Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

USDC Lending Rates Converge Across Morpho and Aave

• Over the last month, USDC lending rates on Aave Ethereum have been converging with our Steakhouse Prime USDC vaults on Morpho across Base and Mainnet.

• This is because throughout Aug-Sep, Aave has been manually increasing borrow rates to boost lender yields. On V3, Aave has also raised the base USDe borrow rate from 0% to 5.25%, pushing borrowers out of USDe and into other stablecoins, with roughly 30% of the repaid USDe debt of $360m, reappearing as USDC borrowing.

• Moreover, the period of lower and more volatile yields on Aave V3 happened due to borrow rates being set lower in March, which kept borrowing cheaper to attract more borrowers but also meant lower rewards for lenders. Meanwhile, V4, as a fairly new market, had limited available liquidity in a much smaller, capped pool, so rates were more volatile. Small changes in deposits or borrowing moved utilisation sharply and created shortlived yield spikes up and down.

• On Morpho, thanks to higher usage, steady borrowing demand and enough supply to meet it, yields have been more stable overall and have continued to lead the four compared rates. Steakhouse Prime USDC Base has been and still is the highest yielding of the four rates compared, supported by strong continued cbBTC borrowing demand.

Cheap Borrowing on Arc Morpho

• Arc launched about a month ago, and its largest BTC-backed stablecoin markets are already among the cheapest comparable markets on Morpho. The borrow rates are lower because they are temporarily capped by the current interest rate curve. This should be adjusted automatically over the upcoming weeks, but until then the opportunity remains available to arbitrage.

• You can borrow USDC and EURC for 1.96% and 2.06%, respectively. There is already around $180m borrowed in USDC and just over $1m borrowed in EURC. Most of the USDC borrowing came in very quickly, crossing $150m within the first week.

• Arc is still a very new chain and continues to gain traction, so it is encouraging to see borrowing remain this cheap while liquidity and market usage continue to grow.

Negative USDG Borrow Rates and HY Vault Performance on Kamino

• USDG incentives are now live for borrowers in the PAXG market on Kamino, with $100k of USDG rewards being distributed over the next three months. The rewards currently push the net borrow rate negative, meaning borrowers are effectively being paid to borrow USDG.

• The PAXG market uses PAXG as collateral and USDG as the debt asset, and it is already seeing solid usage with $1.89m supplied and $1.67m borrowed. The current borrow APY is -4.3%.

• Additionally, our Steakhouse USDG High Yield vault continues to earn above 7%, with a 90-day average of 7.55%. The vault now has over $47m supplied and $43m borrowed, making it one of the largest Kamino vaults and the 4th biggest by deposits.

• The vault also has a new integration with Reflect, powering both its Protected and Amplified products, with $250k and $50k pre-deposit caps respectively.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Steakhouse in Singapore: TOKEN2049 Week Recap

• Steakhouse chefs touched down in Singapore for TOKEN2049 and a packed week of side events. Across panels, presentations, private forums, dinners and meetings, our team spent the week talking about stablecoins, vaults, institutional lending and the next stage of onchain finance.

• You could catch our APAC Lead Jiyeon Park joining a panel on Stablecoins as a new Settlement Layer, and co-founder Mark Phillips speaking on Institutional DeFi on Solana, onchain allocators and vaults.

• Our other Steakhouse co-founder, Sébastien Derivaux, also took the stage at DAS Asia and Vault Summit, covering institutional money markets and the risks around vault strategies. For readers who missed us in Singapore, here is a short recap of some of the ideas we brought to the stage.

• At DAS Asia, Sébastien explained that stablecoins are becoming a real settlement and savings layer, while credit markets around them need deeper liquidity, transparent risk management and useful places for that capital to go. Onchain USD lending has kept building across market cycles, with $12.7B of stablecoin loans outstanding today.

• From there, he focused on three areas that can take onchain money markets further, more stable and predictable rates, greater efficiency between lenders and borrowers, and collateral that reflects the assets institutions actually hold.

• On stability, DeFi lending rates have been moving closer to SOFR as liquidity deepens and more capital enters the market. The average absolute spread between Aave USDC supply rates and SOFR fell from 6.0% in 2021 to 0.7% in 2026, while volatility also came down over the period.

• There were plenty of other interesting points in Seb’s talk, and we’d encourage you to give the full presentation a watch. From here, we’ll keep building, and you can catch what we have cooking next in London this November. Thanks to everyone who spent time with us in Singapore and made the week such a good one!

Credit Spreads Across Base and Ethereum

• By examining the credit (High Yield - Prime) spread on Base vs Ethereum, we noticed that Base has been stabilising and flattening over the past month, while Ethereum has remained more volatile and slightly wider.

• On Base, the spread has compressed to around 40-50 bps, compared with 80-100 bps on Ethereum currently.

• When looking at the yields separately, we can see they are all relatively similar now compared with the much wider differences seen in the first half of the year.

• The Prime vault yields have been converging, largely driven by the rates in their underlying cbBTC markets, which we covered in our previous issue here. Moreover, Base HY‘s APY has been slightly plateauing over the past month as newly deployed stock markets were added to the vault and have been building up borrowing demand, while cbXRP market remains the main allocation with steady supply and borrowing.

• On the other hand, Ethereum HY has been yielding above 5% over the past month, making it the highest earning one of the four vaults. This has mainly been driven by strong and growing borrows in the PT-reUSD-10DEC2026 market, with mF-ONE also helping keep yields elevated. These collateral markets are currently only available on Ethereum, which helps explain why the Mainnet vault is able to earn a higher yield.

Launch of the new Steakhouse USDG Pro Vault on Arbitrum

• Steakhouse USDG Pro vault launched on Arbitrum, and it allocates to the USDG/syrupUSDG market. The rollout is supported by Arbitrum incentives, with rewards bringing the vault APY to almost 8% on Morpho.

• The elevated yield has already attracted new deposits, with over $5.7m flowing into the vault within its first week since deployment on 6 October.

• Moreover, there is even more capital flowing into the underlying USDG/syrupUSDG market the vault allocates to, which now has over $16m supplied and $14.4m borrowed, putting utilisation at around 89%.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

New Markets Drive Morpho Borrowing to $5.5bn

• Borrowing on Morpho has been steadily growing since June, rising from around $3.5bn to $5.5bn by the start of October, which is an increase of 58% in four months.

• A large part of this $2bn growth has been concentrated in just four markets, which together added around $1.2bn in borrowing, accounting for circa 60% of the total increase.

• Three of those four markets did not yet exist in June, so a big part of the growth is coming from completely new borrowing demand. The exception is cbBTC/USDC on Base, which was and still is Morpho’s single largest market.

Higher BTC Prices Bring More Borrowing

• BTC price has been increasing over the past month, so we looked at the effect this has had on borrowing in BTC-backed markets on Morpho.

• As mentioned above, borrowing on Morpho has already been growing over the past few months. When we compare daily borrowing activity with changes in BTC price, we can see a positive correlation. On days when BTC rises by more than 3%, around 1.8x as many users borrow compared with a flat BTC day.

• Interestingly, when we look at how much users are actually borrowing relative to their collateral, LTV shows an inverse relationship with BTC price. As BTC moved from below $65k to above $80k, average LTV fell from around 56% to 47%, meaning the value of the BTC collateral increased faster than the amount borrowed against it.

• Overall, the data suggests that higher BTC prices bring more borrowers into the market, while average LTV still falls as collateral values increase faster than debt. This can also create an opportunity for lenders, as stronger BTC periods may bring higher borrowing demand and utilisation into BTC-backed markets, which can push lender yields higher.

Steakhouse Launches First Sterling Credit Market on Kamino Solana

• Steakhouse brought the first sterling-denominated credit market to Kamino, letting users borrow GBP liquidity against crypto collateral without selling against dollar backed stablecoins and swapping to their preferred currency, or going through traditional FX rails.

• The market enables a cross-currency trade between sterling and dollars, with tGBP borrowable against USDC, cbBTC or JitoSOL, while tGBP depositors can borrow USDC against their sterling collateral. tGBP currently costs 3.5% to borrow, compared with just 1.01% for USDC, while tGBP suppliers earn 2.84% and JitoSOL 4.85%.

• Demand is still concentrated in tGBP, with around $62k borrowed against $68k supplied. Around $55k of USDC is supplied with almost nothing borrowed, which keeps USDC borrowing so cheap.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Prime USDC Rates on Base & Ethereum have started to Converge

• Throughout this year, Base has had a consistent organic premium over Ethereum mainnet of around 50–100 bps.

• However, the spread between the Steakhouse Prime USDC vaults on Base and Ethereum has been slowly but surely flattening, as the two rates have started converging over the past few weeks.

• These rates are closely connected to their underlying markets, which, in the case of the Prime vaults, are primarily the cbBTC/USDC markets on Base and Ethereum. Over the year, Base has consistently yielded more due to strong Coinbase app borrowing demand, but recently more supply has been coming in. Since mid-August, Spark has been adding liquidity through its Liquidity Layer, which allocates capital toward attractive yields. That extra supply has kept up with growing borrowing demand and slightly pushed lender yields down.

• On the other hand, Ethereum saw the opposite dynamic. From August through September, around $75-80m of liquidity was withdrawn from the underlying market by several large lenders, while borrowing still continued to grow by $30-40m. Less supply combined with stable borrowing pushed utilisation above the market’s target and increased the reward for lending.

• It is important to note that the Base cbBTC market is 12.5x larger than the Ethereum one, and therefore is more stable against individual supply and borrowing flows.

Ethena Rolls Out New Collateral Rewards on Morpho Markets

• Ethena has now launched a 5% collateral reward on Morpho for USDe collateral, including the USDe/USDC market on Base and USDe/USDG market on Robinhood Chain.

• Both markets are already among the largest markets on Morpho, currently with over $390m TVL on Base and $342m on Robinhood Chain, with substantial and steadily growing liquidity, supported by strong borrow demand.

• These incentives make looping USDe more attractive, since the 5% collateral reward helps cover the cost of borrowing. Borrow rates have consistently stayed at 4%, so loopers are currently left with a positive spread between what the collateral earns and what they pay to borrow.

• Notably, Maple also provides collateral rewards across several syrupUSD markets, helping create attractive looping spreads. For example, syrupUSDC currently earns around 5%, while the borrow rate is only at 0.4% in the syrupUSDC/AUSD market and 4.8% in the syrupUSDC/USDC market on Mainnet.

Zama Incentives Push Prime USDT Above 8% APY

• Zama has rolled out new incentives on their UI for the new confidential vaults, as previously mentioned in one of our DeFi Markets Update.

• The incentives are distributed among three Steakhouse vaults: Confidential Prime USDC, Prime USDT and tGBP.

• Currently, the Steakhouse Prime USDT rate is around 3% on Morpho, however through the Zama Earn page there is an incentive boost that pushes the yield above 8% for the exact same strategy, just lending through a different platform.

• The Prime USDT vault has exposure mainly to wstETH, WBTC and cbBTC, making it a blue chip vault and it has been earning around 6-8% incentivised APY consistently for the past three weeks.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Comparing EUR-Denominated Vault Yields Across Morpho

• Last week, we examined the APY of selected USD-denominated vaults and found Steakhouse Prime USDC on Base to be the highest yielding one. This week, we look at Steakhouse Euro-denominated Prime vault yields over the last 180 days.

• Generally speaking, EURCV on Mainnet has been the most stable of the three, with steadier supply from B2B integrations helping keep rates mostly in the 3–4% range, while EURC has been more volatile. Both EURC Base and Mainnet spent much of the first half of the period around or below 1.5%, while EURC on Base later reached the highest yield of the three at 6% on July 14th.

• During May, EURC yields fell for slightly different reasons on each chain. On Mainnet, borrowing in the WBTC/EURC market, the main EURC market on Mainnet, dropped by more than half and stayed at around €2.4m through the month. Later, on Base, €3m of new EURC was supplied into the cbBTC/EURC market while borrowing stayed relatively unchanged. In both cases, this caused lower utilisation, which led to lower yields for suppliers.

• This turned around from mid-June into July as available EURC liquidity tightened. On Base in particular, large withdrawals reduced supply faster than borrowing came down, pushing utilisation above Morpho’s 90% target and driving lending rates much higher. Same thing happened on Ethereum shortly afterwards with the spike on 25th of July.

• Right now, all three vaults have fairly similar yields for the first time in the past six months, with EURCV being the largest of the three, with over €120m of supply available at more predictable rates across major collateral markets.

Morpho becomes the First and Main Venue for Tokenized Stock lending on Base

• Morpho has launched new USDC lending markets on Base backed by Coinbase tokenized stocks, including AAPLc, GOOGLc, METAc, NVDAc and SPCXc.

• After reviewing the new markets, they have been added to our High Yield USDC vault, giving depositors exposure to these new lending markets and the higher rates available there.

• Steakhouse High Yield USDC V2 rate has been stable at 5% for the past month, after a few months of ranging between 4.5% and 6.9%. The vault now has around $30m in TVL, with about $6.3k allocated to the new markets so far.

• The tokenized stock markets in our HY vault are already picking up quite quickly since launching last week, with around $70k supplied and $63k borrowed across the five so far.

Steakhouse Goes Live on Arc with Prime USDC and EURC

• We deployed two new vaults Steakhouse Prime USDC and Steakhouse Prime EURC on Arc, a new chain by Circle. The two vaults currently allocate into cirBTC-backed USDC and EURC markets on Morpho.

• The cirBTC/USDC market has been growing quickly since Arc launched last week on September 16, and already passeed $18m in borrows with more than $100m supplied.

• Arc is a new Layer 1 built by Circle for financial activity such as stablecoin payments, lending, FX and tokenised assets, with USDC as the network’s native gas asset.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Comparing USD-Denominated Vault Yields Across Morpho

• Lately, more and more USD-denominated vaults are being deployed on Morpho, so we examine how Prime USDC, USDT, USDG and RLUSD vault organic rates have performed across chains.

• Each vault has settled around its own typical yield, ranging from roughly 2% for RLUSD to around 4% for USDC. Overall, the Steakhouse Prime USDC on Base was the best-performing vault for the past 6 months.

• Some vaults showed more rate movement at certain points due to liquidity shifts in the Morpho markets they allocate to. For example, Steakhouse Prime USDT spiked between May 30 and June 10 after a liquidity squeeze in two of its markets, wstETH/USDT and WBTC/USDT. More generally, supply moving in and out of the underlying markets while borrowing stays relatively steady also causes the smaller bumps seen across the vaults in the chart.

• Furthermore, some of the other moves in yields were linked to specific events, such as the Kelp DAO exploit in April or the launch of USDG on Robinhood Chain on the first of July. Overall though, yields have been stabilising over time, with USDC on both Base and Ethereum Mainnet being the highest earners.

Steakhouse Expands Confidential Access to Five Vaults with Zama

• Zama has expanded its Earn platform with confidential access to 16 Morpho vaults, using encrypted deposits, balances and withdrawals to keep individual positions private. Five of those vaults are curated by Steakhouse, bringing privacy to more of our existing Morpho strategies.

• This new rollout scales from what started with Steakhouse Confidential Prime USDC that we launched with Zama in June. It was the first DeFi yield product built for confidential USDC.

• The vault passed $40m in TVL within seven weeks, with its average APY of 7.2%.

• The new launch also brings fresh incentives, including $100k for our Steakhouse Prime USDT vault, increasing its APY to above 6%. The vault is the same one that exists on Morpho, with $58.5m TVL, however the incentivised APY is exclusive to the Zama UI only.

• The other three Steakhouse confidential vaults are High Yield USDC, High Yield USDT and tGBP. tGBP also received new incentives, lifting its APY from circa 0.05% to 3.6%.

Tether x Fasanara Launch $400m StableFund

• Fasanara has teamed up with Tether to launch StableFund, an evergreen private credit fund designed to connect stablecoin liquidity directly into real-economy credit yields. It started with $400m of co-investment and is targeting up to $3bn of additional institutional capital as it scales.

• StableFund invests in short-duration, asset-backed private credit across Fasanara’s lending network and USDT is built into the origination and settlement layer. Essentially, it brings USDT infrastructure into TradFi institutional lending by combining Fasanara’s underwriting with Tether’s stablecoin network to fund loans more efficiently.

• Moreover, Fasanara already has its own credit DeFi exposure with Midas-issued mF-ONE and mGLO. All together, they now hold $125m across Ethereum, Base and Robinhood Chain, with Steakhouse curating lending markets for both assets.

• Across these three markets, around $47m of USDC and $28m of USDG is borrowed against Fasanara credit strategies. With StableFund, Fasanara is now using USDT as part of how that credit gets funded and settled offchain too.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Credit Spreads Show Signs of a Maturing Market

• We examine rates across Steakhouse Prime USDC and High Yield on Base and Ethereum to understand what is actually driving the extra yield between them. Since May, rates have been much more stable, after a pretty volatile start to the year with exploits and shifting borrow demand.

• Looking at the credit spread, defined as the APY difference between HY and Prime, the two series were moving apart for the majority of the period. This suggests that the difference between them was more likely coming from unexpected changes in borrowing demand, liquidity or market composition, such as the onboarding of new collateral like cbXRP or events like the three exploits we experienced in spring: Resolv, Kelp and Drift.

• More recently, the two series have started converging and following a similar pattern. During July and halfway to August, they have been around 0.87 correlated, showing that the extra yield in HY over Prime has been priced increasingly similarly across both chains.

• The two moving in sync suggests that investors are pricing and accepting riskier strategies more consistently across chains, creating a more homogeneous risk segment and making the credit premium easier to isolate as a distinct risk factor.

• To conclude, this is encouraging because it points to a more mature market with less outside noise. As rates become easier to separate into repeatable factors like credit, or even chain, stablecoin and platform risk, DeFi becomes more comparable to TradFi, where this kind of factor decomposition is already standard.

Trezor Extends Steakhouse Earn From USDC & USDT to ETH

• Trezor has added Steakhouse Prime ETH to Trezor Suite, expanding the Earn setup that started with Prime USDC and USDT in May on Ethereum Mainnet [read more here]. Users can now access the ETH vault directly from the same wallet interface, adding a lending option alongside Trezor’s existing ETH staking product.

• Deposited ETH is automatically wrapped to WETH and routed into our Steakhouse Prime ETH, where it earns variable lending yield from borrowers while staking earns its return from Ethereum validator rewards. The vault currently has around $20m deposited.

• The earlier Trezor rollout has already brought around $33.5m combined into our USDC and USDT Prime vaults. The ETH launch extends the same setup to another major asset across Trezor’s 2m+ users.

Midas Fasanara mF-ONE Expands to Solana as solmF-ONE

• Midas has expanded Fasanara Capital’s F-ONE strategy to Solana with solmF-ONE, following the existing mF-ONE market on Ethereum. The asset is now live as collateral on Kamino.

• The original mF-ONE on Ethereum currently has around $65m in TVL, while the new Solana issuance launched only last week and has crossed $50k in TVL.

• Steakhouse onboarded the asset across our USDC High Yield and USDG High Yield vaults on Kamino. The vaults can now allocate liquidity to this new borrower segment as demand develops.

• The solmF-ONE Kamino market currently has around $1.61m of lending liquidity supplied, made up of roughly $1.29m USDG and $315k USDC. Moreover, the market offers a wide yield spread, with solmF-ONE earning 10% while USDC and USDG can be borrowed for 2.50%.

• F-ONE earns yield from Fasanara-managed private credit, mainly short-duration receivables financing, alongside market-neutral digital-asset strategies. Fasanara manages more than $5.5bn in assets.

• On Solana, solmF-ONE uses three liquidity layers which are instant liquidity, intermediate liquidity management and the core F-ONE allocation. This helps support faster redemptions around slower-settling private-credit assets.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Steakhouse USDG Vault Growth on Robinhood Chain

• The Steakhouse USDG vault on Robinhood Chain has grown to around $425m, making it the second-largest vault on Morpho. Steakhouse curates which Morpho lending markets the vault can allocate deposited USDG into.

• On August 26, mGLO was added as a new collateral market for the Steakhouse USDG vault on Robinhood Chain. The vault now allocates USDG across markets where borrowers post USDe, syrupUSDG, spUSDG or mGLO as collateral.

• We covered mGLO’s launch and growth on Base in previous DeFi Markets Updates, where Steakhouse USDC vaults supply USDC into the mGLO/USDC market and borrowers post mGLO as collateral. That market currently has $21.9m of USDC borrowed, compared with around $28m of USDG borrowed against mGLO on Robinhood Chain.

• Steakhouse USDG is also starting to be used as yield-bearing infrastructure in permissionless applications on Robinhood Chain. One emerging use of Uniswap v4’s DualPool hook parks idle USDG in the Steakhouse vault between trades, showing how the vault can be plugged into other DeFi products while liquidity is not actively being used for swaps.

• Additionally, MORPHO, the token, was listed for trading on Robinhood Crypto on August 27. This is separate from Robinhood Earn and the Steakhouse USDG vault, but gives Robinhood users direct access to the token alongside the protocol’s growing use within Robinhood Chain.

MetaMask Money Account Growth and Vault Market Exposure

• The MetaMask Money Account has now surpassed $20m in deposits and sits above $21.5m, with Steakhouse providing curation and risk frameworks for the underlying vault.

• Money Account is MetaMask’s self-custodial stablecoin account, letting users earn, trade and spend from the same balance. Supported stablecoins are converted into mUSD and move through Veda’s vault infrastructure on Monad.

• The vault deploys mUSD across Morpho lending markets and monitors liquidity and risk. At launch, the available markets were WETH/mUSD, wstETH/mUSD and WBTC/mUSD. Since then, six additional markets have been added.

• Around $9m of Money Account deposits currently flow through Steakhouse’s mUSD vault on Morpho, which has generated about 3.5% 7-day APY. The strategy runs through a dedicated Morpho vault built for MetaMask and is accessed directly through Money Account.

Vultisig Adds Direct Access to Steakhouse USDC on Kamino

• Vultisig, a self-custodial multi-chain crypto wallet, added direct access to selected Kamino Earn vaults from Steakhouse, RockawayX and Allez. Users can now deposit into these strategies directly inside the Vultisig app.

• The integration features the Steakhouse USDC, our USDC vault on Kamino. The vault has over $18m supplied.

• Steakhouse USDC is currently yielding 3.3% supply APY. The vault is 83% utilised, with $15.5m borrowed against the current supply.

• Vultisig has over 50K+ active vaults and support for 36+ chains, so the integration opens Steakhouse USDC to a broader set of users, and it also gives our vault another place to pick up deposits directly from wallet users.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Compound Selects Steakhouse for USDC Treasury Management

• Steakhouse has been selected by Compound’s Treasury Management Committee to curate the DAO’s primary USDC allocation sleeve. The capital will sit in a dedicated noncustodial Ethereum vault built specifically for Compound, alongside its separate RWA sleeve.

• The starting portfolio will be spread across Prime and High Yield lending, fixed-rate positions and a Turbo sleeve.

• The strategy is expected to earn between 4.2% to 5.9% net APY, while keeping 35% of the capital recallable the same day and roughly 80% within a week. This leaves room to actively move capital while keeping most of the treasury relatively liquid as rates, opportunities and risk change.

• The structure runs through our Steakhouse Box infrastructure, while Compound keeps custody through vault shares held in its Treasury Timelock.

• Compound also holds guardian rights, with material changes going through a public timelock where either guardian can cancel them, and the Box has been audited by ChainSecurity and Cantina. Over time, the setup can expand into new tokenised assets and potential Compound v4 markets.

Steakhouse Kamino Vault Growth on Solana

• We are expanding on Solana, with total TVL across our Kamino vaults growing from $31m on May 1 to over $62m today, roughly doubling over 3 and a half months.

• The largest driver has been Steakhouse USDG High Yield, which grew from around $4m in July to $40m, making it our largest vault on Kamino.

• Growth accelerated after Kamino and the Global Dollar Network launched a $300,000 three-month USDG incentive campaign on July 13, with more than $12m deposited into the vault in around one day and utilisation reaching 85%. The campaign adds USDG rewards on top of the underlying lending yield, as covered in our Markets Update when it launched.

• The Steakhouse USDG HY APY has remained relatively stable and high over the past month, ranging between 7.5% and 8.5%.

Term Finance Exploit and its Impact on Morpho

• On August 23, Term Finance lost around $8.5m after malicious governance proposals gained control over its Meta Vaults. The attacker drained roughly 1.68m USDC from five Term-managed USDC vaults and 2,842 WETH from Term’s ETH Meta Vault, which had part of its funds allocated through the Parity Core ETH vault on Morpho.

• Around $6.8m was withdrawn from the Parity Core ETH vault during the exploit. Since that capital was spread across Morpho lending markets, we examine whether the withdrawal had any noticeable effect on them.

• There was a small and short utilisation spike in the WETH/wstETH market after the withdrawal, but the market returned to normal within around eight minutes as liquidity came back in. Borrow APR also briefly jumped from 1.95% to 5.69% before returning close to its previous level.

  

• Overall, the day after the exploit, August 24, when the news spread more widely, Morpho had its largest daily net outflow in the past 10 days. Some of this may have been users reacting to the exploit, but the move was still within the recent range and net flows turned positive again today.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Steakhouse Onboards reUSD on Kamino

• Steakhouse has onboarded reUSD as collateral exposure for the USDC and USDG High Yield vaults through a new reUSD market on Kamino. The market went live on August 13 and allows reUSD holders to borrow USDC or USDG against their position.

• reUSD is Re’s senior reinsurance-backed token, currently with roughly $196m in deposits and 6.2% APY. Its returns are linked to Re’s insurance underwriting portfolio, reserves and premium receivables, giving depositors, lenders and borrowers onchain access to a specialised TradFi yield source.

• Initial supply was strong, with the 1m reUSD collateral cap filled within 76 minutes and subsequently increased to 5m reUSD. The market has now reached over $8.5m in size, with the current breakdown below.

• For Steakhouse, the integration adds another isolated, capped RWA-backed credit market to the High Yield vaults. The vaults do not hold reUSD directly, but supply USDC and USDG to borrowers using reUSD as collateral.

Private Credit Borrowing Grows on Morpho

• Just under four weeks ago, we onboarded mGLO as collateral on Morpho Base. Borrowing in the mGLO/USDC market has since grown from $10m to $33m, with utilisation now around 90%.

• mGLO is tokenised private credit managed by Fasanara and brought onchain by Midas. Its underlying portfolio is mainly short-duration trade receivables, giving holders exposure to private credit that can also be used as onchain collateral.

• The growth comes from holders depositing mGLO on Morpho and borrowing USDC against it while keeping their mGLO exposure. Nearly all of the USDC supplied to the market is currently allocated through Steakhouse-curated vaults, including $28.9m from High Yield USDC Edition and $7.6m from High Yield USDC.

• The market applies a 6% valuation haircut and a 91.5% LLTV, resulting in an effective LLTV of roughly 86%. The growth so far suggests there is demand for making private credit more useful onchain, beyond simply holding it for yield.

Vaultedge Routes Stablecoin Liquidity into Steakhouse USDC

• On August 3, Vaultedge connected sUSDVE to Steakhouse by deploying USDC from its Peg Stability Module (PSM) into Steakhouse-curated lending strategies on Base. This gives the existing vault another source of USDC coming through Vaultedge.

• USDVE is Vaultedge’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, while sUSDVE is the yield-bearing token users receive when they stake USDVE through the Vaultedge app. sUSDVE has no lockup and earns from yield generated across Vaultedge’s system.

• The PSM helps keep USDVE close to $1 by allowing swaps between USDVE and USDC. With the Steakhouse integration, part of that USDC can also be deployed into the existing Steakhouse USDC vault and earn lending yield on Morpho while remaining part of Vaultedge’s liquidity setup.

• Half of the yield generated on the deployed PSM liquidity goes to sUSDVE holders. Vaultedge continues to manage the stablecoin and user-facing liquidity, while Steakhouse manages how the USDC is allocated across lending markets and the risk behind those allocations.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Steakhouse Prime Onboards weETH After Protocol Hardening

• Steakhouse worked with ether.fi over several months to harden weETH before adding it to Steakhouse Prime. The process covered governance changes, 13 protocol upgrades across five areas, and additional protections around oracle failure, withdrawals and slashing risk.

• For weETH holders, the result is access to more capital-efficient stablecoin borrowing on Ethereum, with weETH/USDC and weETH/USDT now live at an 77% liquidation LTV (LLTV). Holders can keep their exposure to staked ETH while using weETH as collateral to borrow USDC or USDT.

• The Ethereum markets use Morpho’s overcollateralised lending model: borrowers deposit weETH and access stablecoins supplied by lenders. The new markets have an 86% maximum LLTV, meaning a position becomes eligible for liquidation when debt reaches that threshold relative to the value of its weETH collateral.

• The weETH/USDC and weETH/USDT markets can be accessed through Steakhouse Prime strategies on Morpho Ethereum. Prime vault depositors provide stablecoin liquidity to eligible markets, while interest paid by weETH borrowers contributes to lender yield.

Grove Expands Across Governance, Credit and Liquidity

• Grove Staking and Governance went live on August 4, giving GROVE holders direct control over protocol decisions through stGROVE. Holders can vote through Snapshot or delegate to one of three appointed delegates, with every staked token carrying voting power and a 2–4 week unstaking period helping keep governance stable during active votes.

• The governance launch comes as Grove is also moving more of its institutional infrastructure into live use, with Grove Basin completing its first production transaction on July 28. A JTRSY redemption that would normally take several days delivered USDC immediately through Centrifuge, confirming that Basin can bridge the settlement delay in practice.

• Basin extends Grove’s role from capital allocation into liquidity infrastructure for tokenized assets, with up to $1bn of committed daily liquidity available for supported transactions. This gives integrated platforms a way to provide immediate stablecoin liquidity while the underlying fund continues through its normal redemption and settlement process.

• That liquidity layer sits alongside Grove’s growing role in credit creation through its $500m warehouse facility with Galaxy, which received its first $47.5m of funding in July. Grove now finances Galaxy’s origination of institutional BTC- and ETH-backed loans, building on its $50m allocation to Galaxy’s tokenized CLO in 2025, which provided exposure to loans after origination.

• These developments show Grove expanding across the full lifecycle of institutional credit: governance controls protocol direction, Allocator deploys capital, the Galaxy facility funds new loan creation, and Basin provides liquidity around tokenized assets. This builds directly on Grove’s original goal of connecting onchain capital with institutional credit markets through a single infrastructure stack.

Examining the BIS Stablecoin Thesis Onchain

• The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) recently published its 2026 Annual Economic Report, including a chapter on stablecoins and their potential role in the financial system. We analyse the main findings and compare them with what we are seeing across onchain credit markets.

• Stablecoins have scaled quickly, reaching around $320bn in market capitalisation by the end of May 2026. The market is still heavily concentrated in USDT and USDC, while 99.4% of fiat-backed stablecoins are USD-pegged; estimated stablecoin transaction volume reached $28tn in 2025.

• At larger adoption levels, the authors model how this growth could feed into traditional markets depending on where issuers hold their reserves. Stablecoin demand can raise bank funding costs and tighten credit supply, while issuer purchases of Treasury bills can increase demand for short-term government debt and reduce short-term sovereign funding costs

• Morpho data shows that stablecoins are also being used at growing scale in onchain credit markets. Mainnet USDC borrowings grew from close to zero in early 2024 to more than $1.5bn at the 2025 peak, and have recovered toward $1bn in 2026; this represents predominantly crypto-native, overcollateralised credit.

• The supply side of these credit markets has expanded as well, with Steakhouse-curated Morpho stablecoin vault TVL rising above $2.4bn across Ethereum, Base and newer networks. That is equivalent to roughly 0.75% of the $320bn global stablecoin market capitalisation cited by BIS, while Morpho overall holds around $4.4bn, or about 1.4% of the global stablecoin market, giving some sense of the scale onchain lending has reached relative to the broader stablecoin ecosystem.

• Together, the BIS analysis and onchain data show stablecoins becoming part of financial intermediation at two levels. Issuers channel reserve assets into markets such as Treasury bills, while stablecoin holders supply and borrow the circulating tokens through onchain credit markets; growing Morpho borrow balances and Steakhouse TVL show increasing activity on both sides of that second layer.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Steakhouse Prime USDC V2 Becomes Morpho’s Largest Vault

• More and more users are migrating from Steakhouse Prime USDC V1 to its V2 counterpart. This week, we witnessed the largest shift to date, with over $200m moving from V1 to V2 in a single day. This brings Steakhouse Prime USDC V2 on Base to over $580m in deposits, making it the largest individual vault on Morpho.

• A large share of the vault is currently allocated to cbBTC/USDC, with smaller allocations to cbETH and wstETH markets. This has supported a stable 4–5% yield, with both the 30-day and 90-day APY at 4.38%.

• Overall, the migration to V2 is well underway, with more than 76% of deposits across all Steakhouse vaults on Morpho already held in V2. Since the V2 architecture is required for Morpho Midnight’s fixed-rate, fixed-term markets, Steakhouse is ready for the next phase.

Steakhouse in the Media: Vaults, Stablecoins and Onchain Markets

• Over the past two months, our folx have appeared in numerous podcasts, interviews and live discussions hosted by Bankless, Schwab Network, Alea, MetaMask, Ledger, Send It, Crypto Valley, and Tiger Research. Across these appearances, our Chefs have explained how stablecoins and public blockchains could reshape lending, asset management and financial distribution. For readers who have not caught every appearance, here is a short look at the main ideas we shared.

• In Bankless’s What’s Next for Vaults? and Ledger’s Inside DeFi Vaults, we unpack Steakhouse’s core product: the non-custodial, underwritten vault. Users delegate risk management without transferring custody, while Steakhouse selects acceptable collateral and markets, sets exposure and loan-to-value limits, and applies a consistent framework rather than simply chasing the highest APY. He also discusses depositor vetoes, principal protection, market efficiency, and how insurance and first-loss capital could create clearer ways to price and absorb credit losses.

• Additionally, in Alea’s Market Cap, we give a deep dive into Steakhouse’s history, from the founders’ early work analysing Maker as a transparent bank balance sheet to building actively managed vaults on Morpho. We explains how automated reallocations move liquidity between approved markets as conditions change, and why Steakhouse decided early to distribute these products beyond Morpho through wallets, exchanges and fintechs.

• To understand why institutions are moving assets and financial products onto public blockchains, we examines the institutional side of this shift on Schwab Network, while the MetaMask discussion brings it closer to the user. Integrations with MetaMask, Robinhood, Coinbase and many more allow platforms to manage the customer experience while Steakhouse handles underwriting, risk management and capital allocation in the background. Users can therefore access stablecoin yield through familiar products without managing the protocols, transactions or smart contracts underneath them.

• On the Send It Podcast, we discuss transparent onchain banks, stablecoins as banking in its purest form, the move away from artificial yields and the opportunity for trade finance. The Tiger Research feature captures our approach to risk directly: “Risk in onchain credit markets cannot be removed. It can only be managed, and the curator’s job is to manage it in the open.”

• Looking ahead, we see both Steakhouse and Grove helping connect public blockchains with larger financial markets. Steakhouse provides the underwriting and infrastructure behind onchain lending products, while Grove Basin brings up to $1 billion of same-block liquidity to tokenised money-market funds and could connect benchmark rates such as SOFR more directly with DeFi.

EURCV deposits cross €100m as borrowing rises 20x in six months

• The Steakhouse Prime EURCV vault on Ethereum crossed €100 million in deposits in July 2026, deposits have more than doubled in past six months.

• Part of this growth may come from the yield spread available across EURCV markets on Morpho. Users can supply EURCV through the vault at around 3.5%, while borrowing rates remain below 1.75% across most markets and below the current €STR benchmark of 2.19%.

• EURCV borrowing increased more than 20x over the same period, rising from approximately €1 million at the end of February to over €21 million in August. Despite this growth, the markets retain deep liquidity, leaving room for further borrowing.

• The vault’s current APY is capped at 3.49%, with incentives helping support the available yield and stimulate activity in EURCV lending markets.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Spread Cycles of Prime and High Yield V2 on Base

• Over the last three months, the High Yield USDC V2 vault on Base has maintained an average yield premium of 1.1% over Prime USDC V2 (7-day basis, ranging from 0.7% to 1.8%) while following a recurring 2 to 3 week cycle.

• The cycle reflects the different liquidity profiles of the underlying markets. Prime is concentrated in the deep cbBTC/USDC market with approximately $1.4B supplied across a broad lender base, where utilisation remained close to 90% and lending rates stayed within a relatively narrow 3.6% to 4.7% range throughout the quarter.

• On the other hand, High Yield allocates across smaller markets including cbXRP, SOL, cbADA, cbLTC and mGLO, where the vault is one of the largest liquidity providers. In these markets borrowing grows steadily (cbXRP borrow rose from $15M to $34M over the period, roughly $1M per week) while new lending liquidity typically arrives in larger, less frequent tranches of $1.5–3M.

• As borrowing gradually absorbs available liquidity, utilisation rises above Morpho’s 90% target and the Adaptive Curve interest rate model increases lending rates over time. Higher yields attract fresh deposits, utilisation returns toward target, lending rates normalise, and the cycle repeats as borrowing demand continues to build. Steakhouse actively manages allocations across these markets in response to the changing utilisation and lending rates, helping absorb market-specific imbalances and reduce dispersion in the vault’s overall yield.

• This pattern has repeated consistently throughout the quarter, making it a useful framework for understanding how the High Yield vault behaves as liquidity conditions evolve. Past cycles do not predict future outcomes, though we hope our readers will recognise familiar conditions as similar market dynamics might emerge again.

Steakhouse’s Perspective on Onchain Vaults

• The SEC published a statement on vaults and onchain lending strategies, and at Steakhouse we welcome the engagement it invites. We recently published our perspective on vaults, highlighting why transparent and verifiable structures are the right foundation for the space. Below is a short summary of the principles that guide our approach. If you want to read the full article, please see ‘The Steakhouse view on Vaults’.

• Steakhouse’s mission is to make finance open and transparent and to empower everyone with institutional-grade DeFi tools to raise, manage, and distribute capital. We believe onchain tools can improve both market efficiency and investor protection, and we expect the rules to mature as the technology does. Our principles focus on vaults as they become mainstream portfolio infrastructure.

• We believe there is a secular trend toward stablecoins as a default way of using money, with users expecting compatible financial products. Vaults can deliver meaningful improvements in market efficiency and investor protection by creating cost efficiencies, expanding opportunities, and providing transparency through public blockchains and strong cryptographic guarantees.

• Steakhouse’s approach is anchored by one principle: cryptographic guarantees outrank social guarantees. Our gold standard for vault design is built on trustless onchain NAV accounting, automated and transparent strategies, and strict noncustodiality, so users can verify protections onchain and understand their exposure with confidence.

• We welcome the Commissioner’s invitation and look forward to contributing as an industry voice while the framework develops. We publish our standards because users and partners deserve a clear basis for comparison, and platforms deserve a clear signal of where the bar is moving. Our perspective will remain documented in public, tested in production, and verifiable by anyone.

PAXG Joins Kamino’s Lending Markets

• The PAXG Market is now live on Kamino, curated by Steakhouse. You can now supply $PAXG, the tokenised gold asset issued by @Paxos, as collateral and borrow USDG.

• PAXG is a tokenised, fully allocated gold asset backed 1:1 by physical gold held in LBMA vaults. The market pairs PAXG as collateral with USDG as the borrow asset, with an 80% liquidation LTV, expanding capital-efficient borrowing against tokenised real-world assets.

• The launch brings one of the largest tokenised gold assets into Solana’s lending ecosystem, allowing users to retain gold exposure while accessing onchain dollar liquidity through USDG.

Steakhouse Financial’s mission is to make finance open and transparent. Our vision is to empower everyone with institutional-grade DeFi tools to raise, manage and distribute the capital they need to make a difference in the world. We believe onchain tools can improve both market efficiency and investor protection, and we expect the rules to mature as the technology does.

This week, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce published a statement on vaults and onchain lending strategies, recognizing the promise these structures hold and inviting the industry to shape their treatment.

We welcome the statement and the engagement it invites. It confirms what we have said for a while: vault design matters and transparent, verifiable structures are the right foundation for the space.

Transparency and code-enforced protections have been core to how Steakhouse builds from the start. What we curate is onchain, noncustodial, and independently verifiable, so that users can audit the constraints rather than take our word for them.

As the largest independent curator, we look forward to accepting the Commissioner’s invitation and taking the lead as an industry voice in shaping how this framework develops.

Below, we highlight an element of our internal risk management framework that illustrates some of these points. This and other materials are regularly updated and maintained on our documentation page https://steakhouse.financial/docs.

Why people use vaults

We believe there is a secular trend: as more users adopt stablecoins as a default way of using money, they will expect compatible products to exist. For these products to succeed, they must offer meaningful improvements on two fronts relative to existing financial products: market efficiency and investor protection.

Done well, vaults deliver both. They offer cost efficiencies and create opportunities that would not otherwise exist, and as a technology they enable substantially better risk mitigation and transparency than legacy structures. Public blockchains are the infrastructure that delivers this, enforced by strong cryptographic guarantees.

How Steakhouse approaches vaults

There are many ways to build vaults, and people who develop them tend to have strong opinions. We accept the divergence, but one principle anchors our approach: cryptographic guarantees outrank social guarantees.

Wherever a protection can be enforced by code rather than by policy, it should be.

Our gold standard for vault design rests on three properties, and it is the bar we apply when choosing where to build, what to recommend to partners, and where to push every platform we work with:

Trustless onchain net asset value (NAV) accounting: A vault’s NAV determines how many underlying assets each share can claim, which makes it the one number every depositor has to trust. We lean toward platforms with an independently struck onchain NAV, such as Morpho vaults, so that trust in the operator never enters the equation.

Automated, transparent strategy: A depositor should know exactly what they are exposed to before they deposit, and changing that expectation should be hard by construction: visible in advance, delayed by design, never silent. Strong guardrails align incentives between a vault operator and its users.

Strict noncustodiality: The user remains in control. Depositors decide when and where to dispose of their assets and positions, and no operator action should be able to trap them. Where the infrastructure allows, we go further and support mechanisms that let depositors check operator actions directly. We advocate for these protections to become standard across every platform.

Not every venue in the market meets this bar today, and the differences between vault designs are real. That is precisely why we publish the standard: users and partners deserve a clear basis for comparison, and platforms deserve a clear signal of where the bar is moving.

This is the perspective we will keep contributing as the framework takes shape: documented in public, tested in production, and verifiable by anyone.

Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Steakhouse Crosses $2bn as Morpho’s Largest Curator

• Steakhouse became the first and only Morpho curator to surpass $2bn in curated deposits, extending its lead as the largest curator on the protocol. The milestone reflects growth across both newly launched products and established Prime vaults.

• Over the past month, the newly launched Steakhouse High Yield USDC Edition attracted more than $220m in deposits following its launch on the Coinbase App, the Steakhouse USDG Morpho Vault powering Robinhood Earn grew to over $140m within 21 days from launch, and Steakhouse Confidential USDC Prime, the first lending vault supporting Zama’s confidential USDC (cUSDC), grew by over $20m in just 3 weeks.

• Steakhouse’s flagship vaults also continued to attract deposits. Steakhouse Prime USDC V2 on Base grew by approximately $100m over the past month, while Steakhouse EURCV Prime on Mainnet added more than $20m, demonstrating continued demand for our low-risk established lending strategies.

• In our most recent DeFi Markets Update, we highlighted Steakhouse’s continued growth as Morpho’s largest curator over the first half of 2026. We’re excited to see what the second half of the year brings as we continue building new products and expanding our lending ecosystem.

mGLO Launches on Morpho Base

• mGLO is now live as collateral in the mGLO/USDC Morpho market on Base, following Steakhouse’s collateral assessment of the market.

• mGLO is a USD-denominated tokenised note issued by Midas that provides economic exposure to Fasanara Capital‘s Global Diversified Alternative Debt strategy. The underlying portfolio consists primarily of short-term trade receivables, bringing institutional specialised private credit into onchain lending infrastructure.

• Holders of mGLO can deposit the token as collateral and borrow USDC while maintaining exposure to the underlying strategy. The market currently has $12m+ supplied with a 4.5% USDC borrow rate, creating new capital efficiency for private credit and expanding the use of tokenised private credit as onchain collateral.

• Steakhouse’s review covered the underlying investment strategy, liquidity framework, oracle design and market parameters. The market uses a 6% discounted oracle as a liquidator-facing buffer, with market parameters calibrated to the quality of the underlying strategy and the available liquidity routes.

AUSD Opportunities on the Steakhouse App

• The AUSD Turbo vault on Mainnet, available through the Steakhouse App, is currently earning around 10% organic APY through leveraged lending strategies powered by the Steakhouse Box infrastructure.

• Additionally, the AUSD High Yield Term vault on Mainnet currently offers over 11% incentivised 7-day average APY and manages more than $4.15m in AUSD deposits.

• The vault combines a 5–6% organic yield with an additional 5% in AUSD incentives. Like the Turbo vault, it uses Box adapters to allocate capital to fixed-maturity positions designed to be held until maturity, offering enhanced yield opportunities for depositors in Agora’s dollar stablecoin.

This memo reviews mGLO on Base as collateral in the mGLO/USDC Morpho market. Ethereum mGLOBAL references the same Fasanara strategy, but its transfer rules, lending venue and liquidity arrangements differ. mGLO and mGLOBAL are issued through legally separate compartments of the Aureum Securitisation Fund. Unless stated otherwise, the market analysis below applies only to Base mGLO.

The figures in this post reflect information reviewed through 15 July 2026. Portfolio and facility figures attributed to Midas or Fasanara are their representations and can change.

0. Preface

The motivation for enabling mGLO is practical. Holders seek credit against a short-duration collateral position, so the market must be calibrated to the quality of the underlying strategy and the path from collateral seizure to cash repayment. As utilisation changes, borrowing costs and liquidation incentives can change as well. The market therefore needs to be sized and monitored around the way collateral can convert back into cash, not around an assumption of frictionless exit.

Steakhouse’s review of the Base mGLO/USDC borrow/lend venue focuses on that full path. Its underlying receivables are granular, appear to benefit from several forms of credit enhancement, currently unlevered and approximately 90 days in duration, allowing performing assets to convert to cash as they mature.

For the shorter liquidation clock, Midas Staked Liquidity and pre-arranged institutional buyers provide finite same-day or T+1 exit capacity, with standard fund redemption as the final route. Morpho values mGLO at 94% of the last published NAV and applies a 91.5% LLTV, limiting debt to 86.01% of undiscounted NAV and leaving a marked-value margin above the stated cost of the faster exits. Monthly mint windows at 93% initial issuance also limit the amount of freshly issued collateral that can enter the market against an aging mark.

These controls do not remove the frictions of private credit. They do, however, distinguish portfolio recovery from immediate liquidation and support a market size tied to functional liquidity.

1. Executive summary

mGLO is a tokenised, USD-denominated note on Base that gives holders economic exposure to the same Fasanara reference portfolio as Ethereum mGLOBAL. The pool is built primarily from invoices sold by small and medium-sized businesses that want payment before the invoice due date. The party that owes the invoice is usually a larger corporate account debtor.

The SME supplier receives early working capital, but the primary payment obligation sits with the account debtor. Fasanara earns a spread associated with SME financing while underwriting a short-duration debtor book materially stronger than the suppliers selling the invoices. Seller fraud, invoice disputes, dilution, servicing failures and originator risk remain part of the exposure.

The portfolio is part of Fasanara Capital’s Global Diversified Alternative Debt Fund strategy. The mGLOBAL vehicle accesses that strategy through an open-ended Luxembourg SICAV-RAIF. Fasanara is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and the strategy dates to 2014. The latest public ARC report1, dated March 2026, assigned the broader GDADF strategy an a(f) fund rating with a stable outlook. Its scope is the fund. It gives no credit rating for the receivables, the 2026 mGLOBAL or mGLO vehicle.

The token represents a limited-recourse note issued through the mGLO compartment of the Aureum Securitisation Fund and administered onchain by Midas. The compartment holds shares of the Fasanara GDADF Fund, which in turn invests through the receivables strategy. Primary minting and direct redemption require KYC and AML eligibility. Base mGLO is freely transferable while transfers remain active and the receiving address is not blocked.

The official fund NAV is calculated monthly and published onchain through role-gated feeds. It is an administrator valuation rather than a standing cash bid. Primary issuance is confined to a defined window after a NAV publication, and the minting process initially delivers 93% of the expected tokens, with the balance settled after the next official NAV. These controls reduce new issuance against an aging mark. An existing mGLO holder can still borrow against circulating tokens between NAV dates.

The Base Morpho market adds a discounted oracle and liquidation threshold on top of the underlying NAV process. Its oracle values mGLO at 94% of the last published NAV before applying Morpho’s 91.5% liquidation loan-to-value threshold. The result is an effective debt threshold of 86.01% of the last published, undiscounted NAV. Faster exits are intended to come from Midas Staked Liquidity, pre-arranged institutional buyers and RFQ venues. Standard redemption through the fund cycle remains the final route.

We assign mGLO an internal Steakhouse collateral rating of BB, or medium risk, at the 86.01% effective threshold. Short tenor, portfolio granularity, administrator-calculated NAV under a documented valuation methodology, reported credit-enhancement features, compartment segregation, a layered liquidity framework, and the market haircut support the assessment. Private-credit information gaps, monthly valuation, finite fast liquidity, centralised administration and limited recourse keep the final rating at BB.

2. Underlying exposure and core of the product

2.1 Short-term invoice financing

An SME delivers goods or services to a corporate customer and receives an invoice payable in roughly 30 to 90 days. Rather than wait, the SME sells the receivable at a discount. The financier advances cash to the SME and collects from the account debtor when the invoice falls due.

The credit analysis starts with the party that owes the invoice. Fasanara reported the following internal distribution for the current debtor book:

• AA (40% of exposure)

• A (41% of exposure)

• BBB (10% of exposure)

• BB (7% of exposure)

• B (2% of exposure)

These are Fasanara’s internal grades and cannot be mapped directly to an external bond scale. The distribution does, however, show why describing the strategy only as “SME credit” is incomplete: 81% of the payment obligations fall within Fasanara’s internal AA and A bands.

Loss can also arise outside the account debtor. A valid invoice can be diluted by returns or offsets. A disputed or fraudulent invoice may miss its payment date. Cash can be commingled, an originator can fail, a servicer can perform poorly and an insurer can contest a claim. Those risks explain why a high internal debtor grade does not translate into a high collateral rating by itself.

2.2 Portfolio characteristics

• Average contractual duration is approximately 90 days. Performing assets settle into cash as invoices mature.

• The portfolio contains more than 700,000 receivables across roughly 140 originators and more than 60 countries. The average position at the time of review is approximately 0.01 basis points of NAV.

• The fund is unlevered at the time of review. The governing documents permit borrowing, so this is a current position rather than a permanent limit.

• Fasanara reported strategy assets under management of approximately US$6 billion and a target net yield of approximately 7%

• The target is not guaranteed and can change with portfolio performance, fees, market conditions and fund terms.

Position count reduces the effect of a single small invoice. It does not establish the largest obligor, originator, country, sector or servicer exposure. Those concentrations remain part of ongoing monitoring.

2.3 Credit enhancement and stress behaviour

Fasanara reports that approximately 80% of exposure benefits from at least one form of first-loss capital, overcollateralisation, credit insurance, or a government or corporate guarantee. Advance rates are commonly reported in the 85% to 90% range.

The 80% figure is not an 80% loss buffer. A retained junior tranche, an insurance policy and a corporate guarantee cover different events and attach at different points. Their value depends on the size of the protection, exclusions, counterparty strength and enforceability. They are still meaningful because the fund often holds senior exposure with another party absorbing an initial layer of loss.

The broader strategy’s historical defaults were reported below 1% in most years. In our earlier review of the higher-yielding mF-ONE vehicle2, we found a 2.19% peak in 2020 and annual recovery above 58%. According to manager data reviewed for this assessment, the historical strategy reported a positive net return that year - this historical result does not indicate future performance.

Short duration changes the response to stress. The manager can stop buying new receivables, tighten advance rates and let performing invoices convert to cash without selling a long-duration loan book. Workouts remain slower. Fraud, dispute and insolvency cases can take much longer than the contractual 60 to 90 days.

Short tenor also leaves correlation risk. Corporate payment stress and onchain stablecoin scarcity can occur at the same time. Portfolio runoff helps the fund raise cash over weeks, while caps and separately funded buyers are needed to cover liquidation on a shorter clock.

We view this issuance as a positive iteration on onchain private credit. Many of the 2022-2023 onchain experiments were with unsecured offchain credit of a materially different credit quality. In this instance, Fasanara reports a US$6 billion strategy, more than 700,000 positions, no current fund borrowing and several forms of credit enhancement.

While these mitigants do not speed up a court process or a disputed receivable workout, the reported scale, granularity, current absence of fund borrowing and credit-enhancement features make this materially different from many earlier unsecured offchain-credit pools and may reduce concentration and refinancing risk.

The underlying history is more informative than the short and smooth token price record. We therefore assess the credit through the strategy’s loss, recovery and portfolio data rather than calibrating the collateral only from observed mGLO NAV volatility.

3. Legal and structural wrapper

The legal chain reviewed by Steakhouse is:

mGLO note holder → Aureum mGLO compartment → Fasanara mGLOBAL Fund shares → GDADF receivables strategy

The holder owns a tokenised note, i.e. a security within the meaning of Art. 4 Para. 1 No. 44 and Annex I Section C MiFID II, without title to individual invoices or a direct claim on an account debtor.

3.1 Note issuer

The issuer is Aureum Securitisation Fund, a Luxembourg fonds de titrisation non réglementée established under the Luxembourg Law of 22 March 2004 on securitisation and managed by Aureum Manco S.à r.l. as a management company, acting through its dedicated mGLO compartment.

The mGLO compartment constitutes a segregated pool of assets and liabilities within Aureum. All rights and claims arising in connection with the Notes are limited to the assets allocated to the mGLO compartment, and noteholders have no recourse to assets allocated to any other compartment of Aureum or to Aureum’s general assets. Noteholders are subject to non-petition provisions and may not attach, seize or otherwise enforce against assets outside the mGLO compartment, nor initiate or support any winding-up, liquidation, bankruptcy or similar insolvency proceedings in respect of Aureum or the mGLO compartment.

The management company is held through the Midas Purpose Trust, an orphan structure with no economic interest in the underlying assets. The combination of statutory compartment segregation, contractual non-petition protections and the orphan ownership of the management company supports bankruptcy-remoteness and cross-compartment protection.z

3.2 Underlying fund

The compartment holds shares in Fasanara mGLOBAL Fund, Sub-Fund 36 of a Luxembourg SICAV-RAIF. Ascender Fund Partners is the authorised alternative investment fund manager, Fasanara Capital Limited is the investment manager, and Banque de Patrimoines Privés S.A. is the depositary.

The regulated service-provider chain sits at the fund layer. An mGLO holder reaches it through the Aureum note. Collateral outcomes therefore depend on the note terms, compartment assets, fund administration and the underlying receivables portfolio working together.

4. Onchain workflows

4.1 Subscription and minting

1. An eligible participant completes Midas KYC and AML onboarding and may submit a subscription request

2. The monthly minting window opens after publication of the relevant NAV. Minting is disabled for approximately 90% of the month.

3. The eligible participant subscribes for notes by payingUSDC. The reviewed workflow initially issues 93% of the expected mGLO at the last official NAV.

4. After the next official NAV is available, the remaining amount is calculated and minted, the average settlement (instant part and holdback) is done at the next official NAV.A lower NAV results in fewer additional tokens, effectively aligning the total subscription value with the next official NAV price.

The window and holdback reduce the amount of new collateral that can be created against an old valuation. The NAV remains monthly, and a holder of existing mGLO can still borrow during the closed minting period.

4.2 Midas instant-redemption route

1. An eligible holder requests instant redemption through the Midas redemption route and sets a minimum amount of stablecoin to receive.

2. The vault checks eligibility, pricing, limits, payment-token conditions and available liquidity.

3. Under the reviewed mGLO workflow, 93% of the value is paid immediately, net of the instant-redemption fee, and the redeemed tokens are burned.

4. The 7% holdback is settled after the underlying fund clears at the next official NAV.

   • If the next official NAV goes up, the holdback settlement is at the request-time NAV.

   • If the next official NAV goes down, the average settlement (instant part and holdback) is done at the next official NAV. This approach minimizes the risk of front run.

Midas Staked Liquidity3 advances USDC to the product compartment and waits for the underlying fund redemption to settle. It is a finite bridge facility rather than a standing secondary-market bid.

4.3 Standard redemption

1. The holder submits a redemption request before the monthly cut-off.

2. The compartment redeems the relevant underlying fund shares.

3. Subject to fund terms, dealing limits, deferral or suspension rights and operational processing, payment is expected to be made at the applicable official NAV, ordinarily around 35 days after the valuation date.

Standard redemption is a delayed contractual exit at administrator NAV. The holder retains a limited-recourse note claim while settlement is pending and bears NAV, timing and operational risk. Fund dealing limits, deferral and suspension rights can extend the wait. Under the reviewed documents, redemptions on a dealing day may be limited to 12.5% of NAV, once aggregate subscription into Sub-Fund 36 equals or exceeds USD 200,000,000..

4.4 NAV publication

The administrator determines the official month-end NAV. Midas (Aureum) reviews the data, deducts applicable fees and publishes the value through its onchain oracle process. Midas’s oracle documentation 4describes role-gated updates, deviation checks, timestamps, heartbeat controls and hard price boundaries. The preferred update path reviewed by Steakhouse limits routine changes to 1% per update and enforces a one-hour cooldown.

A separate higher-quorum path can publish a larger change. Midas (Aureum) can also pause deposits and redemptions if a reliable NAV cannot be established. Those controls are designed to reduce the risk of an erroneous update.

5. Liquidity and redemption

Base mGLO currently does not have a secondary exchange market on DEX venues. Its liquidation design is intended for several routes with different sources of capital and different failure modes.

Liquidity routes:

• Midas Staked Liquidity: instant settlement at a 0.5% fee; Midas announced5 a platform commitment of up to US$40 million across supported products.

• Institutional buyers: T+0 or T+1 sale at a 3% fee, with ~US$130 million of aggregate purchase capacity.

• Standard redemption: contractual fund route, monthly at NAV, no standard-redemption fee.

Additional RFQ venues may be available both onchain or offchain for clearing secondary markets between authorized buyers and sellers.

Ethereum mGLOBAL has a separate internal sleeve invested in Aave v3 USDC. The collateral venue for that token is Aave Horizon, a separate Aave market. The sleeve is an asset of the mGLOBAL compartment rather than a credit facility, but it remains finite and exposed to Aave v3 withdrawal conditions. mGLO is issued by a separate KO compartment without liquidity sleeve and legally independent from mGLOBAL. The Base mGLO analysis excludes it.

Base mGLO can be transferred to a non-blocked address while transfers are active. Receipt of seized collateral does not require Midas (Aureum) onboarding. Direct Midas (Aureum) redemption and the institutional purchase routes do. Liquidators that expect to use those routes should complete onboarding before a stress event.

6. Discounted Morpho oracle

The mGLO/USDC6 market reads a discounted value instead of the raw Midas NAV. Its market oracle7 consumes a dedicated wrapper feed8 that returns 94% of the upstream Midas NAV.

Market parameters:

• Collateral: mGLO

• Loan asset: USDC

• Morpho LLTV: 91.5%

• Fixed discount to Midas NAV: 6.0%

• Oracle value as a share of NAV: 94.0%

• Effective debt threshold against undiscounted NAV: 86.01%

At a US$1.00 published NAV:

Discounted oracle value = 1.00 x 94% = 0.94

Effective debt threshold = 0.94 x 91.5% = 0.8601

Morpho’s liquidation incentive factor at a 91.5% LLTV is approximately 1.0262. A liquidator repaying US$1.00 of debt receives collateral worth approximately US$1.0262 at the discounted oracle. If the last published NAV remains fully recoverable, that collateral has an undiscounted marked value of approximately US$1.0917.

The resulting 9.17% is a gross marked-value uplift over debt repaid. That margin is sized against the exit routes above: instant redemption through Midas Staked Liquidity costs 0.5% (93%*(1-0.5%) settled immediately, 7% trued up at the next NAV), the OTC / liquidator network is described as settling at a 3% discount to NAV against pre-arranged institutional purchase capacity, and the standard monthly route redeems at par. Under the assumptions above, the 6% pricing buffer is intended to provide room for the stated exit costs. Of course, actual liquidation outcomes can vary with NAV movement, liquidity availability, execution timing, eligibility, operational constraints and other market conditions.

7. Collateral rating assessment

• Instrument: mGLO on Base

• Legal issuer: Aureum Securitisation Fund, acting through its mGLO compartment

• Token administrator: Midas

• Underlying investment manager: Fasanara Capital Limited

• Token address on Base: 0xFCc9Cc1209651Ed8867332d6F664CF82743A2584

• Token type: ERC-20 mToken

• Morpho LLTV: 91.5%

• Oracle factor: 94% of the last published Midas NAV

• Effective debt threshold: 86.01% of the last published, undiscounted NAV

• Steakhouse collateral rating: BB

We assign BB to mGLO as collateral, reflecting reasonable risks across the asset issuer, the underlying credit exposure, and the smart contracts governing the token. The senior, well-enhanced nature of the short-term trade-receivables exposure is offset by the information asymmetry and originator dependence inherent to private credit, and by an issuer that operates within Luxembourg’s securitisation framework outside the scope of AIFMD. mGLO’s valuation is driven by the underlying fund NAV published on-chain through bounded, role-gated price feeds, with redemption routes that include a Midas (Aureum) instant-redemption route (subject to eligibility, fees, limits and available liquidity conditions), and a standard monthly fund route at the applicable NAV.

Rating summary

• Asset rating: BB (minimum of counterparty, credit and operations)

  • Counterparty risk: BB

  • Credit risk: BB

  • Operations risk: BB

• Platform rating: not separately assigned

• Market rating: BB (minimum of oracle, liquidity and market haircut)

  • Oracle: AA

  • Liquidity: BB

  • Market haircut: AA

• Final rating: BB (minimum of applicable asset and market ratings)

7.1 Asset rating: BB

Counterparty risk: BB

Key Drivers

• Aureum is a securitisation vehicle and by law restricted to securitisation activity. The issuer operates within a defined legal framework rather than as a licensed asset manager. The token is issued through the Aureum Securitisation Fund, a Luxembourg securitisation fund subject to the Securitisation Act 2004, with an ordinary Luxembourg S.à r.l. as its management company.
  The regulated asset-management and fund-administration functions reside with Fasanara Capital Limited (FCA-authorized investment manager) and Ascender Fund Partners (AIFMD-regulated administrator).
  In rating terms considering solely the issuer of the notes this corresponds to a recognised legal framework operated by a non-asset-manager management company. This rating does not reflect the credit quality of the issuer but the regulatory context.

• Administration is centrally controlled by Midas through role-based access control and multisig signers; the system is not decentralised.

Governance Controls (Mitigants)

• Bankruptcy-remote structure: the management company is held by the orphan Midas Purpose Trust, with statutory compartment segregation, limited recourse and non-petition under the Securitisation Act 2004.

• Role-based access control across the token and vault contracts, with privileged actions gated to Midas (Aureum) -controlled roles and multisig signers.

• Greenlisting (KYC/AML) required for primary mint and redeem.

Implication

Collateral outcomes rely on the issuer’s administration within Luxembourg’s securitisation framework, supported by statutory segregation and bankruptcy remoteness, rather than on decentralised on-chain enforcement.

Credit risk: BB

Key Drivers

• Exposure is to a diversified pool of short-term trade receivables under Fasanara’s GDADF strategy - invoices payable by large corporate debtors, originated from SMEs. The exposure is senior in nature (senior unsecured commercial credit), with approximately 80% of credit exposure enhanced by credit insurance, first-loss protection or guarantees, and conservative advance rates of 85–90%.

• The strategy carries an ARC Ratings a(f) fund rating (stable outlook); historical defaults are reported below 1% with recoveries typically above 60%.

• The seniority and enhancement of the exposure could support a higher band; the rating is held at BB because this remains private credit, subject to information asymmetry and originator risk.

Key Concentration / Structural Considerations

• Granular and diversified: approximately 700,000 receivables across ~140 originators in 60+ countries; no leverage at fund level.

Implication

Senior, well-enhanced, short-dated credit exposure, with the rating constrained by the information asymmetry and originator dependence characteristic of private credit.

Operations risk: BB

Key Drivers

• Audited code and a live bug bounty.

• Multi-year operating profile of the Midas token framework, with total value locked in the hundreds of millions

• Economic transparency: the underlying fund NAV is regularly published on-chain through dedicated price feeds, while off-chain value notarizations (via vLayer), overcollateralization attestations (via Chainlink CRE), and independent verification results (via Canary Protocol) are all pushed on-chain into the Midas Attestation Engine.

Implication

A mature operational profile with on-chain NAV publication; the pillar is held at BB on a worst-of basis by audit coverage.

7.2 Platform rating: None

7.3 Market rating: BB

Oracle: AA

Key Drivers

• The market uses the intrinsic NAV of the underlying fund, published on-chain through dedicated growth-based feeds (separate deposit-side and redemption-side feeds), reflecting net asset value rather than a market-traded price.

• NAV updates are role-gated and bounded: each update must fall within hard minimum and maximum limits, and the safe-update path enforces a maximum per-update deviation and a minimum interval between updates.

• The Morpho market prices collateral through a dedicated wrapper feed that applies a fixed 6% discount to the published NAV, a conservative, liquidator-facing buffer

Implication

A NAV-based, bounded oracle reduces exposure to market-price manipulation.

Liquidity: BB

Key Drivers

• Primary redemption is available through a standard monthly cycle at the applicable NAV. The reviewed materials also describe layered liquidity routes, including Midas Staked Liquidity and an OTC / liquidator network, that may support faster exits subject to eligibility, fees, limits, available liquidity and operational constraints.

Implication

Liquidity is structured, with both instant and monthly routes; primary redemption operates on a short-notice / monthly basis.

Credit Enhancement: AA

Key Drivers

• The credit-enhancement pillar is derived from the moderate price-fluctuation profile of the collateral against the loan asset, adjusted by the effective loan-to-value. At an effective LLTV of 86% (official Moprho Market LLTV of 91.5% adjusted by the 6% discounted oracle), the adjustment lifts the base assessment by three notches to AA.

• The 86% effective LLTV provides a moderate haircut and liquidation incentive consistent with the NAV-based pricing and the short-duration receivables underlying the strategy.

Implication

The 86% effective LLTV provides a valuation buffer against the published NAV, subject to NAV movement, liquidity availability and execution risks.

Final rating: BB

8. Operational security considerations

Steakhouse reviewed Midas’s operational setup on 14 July 2026. The review covered custody policy, privileged roles, the NAV process, mint controls, upgrade governance and planned remediation. This section describes the control design without publishing the full signer and policy map.

8.1 Deployed controls

Operational roles sit behind multi-party MPC custody policies. The reviewed default for the relevant Fordefi vaults was a 4-of-7 approval policy.

The mGLO Management Vault9 holds mint, burn and pause operator roles. Burn is policy-pinned to a designated wallet. Pause uses an expedited containment path, while unpause requires stronger approval.

The Vaults Manager10 controls fees, daily limits, accepted payment tokens, receivers and request approvals. The user deposit path is greenlist-gated, checks the payment-token price and carries a US$30 million instant daily limit in the reviewed configuration.

The Oracle Admin11 publishes NAV updates. The preferred path enforces a 1% maximum change and a one-hour cooldown. Routine updates require two core signers plus an independent transaction-screening co-signer under the reviewed policy. Larger changes use a separate higher-quorum path.

Contract upgrades pass through a 48-hour timelock12 before reaching the ProxyAdmin. The timelock is controlled by an admin Safe whose members are themselves multi-party custody systems.

These controls reduce single-key and accidental-update risk. Some approval thresholds live in custody-platform policy rather than in the token contracts, so onchain observers cannot verify every policy condition from contract state alone.

8.2 Minting and oracle residuals

User minting runs through a greenlist-gated deposit vault with contract-level bounds, a payment-token allowance and a USDC peg check. OTC minting runs through the Management Vault behind the 4-of-7 custody policy. The OTC path lacked a contract-level rate limit at the time of review.

The preferred oracle update function has tight deviation and timing controls. A separate administrative function permits a much wider value range and relies on the higher-quorum policy. That path is necessary for a genuine large down-mark, but it also leaves more discretion with the operator.

Midas described planned changes targeted for the third quarter of 2026, including contract-level rate limits across mint paths, a governance delay and alerts for OTC minting, stronger controls on the wider oracle-update path, automated monitoring and broader timelock coverage for runtime roles. These planned changes are not current controls and remain subject to implementation.

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Steakhouse Financial Ltd’s origins as a company are rooted in the culture of the crypto industry. As co-founders, we met online as contributors to an open-source decentralized stablecoin project called MakerDAO (later renamed Sky, with a stablecoin, Dai, now known as USDS). Since then, we have helped other open-source projects and, increasingly, companies work out the structural economics of building successful open financial infrastructure. In particular, our work focuses on stablecoins, a burgeoning field of finance that looks a lot like many of the early historical attempts at banking.

Why is a company helping to build transparent finance with cryptocurrency interested in bringing back a book about the history of Scottish banking?

Firstly, because we are financial history nerds. We love reading about the men who figured out ways of doing things differently rather than following the script handed down to them by experts or elders. Scottish banking has been a central text in our obsession with well-researched records of how the modern financial system came to be. We like to think that SG Checkland would have been in his element following the development of the stablecoin industry and might have written a book about it too, in time.

Secondly, the similarities between the stablecoin industry and the early history of Scottish banking are remarkable. In Scotland, the emergence of privately issued liabilities provided a much-needed boost to a struggling rural economy, allowing enterprising Scotsmen to push into fields of trade such as tobacco or textiles. In stablecoins, the emergence of a reference asset that can be relied on to exchange value between two crypto addresses has allowed for a Cambrian explosion of experiments, ranging from remittance payments for the developing world and complex financial primitives all the way to scams and cons—not unlike the early Scottish banking sector, which spawned scoundrels such as John Law.

People may be familiar with how banks work, but what are stablecoins? These are private liabilities, redeemable on demand, issued either by a company or by an automated program running on a blockchain, that promise to track the value of a reference asset. In many respects, their balance sheets resemble that of early banks, such as the ones in this book. The openness of the public blockchains has enabled the efflorescence of countless stablecoins, in particular ones tracking the US dollar, and has produced a thriving competitive ecosystem that powerfully demonstrates the potential of building on crypto.

Like many transformational innovations, blockchains are, in themselves, quite simple, combining three previous discoveries in a novel way. The essential features of a blockchain are that it is (1) an accounting ledger, or database, (2) run in a cryptographically secure way across (3) a distributed network of computers. By ‘public’ blockchain, we mean open-source software that is entirely agnostic about who the user is and relies on automated economic mechanisms to ensure that the records in the database remain true. The chief value proposition of public blockchains, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, is that they are decentralized (i.e. run by many people in a redundant way). This gives these data-bases important qualities, such as neutrality (no one party can decide who can write to the database) and resistance to censorship (anything is allowed to be written into the database).

Financially, this means that blockchain entries can be said to face no counterparty risk with regard to their validity. Counterparty risk materializes when one party in a transaction suffers a loss and value is lost to the other without warning. In 2008, many banks were exposed to profound levels of counterparty risk, when interbank trades related to one sector of the economy—meat-and-potatoes commercial banking—nearly collapsed as a result of cascading risk in an unrelated sector of the economy—residential real estate derivatives. Though counterparty risk still exists between parties that use blockchain-mediated exchanges, the public blockchain transactions themselves don’t face this issue, provided the blockchain itself is sufficiently decentralized. In this instance, the database entry cannot be reversed by any single

party. A source of truth is created. When an entry is written into a blockchain, it remains there forever, in full and public view. The blockchain itself is less a counterparty than shared infrastructure that anyone can use, like oxygen molecules or sunlight.

Scottish banks and stablecoins both evolved in an environment of cooperation between free and consenting individuals, with no government authority involved. Although the Act of Union allowed the Crown to retain some proscriptions regarding the use of private liabilities from the Bank of Scotland, Scottish banking differed from many other early reserve bank systems, including England’s, in its independence from the obligation to meet the government’s funding needs. It is easy to forget, but central banking is a very recent phenomenon in world history. The US Federal Reserve emerged in 1913 through a controversial public–private partnership, before ascending the ranks of administrative state power to its present commanding position over the world’s largest reserve currency. The Bank of England and the Bank of Amsterdam both had a unique sanction to provide for the funding needs of their respective governments and, in particular, to assist them with fundraising for wars and other projections of geopolitical power.

The Bank of Scotland, although incorporated by Act of the Scottish Parliament, had no such obligations, and as such a vibrant ecosystem of private banks was able to emerge, bringing with it competitive pressures, sly actions (such as accumulating competitor’s notes to threaten runs) and even banking services offered by merchant companies as a way of facilitating activities halfway around the world. We like to describe the issuance of stablecoins as ‘pure banking’. As Checkland puts in this book, ‘banking in Scotland was unique in its exclusive reliance upon the business opportunities afforded by agriculture, commerce and industry; it represented banking in its purest form’.

Other curious similarities exist between the Bank of Scotland and decentralized stablecoins, such as Sky’s USDS, that are issued by a program rather than a company. Use of the Sky program and its USDS stablecoin is unrestricted. Anyone can purchase a so-called governance token (named SKY) and participate in the process of setting the parameters for a balance sheet that, at time of writing, has over $10 billion in outstanding liabilities, or stablecoins. It is run as a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, which is a jargonistic way of saying ‘by vote’, regulated through preset rules encoded in programs that run on a public blockchain. Although the Bank of Scotland’s statutes aimed to restrict London’s influence by requiring that more than two-thirds of its shares be held in Scotland, in any other respect it was similarly an open corporation. As a public bank it could not restrict membership or expel shareholders, and shares were purchased on the open market. Curiously, the Act describes that ‘all Forraigners who shall joyne as Partners of the Bank shall be and become naturalised Scotsmen’. Similarly, all individuals who purchase a SKY token ‘shall joyne’ the DAO and become naturalized crypto swashbucklers.

Like Sky, which was originally set up with a public good in mind (global adoption of a common infrastructure, absent a central authority or administrator that might abuse its influence), the Bank of Scotland was, by implication, an institution built to further the public interest of Scottish citizens. Sky has not shareholders but token holders; the Bank of Scotland’s Act named its shareholders ‘adventurers’. Decisions on Sky’s parameters are determined by a token holder vote recorded on the blockchain, while the Bank of Scotland relied on general meetings of adventurers to perform acts such as naming directors, issuing more capital or paying dividends. In both instances, the balance sheets really filled up when depositors began relying on notes issued as trading instruments and units of account.

Stablecoins, like the free period of Scottish banking, demonstrate that individuals are capable of self-organising into functional units that unlock productivity and allow exchanges of property rights to occur. It is telling that this period of Scottish history also produced thinkers like Adam Smith, who defined the natural notion of a free market. To these thinkers, the modern reality of tightly regulated monopolies that privatise profits and socialise losses to a coerced and overtaxed citizenry would be the antithesis of what they set out to do hundreds of years ago. Stablecoins offer renewed promise for allowing people to make their own decisions and trade with one another without the need to rely on an over-bearing authority to orchestrate every exchange.

As one reads Scottish banking, two distinct eras emerge: before and after the Bank Charter Act 1844 and Bank Notes (Scotland) Act 1845. While competition and innovation was the key to commercial success in the period when banking was actually free, it became more oligopolistic (what Checkland calls ‘the cartel of the general managers’ committee’) and less innovative following the stringent over-regulation introduced by the Acts. The number of banks dwindled from seventeen in 1850 to eight in 1914, and established banks have since learned to use regulation to secure their rarefied positions. This was not without significance for the Scottish economy as a whole; the strength of its financial sector diminished as a result, especially compared to England. Crypto is currently sitting at the same critical juncture. Today, it is free and full of innovation and promise, but it is threatened by overzealous regulators champing at the bit to establish rules, pick winners and create monopolies.

Finally, this book is an authoritative, meticulously researched and timeless history that deserves to be resurrected in its own right. We are certainly motivated by our passion for stablecoins, crypto and financial history, and our desire to share it with a broader audience. It has been a delight to collaborate to that end with SG Checkland’s daughter, Sarah Jane, and her partner, Jonathan Margolis. But, ultimately, this work merits a return to the shelves simply because it is exceptional—an exquisitely detailed celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit of an indomitable nation that bequeathed the world an enlightened tradition of individual freedom.

George Town, Cayman Islands

March 2026
Mark Phillips, Sébastien Derivaux and Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic
Steakhouse Financial Ltd

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Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Steakhouse H1 2026 Lookback

• The first half of 2026 wasn’t an easy period for onchain lending. Events including the Resolv exploit, the rsETH bad debt event on Aave and heightened market volatility tested risk management across the ecosystem, yet Steakhouse finished the half year with zero bad debt while continuing to grow deposits on Morpho.

• The deposits increased from $1.55bn on 1 January to $1.70bn on 1 July. Throughout the period, Steakhouse remained the largest curator on Morpho, maintaining circa 2x more deposits than the second biggest curator.

• The three largest vaults (all Prime) held approximately $765m in deposits on 1 July, representing around 56% of all Steakhouse Morpho TVL. Newer vaults continued growing alongside them and expanded the range of lending strategies available to depositors.

• Furthermore, adoption of Morpho Vaults V2 continued to accelerate during the first half of 2026. Steakhouse became the first curator to surpass $1 billion in V2 deposits, representing nearly one quarter of all assets deployed across the new vault standard.

• Steakhouse also strengthened its position across Morpho’s stablecoin market, excluding incentive-driven stablecoin farms. Its share of stablecoin deposits increased from 49% in January to 52% by the end of June, meaning more than half of all stablecoin capital on Morpho is now curated by Steakhouse.

• Overall, the first half of 2026 brought several new distribution integrations across retail and institutional platforms, extending access to Steakhouse lending strategies. We head into the second half of the year with strong momentum, grateful for the trust placed in our vaults and looking forward to making even more Steak!

New Incentives for the Steakhouse USDG High Yield Vault on Kamino

• The Steakhouse USDG High Yield Vault on Kamino now earns more than 10% APY, following the launch of the new incentives campaign, combining USDG rewards with an underlying lending APY of 7% based on the 90-day average.

• Kamino and the Global Dollar Network launched this $300,000 incentive campaign for the vault, distributing USDG (the stablecoin issued by Paxos) rewards to depositors over the next three months.

• The Steakhouse USDG High Yield Vault has grown by more than $12m since the incentive campaign launched yesterday evening, with deposits now exceeding $16m and utilisation at 85%. More than half of the portfolio is currently allocated in the Main Market on Kamino, with the remainder primarily deployed to the OnRe Market alongside smaller positions in Maple, JLP and Bitcoin markets.

• The vault has generated more than $268,000 of cumulative interest while charging no management fee and a 5% performance fee.

Morpho is now the Largest Venue for USDC deposits

• Morpho has overtaken Aave to become the largest DeFi lending venue by USDC deposits. USDC supplied through Morpho has now surpassed $2.8bn, making it the largest onchain venue for USDC lending.

• More than 50% of those deposits are allocated to Steakhouse vaults. Steakhouse now manages circa $1.4bn of all USDC on Morpho.

• Looking across chains, Steakhouse is also the largest curator of USDC on Base, with approximately 65% of all USDC deposited through the platform allocated to Steakhouse vaults, equivalent to around $1bn in deposits. Around $368m of those deposits come from the Coinbase App’s USDC lending product.

• Coinbase App users can choose between the two Steakhouse USDC lending strategies on Morpho: Prime, focused on blue-chip collateral, and High Yield Edition, which targets higher returns through a broader collateral set. Recently, Coinbase has also increased the advertised High Yield APY to ~7%.

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New foreword to the book, “Scottish Banking, A History: 1695-1973” by S.G. Checkland. One of the motivations for us to bring back this book to print was to celebrate the academic work of this great economic historian, whose detailed research and passion for the subject matter makes us daydream that he might have loved the crazy world of stablecoins as much as he was passionate for the universe of Scottish banking.

He was once the pin-up of British academe. Tall, handsome, with an unruly crest of brown hair, a beguiling Canadian accent and aromantic limp resulting from his war wounds. Renowned for his effortless way of pulling seemingly disparate strands together in one heady sweep; his verbal pyrotechnics, sending students and lecturers alike scrambling for the dictionary; his insouciant way of drawing diagrams on the rotating blackboard, then sending them spinning in one seamless action. An exotic and inspirational figure in the somewhat dour and parochial city of Glasgow of the 1960s and 1970s, where most students still lived at home.

His legacy? A shelf full of weighty tomes on such subjects as the Industrial Revolution, British public policy from 1776 to 1939, the Gladstone family, and the history of Scottish banking. The first served as the go-to textbook for a generation of students and the latter two earned him prizes, all now sadly gathering dust and cobwebs. Sic transit gloria mundi, one might think. However fine a contribution my father added to the sum of human knowledge, I assumed it was always doomed to be supplanted by the efforts of academics who came later.

How wrong I was.

In August 2024, I received a message on LinkedIn from someone called Adrian, introducing himself as an economic consultant specialising in cryptocurrency. He and his colleagues at Steakhouse Financial were ‘financial history geeks’, he explained, and as such were avid admirers of Dad’s history of Scottish banking, not just because it is a phenomenal work of scholarship but because they see many parallels between the swashbuckling adventures it relates and their own adventures in crypto. Might I, as literary executor, agree to them getting it back on the shelves in refreshed form?

What? Was this a prank? A ploy to part me from my money? Surely all financial wizards are interested in is getting rich quick. Full of scepticism, my partner, Jonathan, and I agreed to meet Adrian at Soho House in Chiswick for a drink.

Adrian turned out not only to be eminently presentable—think Clark Kent meets Harry Potter—but also sane and serious. Scottish banking has been like a Bible for him and his colleagues, he said, and although they knew nothing about publishing, they were more than ready to go through all the necessary hoops—and expense—of picture research, design and reprinting to bring it back to life.

Well, if you insist.

My dad was not just a pioneer of economic history during the post-war years but the architect of one of the most substantial and prestigious university departments on the subject. Since he retired in 1982, the subject’s star has fallen; it has since been integrated into general history or economics courses, mainly along econometric lines or the statistical analysis of data that already exists. Furthermore, as universities focus on survival, rattling the begging bowl for funding and enticing foreign students in for their money, primary research is taking a back seat.

Meanwhile, the internet, AI, and the misuse of these resources has scrambled our perception of reality and, indeed, our trust in truth. Interest in history has reached a nadir unknown since the Middle Ages, with vast swathes of the population content to live in a narcissistic present. When interest in the subject is shown, all too often it is to condemn the sins of our imperialistic fathers or to find ways of punishing them retrospectively. In his book The war against the past: why the West must fight for its history, Frank Furedi, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Kent, writes, ‘Today’s presentist zeitgeist ... dispossesses the past of its claim to truth. At best, the past is indicted as irrelevant; at worst, it is charged with causing harm to the generations that have followed.’

Could it be that the books by my father and his generation, born of painstaking primary research, low tech, and a culture of knowledge for its own sake, are about to develop a new cachet? Could they soon be regarded as a gold standard, with more reprints in the pipeline? If so, the Steakhouse founders can add another innovation to their list of achievements.

Sydney George Checkland’s personal story, of rags to if not quite riches then at least writing about them, started out in 1916, in Ottawa, a lumber town comprising shabby clapboard dwellings, dirt roads and spittoons, with some pomp and ceremony attached, thanks to Queen Victoria having granted it capital status in 1857. Both Syd’s parents were émigrés from England, his mother a former matron in children’s homes, his father a colporteur, or door-to-door Bible salesman, desperate for better remuneration and fulfilment. Together they imbued their middle son with their own homesickness for the old country while making do in a cockroach-infested apartment above a grocer’s shop. Before long, Syd was struggling to reconcile his father’s rigid belief in the truth of the Bible with empirical fact as taught by his often-expat Scottish teachers.

Leaving school at 17, Syd got a job as a ledger clerk at the Bank of Nova Scotia, and his parents rejoiced: a respectable job for life, at £200 per annum! But Syd did the math, calculating that he would never save up enough to escape Hicksville. So he studied at night school with the Canadian Bankers Association, then took up a much-better-paid job as accountant to a Chinese laundry—only to discover that its finances were even more precarious than his own.

Time to rebel against his father’s puritanism and embrace Machiavelli’s tenet that the end justifies the means. Using cunning stratagems, such as sending out cheques in the wrong envelopes as a ruse to slow creditors down, by September 1938 he had not only transformed the laundry’s fortunes but saved himself £500, enough to pay his passage to England. His mother, now suffering from breast cancer, bravely waved him off, never to see him again.

Thus began a charmed period during which Dad worked his way through university as a labourer, met my mother, Olive Anthony—the girl with the honey-coloured hair and cracked glasses seated in the front row of the lecture theatre—and obtained a first-class honours Bachelor of Commerce degree. After that, a career in politics beckoned, and he was voted in as president of the National Union of Students, then president of the International Union of Students the following year.

In 1939, Syd bought himself a bike and set off on a 3,000-mile odyssey around the continent, learning to cycle as he went. In later years he would describe how, on disembarking at Cherbourg, he wobbled his way through streets lined with locals cheering uproariously at the sight of him; he had happened upon the route for the Tour de France. The adventure soured when he reached Freiburg, in Germany, where he witnessed a Nazi parade, complete with banners and shouts of ‘Heil Hitler’. It was clear that ‘this mad machine of intoxicated people who had shed their human identity’ needed to be stopped, as he wrote later in Voices across the water: an Anglo-Canadian boyhood.

Goodbye, International Union of Students, and hello, British Army, starting with six months of training at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy for officers in Berkshire, at the end of which he was awarded the Belt of Honour as the best cadet of his intake. He then switched to the Canadian army because it offered a better pension in the event of his injury or death, a pressing consideration now that he was married to Olive. This shift set in motion the events by which he would nearly lose his life.

The Canadian Governor General’s Foot Guards tank regiment was a return of sorts to Hicksville, fighting alongside the local lads from his childhood, who had nothing like his level of training. To make matters worse, when the orders came in June 1944 to cross the Channel, the American master of the merchant ship carrying Syd’s battalion failed to chain down the tanks properly, so that they shifted and suffered damage. Things got worse when they reached the Falaise pocket, where mayhem ensued, during which Dad’s tank was attacked by a camouflaged German Tiger tank, killing the wireless operator and setting the tank on fire. Pushing the dead man out, Syd ran for his life, sustaining extensive shrapnel wounds before plunging into a small haystack. There, after self-administering morphine, he spent the night before being found next morning by the unit’s padre. ‘The sense of relief was overwhelming’, he wrote in the memoir about his youth. ‘The fear, the nausea, the feeling of slipping away was replaced by a soaring determination to live. I would return to England, to wife and child, as yet unborn.’

Some of the greatest medical advances have been made during warfare, and my father was now a beneficiary of such experimentation. His right leg was basically shredded and under any other circumstances would have been amputated, but instead the medics propped the leg up behind him and encased him in plaster from his chest to his toes while giving him regular injections of the then-innovative penicillin, in the hope that the ‘cabling would grow back’, as he recalled later. After six months, he left hospital in calipers, categorised as 40% disabled but with two legs. Huge effort and application had him walking again, leaning on a stick and with a crippled right foot. My mother, now nursing my infant brother John, stepped up as chauffeuse.

Still determined to become a politician, he then stood as candidate for the Common Wealth Party in the general election of July 1945 for Ecclesall, Sheffield. This was a new socialist party founded by the writer JB Priestley and the Marxist historian Tom Wintringham, standing for common ownership, morality in politics and so-called vital democracy—a system of government in which state power would be vested in the general population. It is a testimony to Dad’s energy and charisma that he ended up with 14,000 votes to the 18,000 of the winning Conservative candidate.

He would stand once more for election, but due to his disabilities this ambition gradually gave way to the pull of academia. Back he went to Birmingham, and a master’s degree, followed by his first academic appointment in 1946 as an assistant lecturer in economic science at Liverpool, where he gained his PhD in urban and business history. Then onwards to a lectureship in history at Cambridge, followed, at the age of 41, by an invitation to set up a new chair of economic history at Glasgow.

Mum was reluctant, as she liked their life in Cambridge. But Dad, who recoiled from the snobbery and privilege of the dons, was thrilled not just at the prospect of being based in the proud mercantile, shipbuilding and industrial city but also at the potential for research, while the Scottish accent and humour offered a homecoming of sorts after his predominantly Scottish education in Ottawa. Founded in 1451, the fourth-oldest university in the UK, Glasgow was also no slouch in terms of longevity.

The move also meant that Dad could build his own empire. When he first arrived, Glasgow had just one lecturer in economic history who had been there since the 1920s. By the time he left, he had a staff of fourteen, including two professors.

He and Olive moved with us five children into the first of a succession of three grand houses owned by the university, Caerleon in Ledcameroch Crescent, Bearsden. It is around this time that my own memories begin, of a magical Dad who couldn’t have been further from the stereotype of the university professor.

Dad, stripped to the waist, looking every bit the lumberjack as he chopped down trees in our vast garden. Dad, mending engines with the help of refugees from the Hungarian uprising of 1956, whom he and Mum had put up in the old stables. Dad, chasing us around the house, brandishing his crippled foot, or letting me, aged 6, ‘drive’ the new family Zephyr. Making up stories about Ball Eye the Tiger, only allowing us an occasional glimpse of the eye to maintain suspense. Introducing me to Willie Snoop, the little man who lived in the muscle of his upper arm and jumped about when spoken to. Singing the popular, deliciously politically incorrect songs from his childhood: ‘Barney Google’ (‘with the goo-goo-­-googly eyes’), ‘Puddin’ Head Jones’ and the music hall song that goes ‘Oh, Mr Gallagher? Yes, Mr Shean. Do you think that handsome ladies have no brain?’

In 1962 we moved to Westdel, on Queen’s Place in Glasgow’s West End. Built in 1889 for the university’s publisher, Robert MacLehose, it contained a bedroom designed by someone called Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom nobody we knew had heard of but who had been a brilliantly innovative architect inspired by the art coming out of Meiji Japan in the 1890s. Our bedroom was the first he produced in pure white, although Mum painted it a fashionable orange. In the late 1960s, Dad made the bedroom his own, so that when the BBC finally woke up to Mackintosh’s merits and made a documentary on him, Dad jokingly offered to pose in the bed while they filmed.

This was a time of drinks parties straight out of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, with Dad suave, Mum la-di-dah, me and my sisters distributing the nibbles. Visitors included Lord Reith, first director-general of the BBC and rector at the University of Glasgow from 1965 to 1968, at 6’6” towering over Dad by four inches, as well as the historian RH Tawney, who dropped his pipe tobacco all over the Parker Knoll armchair. By then, Dad was working on his Gladstone book, so the sitting-room carpet had to be cleared of the Gladstone family papers for these events.

Every summer my parents took the family on long camping trips, across Canada and the US or to Spain, Italy and Turkey. At the time, we groaned at the early rises and Mum’s insistence on driving 150 km before breakfast, but today we look back with nostalgia as well as awe. At Christmas, we threw Edwardian-style parties complete with charades and carols round the piano, with my mum belting out the tunes, as well as magic shows, the most memorable of which was when Dad sawed one of my sisters in half.

Other memories include table tennis championships, in which Dad rattled his bat up and down against the shelves like a hooligan, and visits by Japanese professors amid much bowing and smiling behind hands. Dad was among the first British historians to link up with Japanese academics studying the Samurai sons who came to Scotland in the 1900s to learn our technology. Ironically, the Scots were generous with their knowledge, it never having crossed their minds that these strange visitors would ever pose a commercial threat. After Dad’s death, my mother would write several books about the cultural links between Britain and Meiji Japan.

The family’s final move was to 5, The University, one of a row of massive granite houses designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott for the professors. This was the academic equivalent to living above the shop, and Dad was in his element, striding out to his department in the Adam Smith Building and the College Club opposite, a panelled establishment muggy with cigarette smoke and the smell of overboiled cabbage. Now that they had safely delivered all five children to university, Mum turned her energies to reading and commenting on Dad’s works, before gradually starting to write herself.

During this period Dad’s taste for politics had something of a renaissance, and he successfully led a campaign to create a separate Faculty of Social Sciences and penned a master plan outlining how the university might develop closer associations with the community; the ideals of the Common Wealth Party were still intact. During the student unrest of 1970, he figured out a nifty way of escaping his department from a side door and coming home for supper, leaving the students waving their banners in the belief that he was still trapped inside. While half the university considered him a ‘pinko’, he joked, the other half saw his views as ‘somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan’.

Curiously, considering his subject, Dad never had any personal interest in either money or possessions. He never carried cash, didn’t want to own property, and pretty much camped out wherever he lay his head.

By now, he was applying his knowledge of economic history to contemporary economic and social challenges, advising the development corporation for the East Kilbride new town and visiting the notorious gangster Jimmy Boyle in prison. He also wrote The upas tree, a history of Glasgow as a declining industrial city, using it as a paradigm for Britain as a whole. ‘In Checkland’, a reviewer from Scottish Economic and Social History noted, ‘past and future are brought together in a manner glimpsed by some of the great founding fathers of economic history in the later nineteenth century, yet so rarely achieved since.’ Meanwhile, he was the driving force behind the consolidation of the Business Archives Council of Scotland, dressing his staff in boiler suits and dispatching them out in lorries to collect records of failed businesses or ones that had been taken over, thereby saving whatever lessons they held for posterity.

Scottish banking was in many ways his most ambitious book. A mammoth enterprise, it spans the history of 100 businesses and was written with full access to abundant material in the relevant archives. The book covers not just the innovations of Scottish banking during its heyday—the replacement of ‘sterile coin’ with banknotes, the use of the limited liability principle as well as the overdraft facility—but the transformation of Scotland’s fortunes from a near-subsistence economy in 1700 to the forefront of the Industrial Revolution a century later, while presenting the stories of the men involved (yes, this is very much a ‘his’ story). Lastly, the book provides a summary of the theories thrown up by the great Scottish economists generated by this economic revolution: James Steuart, David Hume and Adam Smith.

Dad’s prestige and authority continued to grow right up to his retirement in 1982 and beyond. He was made chairman of the National Register of Archives for Scotland in 1971, Fellow of the British Academy in 1977, president of the Economic History Society from 1977 to 1980, chairman of the Industry and Employment Committee from 1982 to 1984, and honorary president of the Economic and Social History Society of Scotland in 1984.

Not bad for a boy from Hicksville, Dad.

London, UK

March 2026

Sarah Jane Checkland

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Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.

Grove introduces the GROVE token

• Grove is capitalizing the stablecoin economy. Through institutional-grade allocation, financing, and liquidity solutions, Grove brings real-world assets and real-world use cases onchain to build the next generation of global financial markets.

• GROVE is the native token of Grove protocol, deployed on Ethereum as an ERC-20 with a supply of 10 billion. The token is expected to support protocol governance, including community participation in proposals and sentiment signaling, subject to final token design and governance documentation.

• The first token distribution went live yesterday, the 6th of July, with an early allocation that recognises participants who were part of Grove’s early community, subject to eligibility requirements. Early participants on the protocol can check their eligibility and claim GROVE at app.grove.finance

• Future GROVE distribution is administered through Sky Ecosystem-supported programs, including Sky Ecosystem Rewards where available. Eligible participants in Sky Ecosystem Rewards accrue GROVE by supplying USDS. Visit the Sky Money rewards page for more information.

• The GROVE token is also available on exchanges such as Coinbase, Bybit, KuCoin, and Bitvavo.

The Early Growth of Robinhood Earn

• Robinhood has launched Robinhood Chain alongside Robinhood Earn, allowing eligible users to earn an estimated 7% APY on USDG through a Steakhouse vault on Morpho. The launch marks Steakhouse’s second major retail lending integration, following Coinbase’s USDC lending launch in September 2025, and extends onchain lending to another large consumer financial platform.

• Early onchain activity shows users are actively moving onto Robinhood Chain. ETH bridged from Ethereum to Robinhood Chain has increased by almost 10x within days of launch, highlighting growing activity across the network.

• Moreover, deposits into the new Steakhouse USDG vault have continued to increase since launch, reaching approximately $17 million in TVL across more than 1,600 depositors within the first six days. The rollout is currently taking place in incremental stages, with access still limited to a small proportion of eligible users. The vault supplies USDG into Morpho lending markets, where borrowers generate the lending yield returned to depositors.

• Coinbase and Robinhood demonstrate how DeFi lending can be embedded directly into mainstream financial applications. While each platform offers a different user experience, both rely on Steakhouse to curate lending risk behind the scenes, giving users access to onchain yield without managing lending markets or vault allocations. Together, the two platforms manage more than $600 billion of customer assets, making this one of the largest retail distribution channels for onchain lending.

MetaMask Money Account Launches with Steakhouse Markets

• MetaMask has launched Money Account, a self-custodial account that combines stablecoin savings, spending and trading from a single balance. Users can earn up to 4% variable APY on supported stablecoins while retaining full custody of their assets. Steakhouse curates the lending markets and monitors vault’s allocations, liquidity conditions, and risk controls.

• Supported stablecoins including USDC, USDT and DAI are converted 1:1 into mUSD, MetaMask’s new stablecoin issued by Bridge and built on M0 infrastructure. Deposits flow through a Veda-managed Morpho vault on Monad, where Steakhouse curates the lending strategy using Veda’s multi-chain, multi-protocol infrastructure before capital is allocated across Morpho lending markets.

• The vault’s liquidity sleeve is held in mUSD, allowing capital to remain readily available while also supporting low borrow rates across Morpho Monad markets, including WETH/mUSD, wstETH/mUSD and WBTC/mUSD. These markets allow borrowers to post blue-chip collateral and borrow mUSD, with borrower interest forming the yield credited back to Money Account users.

• The new WETH/mUSD market on Monad already holds more than $410k in supplied mUSD with current borrow rate of 0.6%

• Money Account connects directly to the MetaMask Card, allowing users to spend from the same balance that earns yield. Monad’s sub-second finality enables purchases to settle directly from yield-generating funds, allowing deposits to continue earning until each transaction is authorised.

• The launch brings Steakhouse curated Morpho lending into one of crypto’s largest self-custodial wallets. Users access DeFi lending through a familiar wallet experience, while Steakhouse manages the lending strategy that powers yield behind the scenes.