Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.
European Central Bank features Steakhouse Integration in its DeFi Research
The European Central Bank has recently published research on how Federal Reserve policy can affect DeFi stablecoin lending rates. They look at factors such as onchain leverage demand, liquidity conditions, market segmentation, TradFi-DeFi arbitrage, and also specifically highlight the Coinbase integration curated by Steakhouse Financial on Morpho as an example of DeFi becoming a “yield generation layer.”
By analysing Aave V2/V3 data across USDC, USDT and DAI, the authors find that in the long run DeFi rates converge towards rates influenced by Fed policy, however, this effect is delayed and can be temporarily reversed, as in the short run DeFi rates are heavily dependent on onchain borrowing and leverage demand.
It is also suggested that the gap between onchain vs dollar rates can be reduced by larger, sophisticated liquidity providers, tokenised RWAs, and mainstream integrations coming onchain. This would bring deeper liquidity and make it easier for capital to move between DeFi and traditional markets, which could help the rates converge more quickly after short-term deviations. Examples of this include the Coinbase integration we launched in September 2025, mentioned in the paper, and also the more recent Robinhood Earn integration we launched this summer.
Together, the Coinbase and Robinhood integrations now consist of three vaults, the Steakhouse USDC Prime and High Yield vaults on Base and the Steakhouse USDG vault on Robinhood, and have now brought over $1.13bn in deposits and $1bn borrows to Morpho.
These institutional onchain integrations bring more liquidity into DeFi while also giving app users more options to earn yield on their assets. At Steakhouse, we agree that deeper liquidity and better access between DeFi and traditional markets are key to making onchain lending markets more efficient and stable.
Higher USDT Borrowing Across Markets Increases Prime Vault Rates
There has been an increase in borrowing across the underlying markets of the Steakhouse USDT Prime vault over the past week, including $7m of new borrows in the wstETH/USDT market and $4m in the WBTC/USDT market.
Higher borrowing demand directly supports lending rates, as it temporarily pushed utilisation across the vault’s markets from around 84% to 92-93%.
This has lifted the Steakhouse USDT vault’s APY from around 3% earlier in the week to roughly 6%. Total deposits also increased from $61m to $67m.
Robinhood Stock Tokens Go Live on Morpho
Robinhood Stock Tokens are now live as collateral on Morpho, with Steakhouse onboarding the first batch into the USDG vault behind Robinhood Earn. The initial set includes Nvidia, SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, Google and SPY.
The markets are still very new, with both supply and borrow demand only starting to develop. Hence, the borrow rates are still low, with 4 out of 6 markets at or below 3%.
This is Steakhouse’s second tokenised-stock integration on Morpho following the Base launch in September, with Robinhood using a different token structure to the Coinbase stock tokens on Base. Robinhood Stock Tokens are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets that track the price of the underlying stocks, while Coinbase stock tokens are certificates backed 1:1 by shares held in segregated custody.
Both structures provide onchain exposure to the underlying stocks, but through different legal and asset-backing arrangements. Conservative LLTVs of 62.5-77% are also used partly because the tokens trade 24/7 while the equity oracle feeds update only 24/5.
Each market has a $1m liquidity facility available for borrowing, giving teams looking to integrate or build around these markets immediate access to deep liquidity at the current low borrow rates.