Beyond Yield: How to Evaluate Vault Infrastructure

More teams than ever are adding onchain yield to their products. Exchanges, fintechs, wallets, payment companies. Most of them don’t want to build and run the vault layer themselves, so they go shopping for infrastructure.

Most of them start by comparing APYs and while yield matters, any serious provider can get you to a competitive number, what separates providers is everything else; whether you can trust them with customer money, whether the vault can actually do what your strategy needs onchain, how fast you can change things, what the experience is like for a customer who doesn’t know or care which chain they’re on, and whether you can enforce the rules your business runs on.

Here’s what we’ve found matters most when teams evaluate vault infrastructure. Six things, roughly in order.

1. Track record: do serious people trust them?

Start here, before you look at a single yield number.

A vault touches smart contracts, protocols, and customer funds. A problem anywhere in that stack wipes out years of incremental yield. So the first question is not “is it secure?” (everyone says yes) but “what is the evidence?”

• How long have they been operating, and at what scale? Securing a few million in a test vault is not the same as securing billions through a market cycle.
• Who is already building on it? Reputable clients are the best signal you will get. If regulated businesses have chosen the provider, that tells you something about the operational and compliance maturity underneath.
• How do they handle upgrades and fund movement? Who can change a strategy, who can move funds, and what stops a bad actor or a mistake?

No track record removes risk. A long one, at scale, with names you recognize, is the closest thing you get to proof.

2. Yield access: can the vault do what it needs to do onchain?

This is the yield question, though it covers more than APY.

A vault’s returns come from the strategies it can run. The strategies it can run depend on what the infrastructure can reach and what it can execute. So ask:

• Chains: Is it on the chains where the yield is, and where your users are?
• Assets: Can it hold the stablecoins, RWAs, and other assets your product needs?
• Protocols: Is it integrated with the places that actually generate the returns?
• Actions: Can it do everything a strategy requires? Deposit, withdraw, rebalance, claim rewards, loop, hedge. The widest set of strategies needs the widest set of actions.

The core question is whether the vault can take the right actions, with the right assets, on the right protocols. If the answer is “mostly,” your curator will spend their time working around the gaps instead of finding yield.

One caution. Broad access makes good strategies possible; it does not guarantee them. A headline APY tells you nothing about the strategy, the risk, or the fees behind it. Ask about those separately.

3. Speed of change: how fast can you launch and iterate?

Launching the vault is day one. The real test is month six, when your users show up on a different chain, a better yield source appears, or you want to switch from USDC to USDT.

The first question is whether the product can be upgraded at all. If it can’t, nothing else in this section matters.

If it can, the question is how fast and how painful:

• Adding a new chain
• Adding a new yield source or protocol
• Swapping one asset for another
• Changing curators
• Shipping a new feature to users

Ask for real numbers. Days or months? Does it take a bespoke integration every time? How much of your own engineering goes into each change?

A system can be technically flexible and operationally slow. The provider that lets you make a change swiftly is the one that lets you keep up with your market.

4. Curator tooling: does it make the strategy team’s job easier?

This one is secondary, but worth a look.

Infrastructure and curation solve different problems. Infrastructure provides the rails; the curator runs the strategy on them. A great curator on weak rails still ends up constrained.

Most of what a curator needs is covered by access (question 2). Beyond that, ask what the platform does to make day-to-day operation easier: monitoring, execution, making changes without a long coordination loop. The less manual work in running the vault, the more time goes into the strategy itself.

5. User experience: does it meet users where they are?

This is the question most teams skip, and it is the one that decides whether your yield product actually gets used.

Say you are a multichain business. Users on Solana, Ethereum, and Base, all holding stablecoins, all wanting yield. Can you offer one product across all three chains? Or does the infrastructure force three separate vaults, or worse, force users to bridge to the one chain you support?

Your users should not have to learn what a bridge is to earn yield. Most customers who aren’t crypto-native won’t do it, and you’ll lose them.

The features that matter here have nothing to do with APY:

• Multichain, one product. Meet users on the chain they are already on.
• Auto-claiming and auto-compounding. If the strategy earns rewards, the vault should claim and reinvest them. Pushing that onto users is a bad experience for anyone who is not a power user.
• Clean deposit and withdrawal. It should feel like part of your product, not a detour.

Then ask the question that separates providers: are these features native to the platform? And if one is missing, will they build it for you, or tell you to figure it out?

Some providers hand you a vault and leave the rest to you. That is a real cost, both in time to market and in the engineering your team carries going forward, and it belongs in the comparison.

6. Controls: can it enforce your rules?

Every business has rules about who can use its product. Vault infrastructure has to be able to enforce them.

Depending on what you are and where you operate, that can mean:

• Restricting the vault to your own platform’s users
• Restricting it to KYC’d users only
• Sanctions screening and blacklisting
• Configurable permissions for who can do what

Not every product needs every control. If you need one and the infrastructure cannot do it, you end up building a compliance layer on top of someone else’s vault. Check this early, with your legal and compliance people in the room. The technology is a tool; the obligation is still yours.

The real decision: what is your second reason?

After enough of these conversations, a pattern shows up.

Yield is the first reason everyone picks a provider. It is also the reason that stops mattering fastest, because any credible option gets you to a competitive number.

The pick is made on the second reason. For one team it is security and track record. For another it is compliance controls. For another it is the user experience across chains, or simply how much operating burden they are willing to carry.

So figure out your second reason before you start comparing. Then run each provider through the six questions:

For each one, sort the answer into three buckets: available today, available with custom work, or not supported. Most bad infrastructure decisions come from the middle bucket, where “we can build that” quietly turns into your team’s problem.

Pick the infrastructure that supports the product you need to run, not the one that wins the APY comparison this week.

‍

If you are evaluating vault infrastructure and want a second opinion on your requirements, talk to the Veda team. We are happy to walk through the trade-offs before you commit to an architecture.