Upshift launches on Stellar with earnUSDC and earnXLM

Upshift's vault standard now runs on Stellar's Soroban smart-contract environment, and the first two vaults, co-curated by Gami Labs and Stake Capital, take USDC and XLM into Stellar's lending and DEX markets.

Upshift is launching its vault infrastructure on Stellar, working with the Stellar Development Foundation to grow DeFi TVL across the network. The full vault standard has been ported to Soroban, Stellar's smart-contract environment, and the roadmap covers RWA vaults, DeFi yield strategies and asset management infrastructure for the apps building on Stellar. The opening vaults are Gami earnUSDC and Gami earnXLM, co-curated by Gami Labs and Stake Capital.

Vault pages: Gami earnUSDC and Gami earnXLM on app.upshift.finance.

Why Stellar

Stellar has spent more than a decade as a network for payments and asset issuance, with native USDC on Stellar and a long list of regulated issuers already using it. Its DeFi stack has filled in more recently. Blend has grown into the network's main lending market and Aquarius into its main DEX, with Blend above $80M in TVL and Aquarius above $40M as of April 2026, and Sushi and Templar add further liquidity and lending venues.

The missing piece has been a vault layer that packages those markets into one deposit. Lending pools and DEXes give active traders something to build with, while a wallet, a fintech or a treasury team needs a single position with a named manager, clear limits and a receipt token it can account for. Upshift supplies that layer on the other chains it runs on, and the Stellar deployment brings the same product to Stellar.

How Upshift runs on Stellar

Porting the vault standard to Soroban meant rebuilding it for a different execution model, a different set of DeFi protocols and a new custody path. The result behaves the way Upshift vaults do on Ethereum or Monad. Depositors hold a receipt token for their share of the vault, the curator runs the strategy inside onchain limits on which protocols and assets the vault can touch, and deposits never pass into Upshift's custody.

Because the vaults are Soroban contracts, a depositor's shares are recorded inside the vault contract itself, so holding earnUSDC or earnXLM doesn't require a trustline. Fordefi handles MPC key management for the vaults' operating wallets, and Hypernative monitors vault activity in real time across the protocols the vaults use. Halborn audited the Stellar vault contract in April 2026, one of 10 smart contract audits of Upshift's contracts by 6 independent firms.

The opening vaults

Gami earnUSDC takes native Stellar USDC and issues earnUSDC in return. The curators route that USDC across Blend, Aquarius, Sushi and Templar, so the vault's yield draws on several lending and liquidity markets at once. Returns accrue to the earnUSDC share price, and the position stays denominated in USDC from deposit to exit.

Gami earnXLM takes XLM and issues earnXLM, putting it to work across the same Stellar DeFi stack. Its returns are paid in XLM, so a holder keeps their XLM exposure while it earns. Both vaults are permissionless and deployed on Stellar mainnet, and deposits open at app.upshift.finance as the curators complete their first allocations.

About the curators

Gami Labs is a digital asset firm focused on DeFi asset management, risk management and vault curation, running strategies across lending markets, liquidity venues and structured yield markets. Stake Capital, led by Julien Bouteloup, co-curates both vaults and brings long experience across DeFi protocols. The curators set allocations and rebalance, while the vault contract enforces where the capital can go.

The roadmap

The work with the Stellar Development Foundation starts with these two vaults and extends in three directions. RWA vaults would put Stellar's tokenized assets, such as Ondo's USDY, to work inside curated strategies. Further DeFi yield vaults follow as Stellar's lending and DEX markets deepen, and asset management infrastructure for ecosystem apps would let wallets and fintechs on Stellar offer vault yield inside their own products.

Upshift has reached more than $550M in peak TVL across more than 30 chains, and Stellar now runs the same vault standard natively alongside them.

Risks

The vaults carry the risks of the protocols they allocate to. A bug in a vault contract or in Blend, Aquarius, Sushi or Templar could cause losses, and liquidity in Stellar DeFi is thinner than on the largest EVM chains, so a large withdrawal can take longer to process. earnXLM is denominated in XLM, so its dollar value moves with the XLM price. Returns are variable and no level of yield is guaranteed.

Always make sure to do your own research and be aware of the above and any other risks before depositing.

Keep reading

• How USDC on Stellar works and where it earns yield. Trustlines, CCTP and the venues USDC earns in.
• How to bootstrap TVL on a new chain. Why chains launch with a curated vault.
• Yield vaults explained. How to evaluate a vault and what the share token represents.