USDT is: people forgo the entire reserve yield just to hold and use it. That's fine as a first step. But a USDT holder eventually matures to the point of wanting to earn something on idle balances or put them to work. That's where vaults play a role. If it sits idle, it's still losing real value as fiat depreciates; at some point you need to offset that dilution.

"A licensing regime that dictates which assets you can hold? That would be strange."

If these products become fully regulated, does Tether's presence in vaults become a liability?

No, because it's a different question. Imagine a world with a new classification of vault manager, where integrators can only use vaults run by a licensed manager in some jurisdiction. I don't see a strong reason why that would de facto exclude Tether, any more than it would exclude gold, or tokenized stocks, or any other denomination. Vaults are flexible enough to hold a very wide range of products, and I'd be disappointed if a licensing regime were prescriptive about which denomination assets are allowed. There are already custodians in regulated jurisdictions that hold USDT, knowing full well it isn't a licensed stablecoin, simply because the customer wants it, or their counterparties in other geographies use it. The need for a vault continues to exist, and that vault may well be licensed. Why not?

And the unintended consequence if regulators did restrict the asset set?

That's exactly what's worth thinking through. If you create a licensing regime that's prescriptive about denomination assets, people don't stop making vaults in those assets; they just make them outside the regulator's purview, and therefore outside the protections the regime is supposed to afford. So you'd be forcing all that activity offshore. I don't know that that's a good outcome. Being more pragmatic and open-ended would be better for investor protection.

"Discretion is the line. A vault that behaves like a hedge fund should be regulated like one."

Commissioner Peirce's SEC comments raised the prospect of curators being treated as asset managers: compliance teams, filings, higher cost of doing business. Where do you stand?

It was very commonsensical, and we agree with practically all of it. We're engaging with the SEC. There's no legislation around vaults as a product yet, but I'd expect the SEC to come up with some rule in the absence of one, and other jurisdictions to follow. "Vault" is as broad a term as "token"; it can apply to almost anything, so the framework Peirce applied around discretion makes a lot of sense and maps to our own philosophy. A vault is essentially a smart-contract wrapper for underlying behavior. If that behavior is identical to a hedge fund, it should be regulated like one; that's hard to argue with. Where there's an opportunity is the less-discretionary segment, which is where we play: low-or-no-discretion products with strong on-chain controls that mitigate risk, where the curator is the counterparty. Those make markets more efficient and give investors strong protections, outcomes that align closely with regulatory objectives. Our hope is a licensing category that recognizes those features without a prohibitively costly increase in the cost of doing business. Part of why vaults are so dynamic is that they're easy to enter; it would be a shame to close that off. Morpho, when we spoke to them, was fully aligned with the SEC's position too.

"Money is fungible. The utility people get from it is not."

A lot of people frame vaults and tokenized money market funds as competing for the same deposits. As rates fall, can vaults attract capital currently sitting in MMFs?

They compete, but let me reframe it. In our model, DeFi monetary movement looks a lot like ordinary money movement, just more fluid, more composable, and quicker. Money moves between asset classes far more easily in DeFi than in traditional finance, but the pressures are the same. Money is fungible; the utility people derive from it in different scenarios is much less so. It depends on rates, conditions, use cases, behavioral preferences. All these asset classes compete. But strictly speaking, tokenized bank deposits and tokenized MMFs are far more competitive with each other than either is with vaults, because vaults offer a different type of credit exposure; they're not like-for-like. I was talking this through with Luca Prosperi recently: a tokenized bank deposit can be a reserve asset for a stablecoin, but so can a tokenized MMF. Everything has channels feeding into everything else, and capital moves between them depending on the holder's preference at any given moment. So I'm not prescriptive about whether vaults competing with MMFs is good or bad; it's neither. It's just a preference for credit that a user expresses when the opportunity exists. And in DeFi, the opportunity always exists, because capital can always move freely. That's full capital mobility in a way we've genuinely never seen before.

"Stablecoins come first. If a company never adopts them, it never reaches vaults."

What's the number-one inhibitor to more institutional capital flowing into vaults?

The internal business case, and it always routes back through stablecoins. Stripe uses stablecoins for internal settlement because they saw the value and realized the efficiencies; every other company has to go through that same exercise. For many, continuing to use their existing banking infrastructure is perfectly fine, so it's very hard to get them to vaults, because they won't get into stablecoins in the first place. It hinges almost entirely on stablecoin adoption.

Could the rise of real-world-asset vaults help, since institutions understand the underlying assets better?

To a degree, but I don't think that's the blocker, and here's the subtlety people miss. In a lending vault, the underlying asset isn't the collateral; it's a repayment obligation from the borrower. That obligation is secured by market incentives mediated by the smart contract: rates spiking when liquidity is low to force repayment, or the contract seizing and liquidating collateral to make the lender whole. So the quality of the asset is contingent on how fast the collateral can be liquidated. And most real-world-asset collateral can't be liquidated quickly. That's why, in DeFi today, crypto is probably the best collateral; it liquidates fastest. It's limiting for borrower growth, because there's only so much you can borrow against Bitcoin, and I'd find it far more interesting to have diverse RWA classes on-chain. But until those assets are inherently more liquid, it's hard to break out of that.

Traditional asset managers cite RWA collateral volatility as the concern: loan-to-value, liquidation thresholds. Is variety of collateral the limiting factor?

No. If it came down to credit quality, prime vaults are already empirically very high quality. The loss rate on overcollateralized Bitcoin lending is negligible, vanishingly low. And the point managers miss is that it isn't only volatility that determines risk; it's liquidity and the speed of recovering that liquidity. An asset with lower volatility but much lower liquidity is riskier to a vault lender than Bitcoin, because it's harder to liquidate and repay. The mind-shift, or the underlying technology change, that needs to happen is making real-world collateral as liquid on-chain as its off-chain counterpart.

"Roughly 99% of stablecoins are dollars. MiCA won't change that if no one wants the euro."

Does a European vault market exist yet, in euros?

It follows stablecoins, and about 99% of stablecoins are dollar-denominated. We look at it in layers: growth of overall stablecoins, penetration of euro within stablecoins, and penetration of vaults within euro stablecoins. My hypothesis, and I'll caveat that I haven't run the numbers, is that vault penetration within euro stablecoins is actually higher than within dollars, simply because the euro float is so much smaller. Steakhouse has done the most to advance it: we run the largest euro stablecoin vault on EURCV, we've integrated with Deblock, and we're integrating with European exchange partners, working to grow borrow demand organically so euro-denominated holders can access yield. These vaults are in the hundreds of millions; they're large. It's the euro stablecoin float itself that's small.

Why is euro demand so weak, even with MiCA in place?

People from the euro system come up to me at conferences almost challenging me: "now that we have MiCA, why don't we have more euro stablecoins?" I push it right back. There's no amount of MiCA regulation that makes people want a euro stablecoin more than a dollar one; people have to want the euro in the first place, and that's their job, not mine. There's also no pull factor: to the euro system's credit, using the euro inside the eurozone is already so seamless you barely need a stablecoin. And euro balances outside the eurozone essentially don't exist; there's very little demand for the euro abroad. So there's no natural reason for euro stablecoins to exist at scale. MiCA can permit the market; it can't manufacture the demand.