I'm assuming this is mostly rage-baiting hyperbole, but it's still worth drawing the distinction here, especially given how new onchain vault products are and how few people have actually looked under the hood.
The hedge fund comparison breaks down at the part that actually matters, which is custody. A fund manager holds your assets and moves them around at their own discretion. A Morpho vault curator never touches the deposits at all. The smart contract holds the funds, the protocol enforces the rules, and the curator only sets parameters. We could disappear tomorrow and your money would sit exactly where it is, governed by code anyone can read.
And it goes further than custody. The Guardian role on our @SteakhouseFi vaults isn't us, it's the depositors, all of them in aggregate. If Steakhouse proposes adding a new collateral, any depositor can start a vote to veto it, and we set the quorum deliberately low so it only takes a small fraction of them to block it. Nothing gets slipped in behind your back. New collateral sits behind a timelock, so if you don't like what's coming you can either help vote it down or just withdraw before it ever goes live. You would have to wait until the next investor update to learn about mandate drift in a hedge fund. Here you get a vote and an exit before anything changes.
What curators configure is asset backed lending, with transparent and strongly enforced constraints. Every position is a loan against posted collateral, with a published liquidation loan to value, a named oracle, a defined rate model, and hard supply caps. It's hardly a black box though I concede it can be hard to parse and compare. It is, however, evidently not opaque.
Compare that honestly to a credit hedge fund. There you get a quarterly letter, marks you can't independently verify, concentration you can't see, unilateral discretion, and a manager who is literally holding your money. With a vault you get every loan, every allocation, every realized loss, and every fee, live, queryable by anyone, enforced by code instead of promised in a pitch deck. It's not less transparent than a fund. It's dramatically more.
You are right that the data can be scattered and that nobody has fully packaged it yet. That is absolutely a frontend and user experience problem. We also believe it is eminently fixable and our philosophy is to show our work and maximize the constraints we operate our vaults with.
The reason we build onchain is to put more transparency into a system that has spent decades getting good at the opposite. We're not perfect and there's considerably more that needs to be done to achieve that, but we believe we're on the right trajectory.
The Grove Points Program is Live🦜
Grove Points opens Grove to the wider community, with 10M points available daily.
There's only one way to Enter the Grove: supply USDS or USDC through Grove Savings and accrue points.
Credit where credit is due.
https://t.co/a3VakCkshd
Thrilled to finally announce what we've been working on at Grove Labs.
One of our key learnings from running the $1B @SkyEcosystem Tokenization Grand Prix in 2024 was that liquidity for RWAs, even for the lowest risk assets such as US Treasuries and MMFs, was effectively non-existent.
For onchain finance and RWAs to scale, we need institutional scale instant liquidity for RWAs that stablecoin-native onchain businesses can depend on, every day, at any time.
Grove's first product, Basin, is what we built to close that gap.
We are excited to be working closely with a number of institutional launch partners that will make this vision a reality:
- Asset Management Partners: @BlackRock@JHIAdvisors
- Tokenization Platforms: @Securitize@centrifuge
- Access Partners: @FalconXGlobal@Anchorage@galaxyhq
We anticipate that Basin will go-live next month, subject to Sky Governance approval. Follow @grovedotfinance for the latest, we have a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline!
Luca’s model for onchain lending is rigorous and the framework is genuinely novel. However, we have two disagreements with it:
1. Onchain lending is repo not a put option sale
2. If you use a more realistic LGD parameter, the model predicts observed lending rates without significant mispricing
The model relies on a loss-given-default (LGD) parameter to estimate the fair value of an onchain lending position. We would set the LGD parameter to a few bps over 0% (higher than the empirical bad debt rate for lenders in Prime markets) rather than ~5% (which is modeled on the liquidation incentive, a borrower cost).
If you do, the model outputs fall exactly in line with observed rates at around 3-30bps, and the alleged mispricing disappears.
Brief update on this weekend's events
Zero exposure and zero losses across all Steakhouse vaults on all platforms. Our full company treasury is allocated to our own products. We continue our existing public commitment to withdraw last in the event of meaningful losses.
ℹ️ No Steakhouse vault (Morpho, Turbo/Term vaults, etc) is currently exposed to Resolv (USR, wstUSR). We were not allocating to RLP.
Earlier today, we detected news that, unfortunately, Resolv had been exposed to a potential infinite mint hack. We are investigating the validity of these claims. Emergency response procedures safeguarded all exposures on all chains.
We're monitoring the situation for second-order effects and pending confirmation of impact.
Steakhouse has been engaged as @ResolvLabs' risk manager.
Resolv's core product, USR, is a stablecoin backed by delta-neutral positions with a dual-tranche risk structure.
The engagement covers independent economic and operational oversight with ongoing analysis and support.
The Steakhouse app is live 🐂
Access all Steakhouse vaults from a single interface, with an expanded set of strategies.
Crypto vaults with full risk visibility. Noncustodial by design.
Explore → https://t.co/RLQsymNBsS
Stablecoins move trillions. Now you can see exactly where and how.
Introducing Dune's Stablecoin Dataset👇
▪️200+ Stablecoins ( USD-backes & Local)
▪️37 chains covered ( 35 @ethereum EVM chains, @solana & @trondao)
▪️Enriched labelling on Balances and Activities
▪️Powering the upcoming @Visa Local Stablecoin Report
Built in collaboration with @SteakhouseFi.
Our Herd MCP is now live to everyone, and is already used by people from top teams like @AlliumLabs@tempo@goldskyio@SteakhouseFi and many more.
Leveraging LLM agents in crypto has always felt tedious and scary. We're removing that barrier :)
Much more to come!
I keep on hearing that "vaults" are the only way for DeFi to survive/succeed. Looking at this $6 billion market, i started wondering what exactly vaults are? Read my latest deep dive on vaults and curators: https://t.co/FOa6GqALBn
.@morpho rewards are now live on Steakhouse V2 vaults.
Explicit risk buckets. Same collateral standards. V2-native incentives.
Explore vaults → https://t.co/dBteLHl1RT