Why every financial product will run on vaults

Apollo managed about $1.05 trillion in assets at 30 June 2026, according to its second-quarter results. In 2024, the firm tokenized one of its credit funds through Securitize and listed ACRED on Morpho's lending markets. A product that would normally sit in a private fund, with high minimums and quarterly liquidity, became something anyone with a wallet could hold and borrow against. The piece doing that work was a vault.

Crypto card companies are bringing their operations onchain, with deposits sitting in ERC-4626 vaults and earning yield until the moment someone swipes. The vault redeems atomically at the point of sale. The balance keeps earning until the second it leaves.

Meanwhile, Huma Finance wraps invoice receivables into onchain pools that held about $380 million on 29 September 2026, according to DefiLlama. Businesses in the Philippines and Kenya receive stablecoin advances against future payment flows. Global DeFi liquidity funds the other side.

All three run on the same primitive, a vault.

The Vault as a Building Block

Yield is one use of a vault among many.

DeFi has capabilities that traditional finance doesn't: global permissionless liquidity pools, composable credit markets where any tokenized position can serve as collateral, decentralized market-making, 24/7 atomic settlement, transparent onchain accounting, self-custodied deposits, and yield sources (basis trades, LP fees, lending spreads) that didn't exist five years ago.

Most of that value is still out of reach for all but the most sophisticated users and businesses.

A vault opens DeFi to personal and commercial use cases by wrapping everything in a standardized accounting and composable layer. It's a smart contract that accepts deposits, deploys capital to strategies, tracks yield, provides access to liquidity, issues credit against deposited positions, and deploys capital to markets. The vault share itself is composable, meaning other protocols can build on top of it. Any financial product that needs to tap into what DeFi can do uses a vault as the wrapper.

An exchange building Earn uses a vault to access yield strategies. Payment companies, asset issuers, perp exchanges, lenders and new chains use them too.

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Earn Products for Exchanges and Wallets

Every major exchange and wallet is shipping an Earn product, and the pitch to users is simple: deposit USDC, earn 5%. Delivering it takes strategy selection, deployment across several protocols, curator management, risk controls, withdrawal processing and yield accounting. Building all of that from scratch takes months.

Vault infrastructure collapses that into a single integration. The exchange plugs into a vault SDK or API, the curator handles strategy execution, and the vault contract manages the rest. Tria, a neobank, shipped Earn to its retail users this way. Upshift's vault layer handles accounting, risk curation, strategy execution and yield distribution so the app team can focus on their product.

We expect this pattern to absorb most of the exchange and wallet market. Building your own vault infrastructure is a lot like building your own payment processor: a few teams will do it, and the ones that reach market fastest will be the ones that plugged into existing infrastructure.

Vault-Backed Payments (PayFi)

PayFi, the intersection of payments and DeFi, has picked up fast. At Davos 2026, it was a headline topic, with real-world payment systems being redesigned to run in real time and with liquidity, compliance and execution tightly integrated.

Vaults sit at the center of it, in three models.

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Atomic redemption is the simplest model. User deposits live in a vault, earning yield, until the moment they spend. At the point of sale, the vault redeems the exact amount needed. Ethena's sUSDe integration with Visa and Mastercard rails is the most visible example.

The credit facility model works differently. Here a credit line is extended against the vault position (or against the receivables of the card issuer). The vault serves as collateral backing a spending facility, similar to how a brokerage margin account works against your portfolio.

Settlement financing addresses a different problem. A crypto card company processes a purchase and takes the user's funds at authorization. The card network, though, may not settle for a few days, or in some cases up to a month, and that gap needs capital. A vault provides short-duration financing against those locked funds, lending against payments that are already reserved and guaranteed to arrive. Capital out to the borrower earns the settlement financing spread. Capital not yet drawn earns DeFi yield from lending markets. As older settlements clear and new card transactions flow in, the vault's exposure rolls forward continuously. For the card company, this replaces the balance sheet buffer they would otherwise have to grow linearly with every new user. For depositors, it's yield backed by real payment flows with single-digit-day duration.

In all three cases, idle capital earns yield until the moment it's needed, and the vault provides the accounting, custody and composability layer behind the product. A payment app could even source settlement financing from a vault and offer the same vault as a yield product to its own users, with one vault serving both sides of the market.

Payment companies plug into a vault and skip building DeFi infrastructure themselves.

RWA Liquidity and Distribution

Tokenized real-world assets are growing fast. On 29 September 2026, DefiLlama showed Ondo Finance holding about $2.6 billion in its tokenized Treasury products (USDY and OUSG), Superstate about $715 million, and Centrifuge about $1.5 billion across tokenized credit, fund and other real-world assets.

The open problems now are distribution, composability, and liquidity. A tokenized T-bill sitting in a wallet doesn't do much. It needs to plug into DeFi lending markets, serve as collateral, earn additional yield through deployment strategies, and be accessible across multiple chains. And when a holder wants to exit, they need instant liquidity.

An RWA vault can hold tokenized Treasuries as the base asset, route them into lending protocols like Morpho for additional yield, make the vault share usable as collateral on Pendle or Aave, and deploy the whole thing across multiple chains through a single architecture. The issuer gets distribution and the depositor gets composability.

Vaults also solve the liquidity problem. An instant redemption vault can sit alongside the RWA pool, funded by DeFi liquidity, allowing holders to exit their positions immediately without waiting for the underlying asset to be redeemed through traditional rails. This is a new source of exogenous yield for DeFi depositors: real-world interest income, uncorrelated to crypto market cycles, routed through onchain infrastructure.

As more assets are tokenized (private credit, real estate, receivables, commodities), the demand for vault infrastructure to wrap, distribute, and compose those assets will scale in lockstep.

Market Making for Perpetual DEXs

Perpetual exchanges need liquidity, and somebody has to take the other side of every trade. On centralized exchanges, professional market makers fill this role. On decentralized perps platforms, vaults do it.

HyperLiquid's HLP vault held about $183 million in deposits on 29 September 2026, according to Hyperliquid's own API. It acts as the protocol's market maker and liquidation engine simultaneously, and depositors earn from trading fees and liquidation profits. The rate moves with market activity (the API showed a trailing APR of about 3.8% that day). GMX pioneered this model with GLP, which paid depositors 70% of platform fees, and now runs it through its GM and GLV pools. Jupiter's JLP does the same on Solana.

For the exchange, a vault provides deep, always-on liquidity without relying on a handful of professional market makers. For depositors, it offers yield from a source (trading fees) that's structurally different from lending or staking. Capital goes into the pool, the protocol's matching engine uses it, and profits flow back.

Upshift's vault infrastructure supports strategies that include perps liquidity provision, for example on HIP-3 DEX HyENA. Curators can allocate capital into these markets alongside lending and other strategies within the same vault.

CeFi Lending and Credit Vaults

Maple Finance and its syrupUSDC product represent a different vault use case: institutional credit. The vault sits onchain, accepts deposits from DeFi users, and the capital gets lent to institutional borrowers (trading desks, market makers, funds) through CeFi credit facilities. A credit team manages underwriting and collections, while depositors earn yield from borrower interest.

This is structurally different from DeFi lending. The borrowers are vetted, the loans are managed by a credit team, and the risk profile centres on counterparty risk. Products like Upshift's upUSDC take a similar approach: stablecoin deposits routed to institutional borrowers with policy engine controls restricting who can borrow, at what LTV, and with what collateral.

The vault provides the onchain accounting and custody layer while the credit team provides the underwriting expertise. Depositors keep self-custody while accessing institutional credit yields.

Receivables Financing and Trade Credit

A supplier in Kenya ships goods to a buyer in Singapore. The invoice might say "net 90 days," but that supplier needs cash now. Traditional factoring, where a bank advances 80-90% of the invoice value for a fee, has existed for centuries. It's also slow, expensive, and locked behind banking relationships that most small businesses don't have.

Tokenized invoice financing moves this onchain. The invoice gets represented as a digital asset. A vault pools DeFi liquidity on one side and deploys it as short-term credit to suppliers on the other. When the buyer pays the invoice, the vault gets repaid. Platforms like Jia use Huma Finance's infrastructure to run these vaults for SMEs in Southeast Asia and East Africa.

The vault primitive lets this run at scale. It standardizes how capital flows in (deposits), how it gets deployed (supplier advances), how returns are tracked (repayment and interest), and how the whole thing stays transparent onchain. Without one, each receivables facility would need its own smart contracts.

Ecosystem Stablecoin Bootstrapping

When a new chain launches, it needs DeFi liquidity to function. Lending markets need deposits, DEXs need trading pairs, and protocols need TVL to attract users, which makes for a hard cold start.

Upshift's answer is the anchor vault playbook: deploy a stablecoin vault on the new chain and route its deposits into the chain's young DeFi protocols. The vault provides the liquidity that bootstraps the ecosystem, while depositors earn yield from being early.

earnAUSD on Monad is the template. It reached over $80 million in peak TVL, becoming the largest vault on the chain at the time, by routing AUSD deposits into Monad's lending and DEX protocols. The same playbook is running on Flare with earnXRP and expanding to Solana, Stellar and others.

The Common Thread

Yield products, payment infrastructure, RWA distribution, exchange liquidity, institutional credit, trade finance and ecosystem bootstrapping serve different users, carry different risk profiles and earn from different sources. They still share the same core mechanics: pool capital, deploy it according to rules, track ownership through composable shares and enforce risk controls in code.

Builders no longer have to design custom infrastructure for each of these products. The vault primitive already handles the accounting, custody, composability, and risk management. What changes between products is the strategy running inside and the curator managing it.

Upshift vault infrastructure now runs on 30+ chains, behind products from neobank Earn to institutional credit and payments. We think every financial product that touches capital onchain will eventually route through a vault, and a lot of them already do.

FAQ

What can DeFi vaults be used for beyond yield?

Vaults power Earn products for exchanges and wallets, vault-backed payments (PayFi), RWA distribution and composability, market making for perpetual DEXs, institutional CeFi lending, receivables financing, and ecosystem liquidity bootstrapping. Any product that pools capital, deploys it, and tracks ownership can use vault infrastructure.

What is PayFi and how do vaults enable it?

PayFi is the intersection of payments and DeFi. Vaults enable it through three models: atomic redemptions (vault redeems at point of sale), credit facilities (lending against vault positions), and settlement financing (short-duration lending against locked card receivables). In all three, deposits earn yield until needed. Learn more about how vaults work.

How do vaults help RWA issuers?

Tokenized assets need distribution and composability. A vault can hold RWAs, route them into lending markets for additional yield, make vault shares usable as collateral across DeFi, and deploy across multiple chains. The asset issuer gets distribution, and the depositor gets composability.

Vaults can also serve as liquidity pools for instant redemptions of RWAs. This has the added benefit of providing a new, exogenous yield source to DeFi, uncorrelated to the broader market.

What is the anchor vault playbook?

It's a strategy for bootstrapping DeFi on new chains: deploy a stablecoin vault, route deposits into the chain's protocols and provide the liquidity that kickstarts the ecosystem. earnAUSD on Monad reached over $80M in peak TVL using this approach.

Can vaults be used for institutional credit?

Yes. CeFi lending vaults accept onchain deposits and route capital to vetted institutional borrowers through managed credit facilities. Depositors maintain self-custody. Products like upUSDC use policy engines to control borrower access, collateral ratios, and exposure limits.

What is vault-as-a-service?

It's infrastructure that lets any platform (exchange, wallet, neobank, asset manager) launch vault-based products without building custom smart contracts. The platform plugs into the vault SDK and sets the strategy and risk parameters, and the vault handles accounting, custody and composability.

Keep Reading

• What is Upshift? - How the vault infrastructure works under the hood, from deposit to strategy execution

• Earning yield on XRP with earnXRP - A walkthrough of depositing into a live vault on Flare Network

• Stablecoin yield on Monad with earnAUSD - How the largest vault on Monad generates returns