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A
What people need to understand though is it's really important that people know the level of risk that they're taking. It's not critical, in my opinion, that there's no risk at all. Right. The whole point of finance is, is moving risk and trading off things like liquidity and yield. I think we want to support a large universe of interesting assets. It's just users need to understand they shouldn't think they're having some safe, you know, insured savings account and suddenly they're getting exposure to basically an on chain hedge fund like Stream Finance.
B
Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream though. Heads up. This was pre recorded a couple weeks before publication. Now we'll take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Kape, America's privacy First mobile carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off six months at Cape Co Unchained. Today's guest is Sun Rakupathy, co founder and CEO of Veda. Welcome, Sun.
A
Thanks for having me.
B
So we booked this podcast a week or two ago and now suddenly there's a lot more chatter about Pulse than there was even at that time. And they're already a big business, about $67 billion in TVL and vaults. And why don't we just start with the basics? Because we've never had a deep dive on them here in the podcast. So Veda is an on chain vault infrastructure provider for institutions. But let's just start with the question, what is a vault?
A
Yeah, great question. So vaults are basically on chain vehicles for giving users exposure to on chain markets. Right. The general problem that exists are defi markets are diverse and complex and very hard for normal people to use. And vaults have emerged as this primitive that sits on top of defi markets that allow users to get simple exposure to these underlying markets. Another way to think about this is vaults are infrastructure for creating financial products on top of onchain markets. Those can be lending, it can be baskets of rwas trading vaults. There's a huge spectrum. So vaults are a word that everyone uses to mean different things. But the thing that sort of unifies all of this is this layer for giving users exposure to on chain markets.
B
Okay. Yeah. You know, it reminds me a little bit of some of the things that were bubbling up during defi summer, like yearn or even I think like instadap might have been another one. But I'm curious to hear like how you even got into crypto and came to launch Veda.
A
Yeah, my journey has been sort of circuitous and wrong and long. I've been building in Defi for the last five years. Before that I was actually enrolled in a PhD in computer science. Machine learning had nothing to do with crypto or defi. I'd heard of bitcoin, but nothing beyond that. And a friend of mine from college was actually joining a startup in the cosmos ecosystem back in the day before my PhD. I was starting to wonder if maybe entrepreneurship and doing startups was a better fit. And so I deferred my PhD and joined DeFi. What I found was an industry that is in many ways very interdisciplinary. Right. You can have you get whatever your academic interest is, whether it's game theory, economics, cryptography, computer science, there's a place for you in the crypto world where you can do something interesting. So that was the thing that sort of initially nerd sniped me. Over time, what I started to understand was that the things we were building today are the infrastructure and foundations for a new financial system that is going to touch billions of people. And when I joined in 2021, the space was basically degens, like yield farming was crazy. There were all kinds of interesting game theory experiments being run on chain. And a perspective that I adopted then, and I still think is true is that degens are kind of like the beta testers of the on chain world. Like we needed people who were willing to take massive amounts of financial risk with their own assets to test all of the infrastructure that we've been building. Without that, these things, these systems would never get battle tested at scale and would never be adopted. And so that's been really fun. I've seen crypto and Defi evolve from what was effectively a onchain casino with crazy experiments being run to now. What we see is an ecosystem of really strong and diverse on chain primitives that are being adopted by enterprises and institutions globally.
B
Okay. Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about vaults is this is sort of the solution to what most people kind of think they want for all their money, which is just to get yield and to have it be sort of automatic and you know, they don't have to think about it, but I know it's not really simple to deliver that. So talk us through what vaults look like on the back end and how they work.
A
Sure. So there are three sort of dimensions that are really important for vaults. One is access. So users want access to the widest range of on chain primitives and markets. Again, that can be across multiple chains. It can be across multiple asset types, whether those are stable coins or other sorts of crypto assets and diversity of strategy type. Right. Trading, lending, RWAs. So that's one thing that vaults need to solve for. They need to be able to give users access to whatever sorts of on chain products that they want. The second dimension is control. So vaults need to be able to impose very strong guardrails over what can happen to assets. When you think of the evolution of defi in the on chain world, these products are increasingly being distributed through fintechs as opposed to direct consumers who are creating their own wallets and coming and experimenting on chain. And what fintechs need when they're underwriting these products is an ability to impose their own compliance policies and risk controls. So vaults need to do that for them. And the third most subtle but probably most important feature of vaults is they need to give users verifiability into what can happen to their assets. Right. That means multiple things. It means users need predictability into when and how they can withdraw from these products. They need to understand what sorts of strategies and risks these products are going to be taking on their behalfs. And finally, this is really important, but it's sort of taken for granted. Users need to see where their assets are at all times. Right. This is sort of the big promise of defi in the on chain world where you don't get the like FTX BlockFi issue, where there's centralized intermediaries who are taking basically unaccountable risk with your assets and you have no idea what's going on. The beauty of this technology is that you can actually see exactly what the health of your portfolio is, what sorts of risk you're exposed to. There's a separate question of understanding it, but the vault's job is to ensure that all of this is very transparent for users.
B
Yeah, I mean, after what was really just traumatic year of 2022 for crypto, I could imagine that for anybody who lived through that, that last quality you talked about is super important. But also, you know, in terms of that back end, explain like where the yield comes from, like what are all the different buckets? Yeah, just how is this being generated?
A
Yeah, I would say there's a couple of different categories. Some are more dominant today, but I expect the industry to evolve. So when we talk about vaults today, the thing that the largest fintechs are doing today is mostly on chain lending, right? That's what Robinhood, Coinbase, Kraken, Metamask, a number of these other companies are building today with vaults getting exposure to protocols like Morpho, Aave on the Solana side, Kamino Jupiter. This universe of sort of peer to peer lending protocols, which they look very different than primitives that you see in traditional finance. But increasingly, as more assets move on chain through things like tokenized funds, tokenized equities, that increases the universe of products that can be built. And so increasingly what we're seeing is demand for vaults that do things that are beyond just simple lending, right? Things like maybe I want access to tokenized treasuries and money market funds, maybe I want baskets of tokenized equities. So vaults are really this very flexible primitive that today have found significant PMF in the on chain lending world. But my view is long term that this will evolve. And we're already seeing that from some demand in the market.
B
And so, you know, there's a lot of different ways to get yield and defi. So when people get yield via a vault, how is that different from other ways that people get yield in both defi and also how they get yield in traffi?
A
Yeah, when you think of defi, you basically have two choices to participate in the system. You can either onboard directly to these underlying peer to peer protocols, right? Think of staking primitives, lending protocols, exchange, decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and others, so you can go and use those products directly. The problem is that those are really meant for expert users, right? Not just people who understand risk at a level, at a smart contract level and a protocol economics level. But even the interface, right? Creating a wallet, managing private keys, knowing what to use these protocols for. So that's the mode that we've seen dominate for most of Defi's life. This is a function of the user base being very defi native and crypto native again, we call them degens. But over time and where we are today, most of the distribution in Defi today and going forward, most of the net new people who are actually getting exposure to these markets and protocols are coming through fintech platforms, platforms where they already live their financial lives. Maybe they're holding stablecoins and the next question they have is how do I put these to work? How do I make money on my stablecoins, right? Or how do I access financing against my crypto assets? So these are user needs that exist beyond a user base that is crypto native and this is really where vaults enter the picture and are seeing a lot of traction. What vaults do is they provide a very simple interface, right? You don't need to deal with the complexities of interacting directly with all of these various peer to peer protocols. You can just express a preference, right? Like look, I want to earn yield. I want most of my assets to be withdrawable 24, 7. I have a low risk profile, right? I don't, I don't know much more than that. But I don't want to take crazy risk, right? Maybe these are my savings and I don't want to go crazy far on the risk curve. And then the fintechs and the parties that come together to build these vault products can solve that user preference and offer them a product that abstracts all of the complexities of Defi. So I wouldn't characterize this as a vault or doing something fundamentally different from the onchain world. They're just packaging up the markets that many different parties have created on chain and creating a user facing product that's very easy to consume and to understand.
B
All right, so in a moment we're going to talk a little bit more about Veda's role in all this. But first we'll take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. If you hold crypto on your phone, your biggest vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your carrier. AT&T Verizon and T Mobile have been breached again and again. And SIM swaps are still one of the easiest ways for attackers to drain accounts. That's where Kape comes in. America's privacy first mobile carrier, same premium service, but Cape rotates the identifier on Your Sim every 24 hours, deletes your call and text metadata after a day, and protects against SIM swaps with a 24 word recovery phrase that only you control. You also get two middle to end encrypted secondary numbers for banking and signups. So you stop handing your real number to every app that asks go to Cape co unchained and use code unchained for 33% off your first six months. Back to my conversation with Sun. So as we discussed, Veda offers infrastructure for these vaults. So we what exactly does that mean? And break down what Veda's role is versus like for instance, curators.
A
So vault, this is really important. There's a distinction between the actual risk management that's happening at an economic level and what the infrastructure needs are. So Veda is an infrastructure provider primarily. Our job is to build a platform that Allows curators and distributors and users to get access to whatever forms of on chain markets and on chain products they want. Right. Our goal is to make this as wide as possible, meaning we want to support the widest range of chains and assets and protocols and markets. And doing that in a way that's secure. Right. That. That turns out to be a really hard problem. How do you integrate things quickly while ensuring that, you know, you don't compromise on security? Once we establish that universe of products that can be built on our platform, this is where a role like a curator comes in who's basically solving that user preference and packaging up these different markets that we've made available to fit that fintech or that user's need. Right. So if that's determining what collateral to lend against. Right. There's a risk management question there of how do we underwrite different forms of collateral if it's managing a liquidity buffer so that users always have a guarantee to be able to withdraw up to X percent of their portfolio? That's a curator decision. So how we like to think about it at Veda is when you deploy and create a vault, there's really three parties that come together to make this happen. There's the vault infrastructure provider that's creating that platform and the smart contracts that actually hold and deploy the assets. There's the curator that's doing the risk management and then selecting collateral types and things of that nature. And then there's the distributor who typically owns the user relationship. And they have views on what their users want. They may have strategic needs for these products. So all three of these parties come together to deploy an instance of a vault that meets a very specific product need.
B
Okay, so now let's talk about one of the aspects that people should definitely know about, because even though, you know, in the comparison to the centralized lenders that we had seen, you know, Blockfi and Celsius, there is of course still risk when it comes to vaults and defi. Um, so one aspect would be that potentially the curators are taking on risk to get the yield. So if something goes wrong and let. So let's say we'll, we'll go to kind of the end of a, you know, potential event here. Let's say a user put some money into a vault and the end result is they didn't get some or even all of their money back. What are the different possible things that might have happened to cause that result?
A
Yeah, so this is a question of risk. Right. When a user puts their money into this kind of system. What are the layers of risk that they're accepting? Because there are different layers. So there's one level of risk which is just raw smart contract risk. Right. At the end of the day, all of these things, whether it's the vault itself or the underlying protocols themselves, or the assets that they're all built on chain in code that's running on the blockchain, which we call smart contracts. And those can have inherent risks. In fact, the sort of exploits that we saw back in 2021 for over that time period, those were actually mostly smart contract based exploits where there's some flaw of logic in the code that allows for someone to basically steal funds. So that's one form of risk that's something that could go wrong. One just side comment is that what we've seen in recent history over the last six to 12 months is smart contract risk has come way down as we've converged on much better coding practices, better auditing tools, better cyber capabilities. But what's gone up is actually key management risk or operational risk where you have layers of different protocols that have some governance functions that do things like upgrade their protocol or allow the whitelisting of new markets. And that's actually turned out to be the layer where risk is now consolidated. This was true of Kelp, the kelp incident. It's true of, you know, Drift. Basically all many of the major exploits that we've seen over the last six months were operational failures. So that's a form of risk that customers might be take or users might be taking. Right. You really have to look at the supply chain of defi protocols, assets, vaults, and look at the governance risk in those. And then the final one is economic risk and collateral risk. Right. Even if you're doing something very simple like a lending strategy, what's really important is that the value of the collateral that is securing the loan doesn't drop more quickly than it can be liquidated and actually used to repay users. So an example of this is where collateral just gets exploited and, you know, instantly wipes out all of its value. So that's sort of the spectrum of risk. It goes from smart contract to operational to economic risk. Different parties are involved in securing different parts of the stack. Like I said, smart contract risk. We've made a lot of progress over the last five years to the point where very few exploits today at scale are a result of smart contract risk. Now I think the industry needs to solve the operational layer and that's one of the most important areas.
B
Okay. And so in that Scenario I painted, it assumes that the user lost some money or didn't get all their money back. But are there situations where when a vault has a loss that it isn't necessarily the user who eats that loss? And if so, what might those scenarios be?
A
Yeah, one. One thing that there's a lot of interest in is insurance. I think especially as these products become more mainstream and are adopted by traditional fintechs and normal consumers, insurance becomes really compelling. So this is an area where there's a lot of work going on and we've actually started to see insurance programs go out. We haven't seen a major claim be processed yet. So that's always something that people should be skeptical of. Right. It's easy to look at the marketing of insurance programs, but until we see a major event where we actually see what happens to claims, it's really hard to know. So that's one sort of way of answering this question. It's, you know, insurance is sort of this category of transferring risk between players or people. On the other hand, right, when you think of the large brands that are now building these products, right, There are. There are scenarios I can imagine where if someone loses money, it's in the interest of the various businesses that are involved to cover that loss, right. Whether that's a distributor of fintech, whether it's an underlying protocol, whether it's a vault provider. So these are sort of the people that are available to cover losses. Either you transfer risk via insurance or someone who's constructed the product has just, you know, again, chosen to cover those losses, or the user has to eat them if they've accepted the risk.
B
And one other thing is, you know, after the RSE attack, a lot of people talked about how when you're vetting partners, you're not always vetting certain aspects of their work. Right. Like, you know, how. How did they manage those keys? And I wondered if there's some kind of, like, checklist that you think either, you know, the different providers in this world should use to vet their partners, or even for, like, a user who's considering, do I want to put my money in this vault? Like, what are all the different ways that you kind of that who you might be working with?
A
Yeah, this is a really complicated and deep question. The first thing I'll say is that we absolutely need operational standards that make it easy for end users to actually understand what kind of operational risk they're taking. We can't expect end users to be able to do the diligence, to look at the supply chain and see which keys have which roles. It's just not practical. But what you can do is rely on credible third parties who do this for a living, like, you know, rating agencies who can evaluate the risk of these financial products all the way down the stack. And we're actually starting to see that category form both with crypto native players, like what Cordura is doing within Redstone. And even some large traditional players like S and P are starting to get interested in rating vaults. So that's one flavor of things that are important. It's that users should not be expected to do this assessment. It should come from experts who, who do this as their core business. As far as, like, best practices, obviously, you know, Veda, we have our own diligence process when we think of product construction and we work with partners. It's really important that people like key management. Best practices for key management are really important here. Things like important keys should be secured by multisigs with time locks where every signer is using hardware keys. These are some of the basic best practices that get you there, how you sign transactions, right. Are you blind signing in devices that aren't isolated? So there are definitely best practices that are forming. What's not obvious to users of the product, are those best practices being followed across the whole chain?
B
Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a much harder question to resolve. So now let's also talk about an incident last November with Stream Finance. It blew up and created about 285 million worth of exposure in vaults. And that especially happened for vaults where the curators had chased high yields. And I wondered if you have seen an evolution in the vault space since then. Like, do you think, you know from that time that you would say, you think that potentially is less likely to happen again, or do you still see curators taking risks that you think could lead to a similar situation?
A
I definitely think post Stream, this was around the 10:10 time there has absolutely been a scaling back of risk taking on Chain. Right. The dynamic that everyone's talking about today on Twitter is this idea that the only way to juice yields on these products is to continue going farther down the risk curve. And as curators compete to offer the higher yield, the highest yield, there's this tendency to just do that on behalf of users, even if users aren't aware of the risk that they're taking. But I think we've definitely seen that sort of practice start to scale back significantly after the events of Stream and other similar incidents. I think this is natural, right? Like, users are becoming smarter, they Were they? There was a general, like pulling out of funds from these kind of products in general across the board. Right. And so that I think made participants like curators a little bit more conscientious. Now do I think that this will never happen again? I don't think so. I think it will happen at some point in the future in the sense that one of the points of DeFi is that this is an open financial system where any sort of long tail asset can move on chain and be composable with a broader universe. Right. So enabling financing against complex long tail assets, that's one of the core value props of DeFi. Right. And when you accept that, what it means is that there's going to be risk in the system. What people need to understand though is it's really important that people know the level of risk that they're taking. Right. It's not critical, in my opinion, that there's no risk at all. Right. The whole point of finance is, is moving risk and trading off things like liquidity and yield. I think we want to support a large universe of interesting assets. It's just users need to understand they shouldn't think they're having some safe, you know, insured savings account and suddenly they're getting exposure to basically an on chain hedge fund like Stream Finance.
B
Okay, so then from the user's perspective, I'm sure that when they're looking at the different vaults, that they'll definitely be, you know, evaluating the curators, you know, these. So these firms are, you know, tasked with mapping out the risk, with choosing the market setting caps, we're rebalancing all those things. So when you think about evaluating curators, what are some of the main metrics that you think are important to look at?
A
Yeah, there's, there's very basic ones like how long has this curator been operating in production? What kind of track record did they have? What kind of assets have they curated? Right. I think that's, that's really important. So operating history is just one very basic thing that I think it is a heuristic, but it's a really important one. Beyond that, when you look at what curators need to be able to do, it is a very complex and technical problem of both being able to underwrite different forms of collateral and assets, which is a very like traditional risk management capability, but also really understand technical risk within DeFi and the nuances and idiosyncrasies of risk within, you know, crypto assets. So that's again, smart contract risk governance protocols. Curators actually need to be able to do both of those things. So that, that's sort of a way to evaluate, it's like how long and how big are these curators? How long have they been around and how big are they? And what sorts of expertise and technical capabilities do they have to be able to safely navigate on chain markets?
B
Okay, so we are recording. Shortly after SEC Commissioner Hester Purse released a statement saying that when it comes to vault vaults, some of them could potentially implicate federal securities laws. She wrote, quote, a vault, for example, could be a common enterprise in which users invest money with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the vault deployers and curators entrepreneurial or managerial efforts. I'm sure for anybody who's been in crypto for any number of years, they will recognize that this line comes from the quote, unquote, how we test, which you know, is what in the US they use to determine whether or not an investment is subject to securities laws. How did you read her statement? What were your takeaways?
A
Let me zoom out a bit and first just contextualize this with what this means for the market. So the first important point is that this was inevitable and I think a lot of people understand that it was inevitable. But why it's happening now, like why regulators are paying attention now as opposed to over the last five years, is because these products are finally becoming mainstream, right? It's no longer just these very sophisticated whales or degens who are using this technology. It's now being distributed again through fintech to real, normal people and businesses who don't fully understand the onchain world. And so that's happening as we speak, right? Robinhood launched their EARN program a couple of weeks ago and I imagine many of the users of that product have never touched DEFI in their lives before. So that's one thing, right? It's very. It was inevitable that this would get the attention of regulators precisely because these products are finally becoming successful. The second thing I'll say is that it's actually good like that. Regulators are paying attention and engaging with this category. You know, Veda has been engaging with regulators for the last couple months. You know, Tongvi Lee, who's Veda's general counsel, Laura, you know very well, she's been an expert on this and has been working really closely to educate regulators on what vaults are, what the design space looks like, different trade offs. So that's one thing I'll say now in terms of Commissioner Purse's statement today, I think she's touching on something that many of us in the space have been saying for a long time, which is, you can't just call 20 different things a vault and pretend that they're all the same thing and carry the same risks and the same regulatory implications. What Commissioner Puris is saying is that different aspects of a vault design inform whether these products should be regulated under securities law or should not be. And so it's a really nuanced question. Right. You have some vaults that don't take exposure to securities. And our view at Veda is that, you know, Defi protocols and markets like AAVE and Morpho are not securities. That's a view that we have pretty strongly. And so vaults that do. On chain lending, they're questions, right? This is a product that's not actually taking exposure to underlying securities. On the other hand, as more securities move on chain, we are increasingly going to see vaults that take direct exposure to securities. And those clearly do implicate securities laws in various ways. And then it's a question of what does that structure look like? In what way do they implicate laws? So that's just my quick read of the situation. There's many people on the timeline who are viewing this as like, you know, the end of vaults or something. I actually think it's the opposite. I think there's so many players out there, financial institutions and fintechs who are really excited about this technology and they are just dipping their toes in, but what's preventing them from jumping all the way in is a lack of clarity and guidelines for what, what these products are and what the laws are that surround them.
B
Yeah, I didn't read it as being some kind of warning shot to vaults. It was more like she was saying, it's very much like the Howey test, where facts and circumstances matter and, you know, all the little details around how any individual vault is structured is what's going to be the determinant. So, yeah, it definitely felt like she was just saying, pay attention to what you're doing. You know, don't. Don't make it like that famous line from the Howey test, which is why I think she know, modified it for this statement. So as you mentioned, vaults are just becoming more popular. And in January, you launched as the infrastructure partner to Kraken Defi earn. And I wondered how that partnership has been going and if there's any, you know, surprises from it or anything about it that has influenced, you know, how you think this space will grow.
A
Yeah, Kraken. Kraken has, I think, confirmed beyond Any sort of doubt that enterprise distribution is the right way to export DEFI to the world? Right. Taking these products and these on chain markets, packaging them up in a simple format that normal people can use and putting it into a. Into a distribution channel that already has millions of users. That's very obviously now the way that Defi can be successful. And in terms of our partnership with Kraken, this has been. It's even exceeded my expectations in terms of growth. So we launched in January with three stablecoin products and a couple months later that partnership expanded to BTC earn. And across all of these products, that we've grown to over 600 million in assets across over 80,000 users, many of whom may have never used DEFI before. So it just shows you there's a huge amount of latent demand for access to these products. When you package them in the right way and embed them in these interfaces with the right ux. It's very clear why these things are taking off and growing. And I think a lot of people are paying attention to the category off, the success of products like what Kraken has done, Robin Hood, Coinbase and a number of others.
B
All right, so as you mentioned, this is a very competitive space right now. And I wondered how you think about how to compete amongst, you know, all the different players. There's Centaura, Metamorpho era, there's just a number of them. So what are you, you know, what do you think will be the differentiators?
A
Yeah, one thing is that there's. When you look at the construction of these products, right, there's so many different ways that so many different layers that come together to make a vault. So Centaura is a curator. Right. And we work with Centaura. In fact, they're. They're the curator for the Kraken products. Morpho has their own vault protocol that's specific to Morpho's markets. But many of our vaults, we're one of the largest users of Morpho. Many of our vaults take exposure to Morpho. So one just thematic thing here is that the market is growing so quickly that it's much more fruitful to just work with people and grow the pie than it is to sort of too aggressively compete with each other. It just doesn't make sense to be knives out in a category that still has a thousand X to go from here. And now in terms of Veda's value prop, why we think we're differentiated, we're one of the oldest vault providers. My team's been building vaults for five years, which there's a lot of things you learn through different market conditions and cycles that are just impossible to learn a priori from a textbook, right? On top of that, we are one of the few that are actually tested at enterprise scale, right? We're at billion dollar scale. We've never had a security incident. And enterprises buy on precedent, right? Nobody wants to be the first one to integrate some net new piece of infrastructure and take additional risk in what's already a fairly risky offering. So I think maturity of go to market, maturity of operating history, in addition to having the best technology stack, these are what I view as our core differentiators.
B
All right, sun, well, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained.
A
Thanks for having me.
B
Thanks everyone for joining this podcast. We will catch you next time. Bye. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guests and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com. It.
Episode: Could Some Vaults Trigger Securities Law? Yes, but It's Case by Case
Host: Laura Shin
Guest: Sun Rakupathy (Co-founder and CEO, Veda)
Date: August 9, 2026
This episode explores the rising prominence of on-chain vaults in decentralized finance (DeFi)—their structure, the risks users face, and the regulatory questions emerging as vaults go mainstream. Sun Rakupathy, CEO of Veda, provides expert insight into how vaults work, the evolving risk landscape post-Stream Finance, how platforms like Veda serve both institutional and end users, and discusses recent statements from the SEC regarding vaults and securities law.
[01:10 - 06:59]
Definition & Function:
Vaults are mechanisms that provide users with exposure to on-chain markets, abstracting away the complexities of DeFi protocols. They bundle strategies like lending, trading, and baskets of real-world assets (RWAs), acting as financial infrastructure atop DeFi primitives.
Evolution of DeFi Users:
Sun describes how "degens" (risk-tolerant early adopters) originally tested DeFi, but the user base now includes more mainstream, risk-averse participants through fintechs and institutional channels.
Back-end Mechanics:
Vaults must address:
Yield Generation:
Currently, vaults mostly focus on on-chain lending (Aave, Morpho, etc.), but as tokenized assets increase, strategies will diversify to include tokenized treasuries, equities, and more.
[08:33 - 11:03]
[12:21 - 14:10]
Infrastructure vs. Risk Management:
Three-Party Model:
[14:10 - 22:05]
Layers of Risk:
Insurance & Loss Retention:
Insurance is growing, but few major claims have been tested. In some cases, businesses may cover user losses proactively.
"It's easy to look at the marketing of insurance programs, but until we see a major event where we actually see what happens to claims, it's really hard to know." — Sun [17:52]
Partner Vetting & User Checklists:
[22:05 - 24:04]
Behavioral Changes Post-Incident:
The Stream Finance incident led to significant risk reduction by curators as users became more aware and cautious.
Risk Disclosure:
Users must distinguish between vault products and insured "savings accounts"—some vaults may resemble on-chain hedge funds in risk exposure.
[24:04 - 25:35]
[25:35 - 29:17]
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce's Statement:
Some vaults could fall under the Howey test, thus qualifying as securities; determination is "case by case" depending on vault structure and strategy.
Industry Implications:
Sun welcomes regulatory engagement and argues that clarity and guidelines will encourage rather than restrict innovation and mainstream adoption.
[29:17 - 33:18]
Kraken Partnership:
Market Competition:
Industry is in rapid growth, more about collaboration than harsh competition.
Veda’s edge: long operating history, no security incidents at billion-dollar scale, and trusted enterprise integration.
"Maturity of go to market, maturity of operating history, in addition to having the best technology stack, these are what I view as our core differentiators." — Sun [32:52]
Sun’s commentary is clear, measured, and technical, yet approachable—balancing optimism for innovation with realism about persistent risks and regulatory uncertainty. Laura Shin’s style remains direct, curious, and probing, ensuring practical explanations for a broad, non-expert audience.
As vaults move into the financial mainstream, users and providers must balance innovation with transparency, risk assessment, and regulatory clarity. Veda, along with partners like Kraken, exemplifies how infrastructure players are shaping the next wave of DeFi adoption—where operational rigor, user education, and legal compliance will matter as much as yield optimization and technical sophistication.