The future of vaults: neobanks and invisible DeFi

The following is a guest post and opinion from Vincent Maliepaard, VP of Marketing at Sentora.

On January 26, 2026, Kraken launched DeFi Earn. The announcement was straightforward: users could deposit stablecoins and receive up to 8% APY, directly within the exchange interface they already used for trading. No seed phrases. No gas management. No bridging. No new application to download.

Within months, the product had crossed 40,000 unique depositors.

For context, this is a crypto-native audience: people who already understand blockchain and have made deliberate choices to hold digital assets. They are not the mass market. But the speed of adoption signals something the industry has been circling for years: when DeFi yield is packaged correctly, demand materializes immediately.

The mechanics behind DeFi Earn are worth understanding because they reveal the architecture of what comes next. Kraken is the distribution layer, the trusted interface millions of users already interact with. Veda provides the vault infrastructure, programmable containers built on the ERC-4626 standard that hold and route user capital. Sentora operates as the risk management and strategy layer, deploying capital across established lending protocols including Aave, Morpho, and others. The borrowers on those protocols pay for access to liquidity, and those payments flow back to depositors as yield.

The user sees a savings rate. Everything beneath that is invisible to them.

This is what the industry has started calling CeDeFi, or, less formally, the DeFi mullet: centralized experience at the front, decentralized infrastructure at the back. Kraken's version of it is still crypto-native in its user base. The next iteration will not be.

The Commoditization of Vault Launch

Creating a vault is no longer a technical barrier. Vault-as-a-service providers have reduced what once required weeks of engineering into a standardized process. Any protocol, ecosystem, or institution can launch a vault relatively quickly.

This ease of creation changes the competitive dynamics of the vault economy. More vaults means more competition for deposits, which creates pressure on curators to offer higher returns. Higher returns require either better strategies or higher risk. The former requires genuine expertise. The latter, when it is not recognized as such, leads to the kinds of collateral failures that drove significant losses in 2025.

Infrastructure commoditization makes the curation layer more important, not less. As vault options multiply, the performance differential between well-managed and poorly managed vaults will become the primary signal allocators use to evaluate the field. Kraken's decision to partner with institutional risk managers rather than build vault strategy in-house reflects this reality. Distribution scale and capital volume require curation discipline that cannot be improvised.

Distribution: From Protocol Integrations to Consumer Applications

The Kraken launch is one data point in a broader structural shift. Consider what else has happened in the past twelve months.

Revolut, valued at $75 billion and holding over 50 million users, integrated Uniswap into its platform and is aggressively expanding its crypto infrastructure. Its crypto head of product described 2026 as the year the platform evolves from a buy-and-sell product into “financial infrastructure for how trillions of dollars will be traded, earned and moved.” Revolut applied for a full banking charter in March 2026, weeks after receiving its UK banking licence. Coinbase launched Morpho-powered Bitcoin loans. Robinhood began using Arbitrum for tokenized stock trading across Europe. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion and is preparing to launch its own blockchain. Klarna is testing a stablecoin. PayPal's PYUSD grew 600% in 2025 to $3.6 billion in circulation.

These are not crypto companies making tentative experiments. These are major financial platforms restructuring their product roadmaps around blockchain infrastructure.

The distribution model for DeFi yield is evolving through three distinct generations.

The first generation required direct participation. DeFi-native users connected wallets, navigated protocol interfaces, and managed positions independently. The addressable market was small and technical fluency was the entry requirement.

The current generation added institutional abstraction. Exchanges, custodians, and fund managers began accessing vault strategies through professional interfaces, with capital flowing into curated products managed by dedicated strategy teams. The Kraken model sits at the leading edge of this generation.

The next generation extends the abstraction further. Fintech platforms and neobanks, the Revoluts and the Robinhoods and the platforms that are still deciding whether to move, will offer DeFi-powered products within their existing consumer applications. A user will see a savings rate. They will deposit into what looks and behaves like a standard product. The capital will route through vault infrastructure managed by an institutional strategy team, generating returns through on-chain lending markets and structured positions.

The vault remains invisible. The risk management, the design decisions, the monitoring and rebalancing, all of it happens several layers below the interface the user interacts with.

This is how vaults will onboard the next significant wave of capital. Institutional participants are not going to navigate protocol interfaces. Retail savers are not going to manage DeFi positions. But both groups will use applications built by platforms they trust. When those platforms integrate vault infrastructure cleanly, the capital follows.

What Invisible DeFi Requires

As vault infrastructure becomes the hidden layer beneath consumer and institutional financial products, the standards applied to curation and strategy management must rise to match the expectations of the distribution channels built on top.

Kraken addressed this by selecting institutional risk managers and disclosing fees, risks, and protocol allocations to depositors before they commit capital. That is the right approach. It is also the minimum viable standard for the consumer distribution wave that follows.

A neobank offering a DeFi-powered savings rate to millions of users cannot tolerate opaque collateral choices or undisclosed strategy risks at the vault level. A regulated custodian routing institutional capital through vault infrastructure must demonstrate that the underlying risk management meets institutional standards. Revolut's evolution from a trading platform to “financial infrastructure” cannot be built on yield products that users cannot evaluate.

The transparency and discipline required at the vault layer are not optional features in this model. They are the foundation of the trust that makes distribution possible.

Standardized risk disclosures, robust monitoring, and automation infrastructure are the prerequisites for vault infrastructure to underpin products at scale.

The Question That Remains

Kraken's 40,000 depositors are a proof of concept, not a ceiling. The addressable market for DeFi-powered yield, distributed through trusted consumer interfaces, is orders of magnitude larger. The vault economy is becoming the infrastructure through which DeFi connects to the broader financial system.

As new CeDeFi solutions are launched, the question remains whether the current risk management, lending markets, and vault infrastructure will scale along effortlessly.

The mullet has been styled. The question is how far back it grows.

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