The Steakhouse View on Vaults
Principles for vaults as they become mainstream portfolio infrastructure
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.