For enterprises looking to offer onchain yield products, the customer-facing experience is only one part of the equation. Behind a simple Earn product sits a network of yield sources, applications, integrations, blockchains, risk controls, transaction infrastructure, and ongoing operational requirements. Fintechs need to decide how much of that infrastructure they should build and operate themselves, and the resources they can commit to building and maintaining the product.

Three Paths to an Earn Offering

Enterprises generally have three options:

• Build complete onchain earn infrastructure end-to-end in-house
• Direct integration into a single onchain yield source
• Leverage vaults as existing battle-tested earn infrastructure

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Build

By building internally, the full Earn stack lives under one roof, from the customer experience and backend infrastructure to yield integrations and strategy management. This may provide experienced teams with greater control, but also makes the enterprise responsible for the technical and operational complexity of the entire offering, from their front-end application to the back-end onchain smart contract architecture.

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Direct Integration

Integration directly with yield sources takes a narrower approach. Rather than building every component of the underlying yield ecosystem, an enterprise can connect directly to individual applications like Aave, Morpho, or other onchain yield providers. This approach can quickly unlock some specific opportunities for customers, but each integration introduces new technical and maintenance overhead. Protocol lock-in can reduce technical flexibility and customer experience as liquidity moves through the digital asset ecosystem to new yield opportunities, while maintaining each bespoke integration and expanding offerings to new jurisdictions with different regulatory requirements can rapidly increase cost and complexity as Earn products scale.

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Vault Infrastructure

Using the right yield infrastructure shifts much of the underlying complexity to a specialized provider. The enterprise can retain ownership of the customer-facing product and the broader user experience, while relying on an underlying vault technology to connect and manage multiple yield sources and strategies. Offering enhanced security, admin and compliance controls, robust vault infrastructure takes away ongoing development, while supporting best-in-class products. This approach makes it easier to offer more Earn opportunities at scale, without maintaining infrastructure for every integration and strategy.

The sections below examine what enterprises gain, and what they take on, with each approach.

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Building and Managing Digital Asset Earn Products In-House

Fintechs have been rapidly integrating stablecoins and other digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), with more than 300 financial institutions supporting stablecoins by the end of 2025. Now these innovative institutions are taking the next step, offering onchain Earn products to their users that put idle crypto assets to work. Earn programs help reduce churn and boost lifetime customer value, but can also introduce new operating costs and challenges for enterprise providers.

Building an Earn offering in-house allows enterprises to own the full stack behind their Earn products. By developing the customer experience and backend infrastructure, maintaining integrations with yield sources, and taking responsibility for selecting and managing the strategies that generate returns, enterprises maintain the greatest degree of control over how Earn functions and fits into the overall business. An enterprise with extensive resources and expertise in developing smart contracts and building onchain infrastructure could develop proprietary strategy logic, risk parameters, or product features unique to their needs.

The Cost of Control

In exchange for tight control, enterprises also assume responsibility for maintaining integrations, monitoring strategies and protocols, managing security and operational risks, and retaining the technical and yield expertise needed to support the product over time.

Since Bitcoin was first introduced in 2008, many leading chains, protocols and yield sources have come and gone. As these yield opportunities change, smart contracts are upgraded, chains evolve, and new risks and opportunities emerge, infrastructure maintenance costs become an ongoing part of operating the Earn business. Internal teams need the capacity to evaluate changes, update integrations, monitor and respond to incidents, and continually assess whether existing strategies remain effective.

Overhead also grows when scaling up or adding features to Earn products. Supporting a small number of assets and yield sources may only require a small team, but expanding across multiple chains, protocols, strategies, and asset types introduces additional integrations and operational dependencies that require technical implementation, testing, monitoring, risk assessment, and maintenance.

For some enterprises, such complexity may be required to provide specialized Earn products to specific customers, or to pursue strategies on the periphery of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. For others, it can divert engineering and operational resources away from the customer-facing product.

Building an Earn offering in-house can make sense when there’s a simple surface area of integrations, and deep in-house expertise with onchain technology. But for enterprises that want to offer access to a broader range of yield sources without taking on the full burden of maintaining each integration and strategy themselves, direct integration or tailored infrastructure can offer a more targeted alternative.

Direct Onchain Integrations for Simple Earn Opportunities

Direct integration can be a more narrow approach to building a digital asset Earn product. Instead of developing the entire enterprise Earn stack internally, financial service providers can connect directly to individual applications that generate yield, such as Aave or Morpho. Enterprises maintain the customer-facing product and the integrations that connect it to those sources, while relying on the underlying protocols to provide the actual yield generation.

This approach can provide a relatively fast path to offering specific, lower yield opportunities without building and managing the infrastructure needed to generate returns using more sophisticated or managed strategies. The tradeoff to the approach comes with scale and security, as many admin and compliance features needed to handle larger Earn programs require ongoing development and maintenance. Let alone the ability to offer distinct products, integrate new yield sources, add blockchains, handle migrations and more. By supporting a small number of established protocols, direct integration can allow enterprises to offer digital asset Earn opportunities without investing in the broader infrastructure required to manage a larger and diversified Earn product, but there are tradeoffs.

Direct Integrations Don’t Eliminate Overhead

The main limitation of direct integration is that each connection to onchain yield creates its own technical and operational requirements. Engineering teams need to build, test, monitor, and maintain connections to individual onchain applications, while product and risk teams need to evaluate changes to those apps and the strategies they support. As new assets, chains, and yield sources are added, those responsibilities accumulate across the offering and often don’t scale efficiently.

Direct integration also makes it more difficult to provide a consistent experience across different yield sources. Each protocol may have different interfaces, transaction requirements, supported assets, risk characteristics, and mechanisms for generating and distributing yield, forcing enterprises to build additional infrastructure and processes to present customers with a coherent product.

For enterprises with a limited number of targeted integrations, that tradeoff may be worthwhile. But as an Earn offering expands, the value of direct access to individual protocols has to be weighed against the growing cost of managing an increasingly fragmented infrastructure stack. At that point, an enterprise may benefit from vaults, an infrastructure layer that can aggregate multiple yield sources while reducing the need to maintain each integration independently.

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Vaults for Broader Earn Offerings

Using a vault infrastructure provider like Veda can allow enterprises to scale their Earn product offerings without developing and maintaining underlying integrations and strategy management infrastructure. Infrastructure providers aggregate access to multiple protocols, assets, chains, applications, and yield strategies through a common infrastructure layer, allowing enterprises to only need to focus on the customer-facing product while relying on the provider to manage much of the overhead associated with broad onchain integration.

In addition to integrations with multiple protocols and chains, infrastructure providers may offer enterprises transaction execution, access to active strategy curation, admin features, security and risk controls, and systems required to monitor and manage multiple integrations at scale. Rather than building new integrations each time an enterprise wants to expand its Earn offering to new assets or find more competitive yield sources, it can access additional opportunities through the vault provider's existing infrastructure.

This model can be particularly useful for enterprises that want to offer a broader range of Earn products or expect their offering to expand over time. Yield infrastructure can provide access to strategies that would be more difficult to support through direct integrations alone, while reducing the engineering and operational resources required to add and maintain each new source. It also allows internal teams to focus more of their resources on the customer experience, product development, discoverability, and business requirements surrounding Earn.

Yield Infrastructure Reduces Overhead Without Sacrificing Yield

By shifting a major portion of the infrastructure and operational responsibility to a trusted and vetted third party, enterprises can rely on an experienced partner to help manage onchain integrations, security practices, and the ability to support a range of strategies and assets. This makes provider selection extremely important. 

When selecting a provider, enterprises need to evaluate how Earn products interface with back-end vault infrastructure. Access to multiple blockchains and yield sources should seamlessly connect to front-end interfaces, with enough technical flexibility to swap in new assets and yield strategies without impacting the user experience.

Compliance capabilities and incident response are also important considerations, particularly for fintechs operating under multinational regulatory and risk-management requirements. It’s important to evaluate vault infrastructure in terms of realized yields on AUM, but also in terms of security practices, audits and ability to support multi-jurisdiction regulatory needs. 

When leveraging a vault provider, the degree of control retained by the enterprise can also vary. Strong vault infrastructure will allow the enterprise and yield strategy managers to determine which assets and sources they make available, how those opportunities are incorporated into the customer experience, and what risk or compliance parameters apply, while handling much of the underlying technical complexity. Too little oversight can expose Earn products to riskier, unproven asset classes and yield sources, while overly restrictive policies can fail to provide a compelling end user product.

For enterprises looking to expand beyond a small set of direct integrations and provide a more compelling Earn product, vault providers offer a scalable, future-proof option that can more effectively attract and retain customers. The enterprise owns the product and customer relationship, while using vault infrastructure to access and manage a wide range of yield opportunities without building each connection independently.

Conclusion

Not all Earn programs serve the same needs, and not all vaults are created equal. The right approach to building an Earn offering ultimately depends on how much infrastructure and overhead an enterprise wants to own based on their expertise with onchain technology and yield curation. 

While building in-house may provide greater control and flexibility, and direct integration can offer a practical first step to onchain yield opportunities, both come with trade-offs in scaling, realized yield, and ongoing overhead infrastructure expenses. For enterprises looking to scale across a broader range of assets, protocols, and strategies, the right vault technology can reduce the complexity of managing those integrations while preserving control over the customer-facing product. The key is matching the infrastructure model to the scope of the offering, the resources available to support it, and the level of control the enterprise requires.

Veda has been working with leading fintechs to power some of the most-used onchain Earn products. To date, having secured more than $32B in volume, supported over 300K users and generated over $100m in yield. The vaults have been trusted by the likes of Kraken to create a flexible and robust earn program which has seen over $800M in deposits across multiple product lines. 

Reach out to Veda to schedule a free consultation to design your bespoke earn today.

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