万字拆解链上金库：八大赛道，谁在崛起谁在衰败？

Original Author: Castle Labs 

Original Translation: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher

This article is excerpted from our research on "The Financialization of Treasuries."

Download the full report here

Vault Taxonomy

This section of the report provides a quantitative analysis of the vault landscape to offer a comprehensive picture of the sector and its evolution. We analyze the ecosystem by category, tracking TVL flows across different vaults and curators.

We break down curator concentration and provide an outlook on major capital flows, contextualizing the structural shifts that will define vaults this year.

Vaults should not be viewed as a single, all-encompassing market but rather assessed based on their different implementations, each with distinct parameters, risk vectors, and responses to stress tests. Aggregated data only provides a partial picture, urgently requiring a more granular analytical perspective.

Before beginning the analysis, it's important to define the term "vault" as the foundation of our methodology.

Our definition is based on the deployment trajectory. A vault is classified as a "tool for users to actively acquire yield-generating strategies." Any asset that is purely a wrapper for an off-chain instrument is excluded from our analysis.

Maple's syrupUSDC meets the vault criteria: users deposit stablecoins into the protocol, which lends them to institutional borrowers, accruing annualized yield through the credit activities of the issued token.

Lido stETH is a vault: users deposit ETH, the protocol earns staking rewards, which are distributed via a rebasing token. Centrifuge JAAA is a vault: users gain exposure to AAA-rated CLO yields through a tokenized wrapper that generates yield from its credit positions.

BlackRock's BUIDL, by this definition, is not a vault: it is a direct token issuance representing a 1:1 claim on an off-chain US Treasury fund.

Applying this perspective, we have defined eight structural categories: Lending Vaults, Liquid Staking, Restaking, Risk-Curated Vaults, Vault Infrastructure Providers & Yield Optimizers, RWA Credit Vaults, Perpetual LP Vaults, Options Vaults

For the purpose of this analysis, we treat Risk-Curated Vaults as a separate category to better understand their dynamics and growth.

Before delving into each category, let's first look at the overall performance of vaults.

The Current State of the Vault Ecosystem

The net TVL for all defined vault categories totals $120.4 billion, a decline of approximately 50% from the peak of around $241 billion in October of last year. The downward trend after the October peak was driven by the "October Liquidation Event," which triggered cascading liquidations across DeFi.

Due to overlaps, the vault TVL figure is higher than the current DeFi TVL (approximately $86 billion). For example, liquid staking protocols like @LidoFinance issue stETH, a rebasing asset representing staked ETH yield, which is used as collateral in lending protocols like @Aave and @Morpho.

If we move to category-level analysis, the overall picture changes dramatically. Recent events have led to TVL outflows and prompted a broader reality check (and hopefully a shift towards a safety-first approach) across the industry regarding security and risk management.

Categories like Lending, Liquid Staking, and Restaking were hit the hardest, as they have the largest exposure to on-chain assets and drive the on-chain economy; meanwhile, RWA Vaults, having no crypto asset exposure, continue to demonstrate uncorrelated growth.

Categories like Options Vaults peaked in April 2022 and have struggled since. Due to the "October Liquidation Event," vaults dominated by risk curators suffered hits comparable to other major categories. Their TVL peaked around the end of October and subsequently declined following the Stream Finance collapse.

Three events between October 2025 and May 2026 (Stream Finance, Resolv, and Kelp hacks) provided a good stress test window, as these collapses/exploits had cascading effects across DeFi.

In the chart below, we highlight the TVL history of these categories during this specific period. As mentioned, most underperformed, with only RWA Vaults growing by 37.8% during the same period, while other categories experienced significant drawdowns.

Next, we continue to analyze the growth of each vault category, focusing on recent trends and shifts.

Lending Vaults

Lending is the largest vault category, accounting for the vast majority of DeFi TVL. The past year marked a broad shift towards curated vaults, driven by products like Morpho that helped amplify this trend.

On Morpho, curators can create their own vaults that can have exposure across multiple markets and generate yields for depositors. These vaults can ultimately be curated by any provider, including traditional financial institutions.

Morpho's recent Vaults V2 upgrade offers curators more features, including the ability to embed approved adapters to source yield from multiple origins, granular risk controls (e.g., setting absolute or relative caps on vault exposure), built-in KYC controls, and other functionalities.

In the same context, Aave also launched its V4 version, introducing an architecture of Spokes and a unified liquidity hub. Spokes offer enhanced functionality through custom risk parameters, isolated collateral types, and oracle configurations per market.

It differs from Morpho's curator-led model in that Aave's governance still needs to review and approve the implementation of these Spokes, whereas Morpho is permissionless. This marks Aave's shift from monolithic to modular lending.

The curator model has enabled Morpho to accumulate over $7.5 billion in TVL on Ethereum mainnet and Base. Base has contributed significantly to Morpho's growth, increasing from $604 million to over $2.8 billion.

This demonstrates the power of the distribution partnerships Morpho has pursued, such as the collaboration with Coinbase: currently, approximately 40% of TVL (in USD terms) is cbBTC, and it has helped facilitate over $1 billion in loans for Coinbase users.

In response to the curator model finding product-market fit (PMF) among institutional investors, Aave is competing in the institutional赛道 through Horizon, which has accumulated over $350 million in TVL since its launch.

Furthermore, in recent months, Aave has undergone many changes, including service providers like BGD and ACI leaving Aave Labs, and the announcement and approval of the "Aave will Win" framework, allocating all revenue from Aave's products to token holders.

None of these events have had a significant direct impact on Aave users. The only impact has been on the price performance of the Aave token. However, the recent KelpDAO attack changed the situation: Aave lost over $12 billion in TVL, bringing it closer in TVL terms to its competitor, Morpho.

The ratio of Aave TVL to Morpho TVL was previously between 5x and 6x but has now dropped below 2x following the incident.

@sparkdotfi, part of the Sky ecosystem, is also one of the lending protocols that benefited most from capital inflows after the rsETH hack.

The chart below shows the TVL changes for this protocol:

Most notably, Bitcoin supply nearly tripled, stablecoin borrows increased by 78% to $752 million with utilization remaining manageable, and WETH borrows increased by 44.1% to 325,000 WETH.

@0xfluid's unified liquidity layer also introduces a different approach to liquidity design, where lending, borrowing, and DEX share the same pool of funds. User collateral acts as Liquidity Providers (LPs) in the Fluid DEX, earning trading fees, while borrowed funds are deployed as smart debt into DEX pools, earning fees to offset borrowing interest costs.

Another interesting move by Fluid is its collaboration with protocols like @JupiterExchange and @VenusProtocol, through which white-label products like JupLend (Solana) and Venus Flux (BSC) were launched, currently holding TVL of $926 million and $21 million, respectively.

This stems from Fluid's broader positioning to partner with key players on various chains to gain more market share, with these partners sharing fees with Fluid.

Worth mentioning are @kamino vaults, the primary lending stack on Solana with over $1.6 billion in TVL. The protocol has seen significant growth through its K-Lend model (the Solana equivalent of Morpho). This allows Kamino to partner with established curators like Gauntlet and target institutional integration.

The largest vault on the platform is currently @SentoraHQ PYUSD, with over $219 million in TVL. The second largest is RockawayX's RWA USDC vault, at just $33 million, indicating significant room for growth for Kamino and Solana as a whole.

Liquid Staking & Restaking

Liquid Staking and Restaking account for a large share of vault TVL, with $42.4 billion and $20.6 billion, respectively.

The main players in Liquid Staking are Lido ($21.8 billion), Binance Staked ETH ($8.9 billion), @Rocket_Pool ($1.2 billion), and @Coinbase cbETH ($320 million).

Over time, Lido has maintained its dominance, with its issued asset, stETH, being highly composable across DeFi. Simultaneously, Lido's dominance also signifies concentration risk. They have expanded their product line by introducing the Earn product, which acts as an aggregation layer, depositing users' funds across DeFi to generate yield. However, due to its exposure to $rsETH, this product was impacted following the recent Kelp DAO hack.

Binance Staked ETH, leveraging Binance's user base, has grown by 121.8% since last year.

For other protocols and the category as a whole, growth has been slow, coming at the expense of diluting staking yields, with current staking yields around 2.5%.

On the other hand, Restaking and Liquid Restaking grew as a category to enhance yields earned from Liquid Staking.

The hack of @KelpDAO, a liquid restaking protocol, and the broader DeFi cascade highlighted the composability risks associated with these assets. As they are accepted as collateral throughout DeFi, this incident proved to be more of a bug than a feature.

The main players in Restaking and Liquid Restaking are @EigenCloud ($7.8 billion), @ether_fi ($5.7 billion), Kelp DAO ($1.6 billion), and Renzo ($167 million).

Restaking products like EigenCloud and EtherFi have expanded over time to include more services.

EigenCloud's rebranding in 2025 helped position itself as the AWS of crypto, driving the development of verifiable computation.

EigenDA, Eigen's data availability layer, is used by several L2s, including @megaeth, @Mantle_Official, and @Celo. Data posted on EigenDA has exceeded 1.8 TB and generated approximately $90,000 in total fees.

EigenCloud's TVL in ETH terms remained stable for a long time but recently declined after the Kelp hack, as users tended to withdraw funds during periods of uncertainty.

Similarly, EtherFi expanded into a neobank with thousands of active card users who have cumulatively spent approximately $440 million through its products.

Furthermore, they have a Liquid product (remember EtherFi originally launched as a liquid staking protocol) that supports multiple strategies to enhance yields across DeFi. One of its top ETH yield vaults has a TVL of $177.5 million.

Risk-Curated Vaults

Risk-curated vaults are one of the fastest-growing categories, reflecting the shift from monolithic to modular lending. The curated vaults they offer on platforms like Morpho earn them performance and management fees, similar to how traditional finance funds operate, deploying user capital across various strategies to generate returns.

This category currently has a TVL of approximately $6.5 billion, with 75% held by three curators: Sentora ($1.85 billion), @SteakhouseFi ($1.63 billion), and @gauntlet_xyz ($1.5 billion), indicating less competition in this category.

These risk curators charge lower fees than traditional finance hedge funds and venture funds, which typically charge management fees (around 1-2% of AUM) and performance fees (around 10-20% of earned interest). For example, the largest curator by revenue, Steakhouse Financial, generates $3 million in annualized revenue on $2.13 billion in AUM (an annualized rate of approximately 0.14% of total AUM).

These curators typically charge only performance fees, and in some cases management fees, but these fees are currently much lower. This is a result of the competitive landscape, as curators vie to offer the lowest fees to attract the most TVL.

But despite this, risk curator concentration is high, with dominance shared by three providers, which is better than liquid staking where Lido is far ahead.

Furthermore, what does this concentration mean? The Steakhouse team comments: "Concentration likely follows the power law found in traditional asset management analogs (e.g., ETFs), where the majority of AUM concentrates around leading managers.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather a reflection of the compounding of scale and trust towards top managers, who compete on performance, product range, and fee loads.