How Veda Powered EtherFi’s Crosschain Migration to Optimism

Veda facilitated EtherFi’s move to the Optimism Layer-2 blockchain in less than three days, bringing 70,000 active payment cards and 300,000 accounts over to the new ecosystem with zero downtime.

As a growing global neobank, EtherFi needed a quick and smooth migration for its large EtherFi Cash user base after fees became cost-prohibitive on the prior blockchain. Because thousands of EtherFi users rely on their cards to make payments, it was important that they continued to be able to pay with their cards as usual during the migration. 

Veda’s onchain yield infrastructure powers five vaults for EtherFi Liquid, which lets users deposit funds into non-custodial vaults that they can then borrow against to spend with EtherFi Cash payment cards. Veda also powers EtherFi’s sETHFI staking vault. 

This underlying infrastructure needed to be set up on Optimism without freezing deposits or withdrawals. Vault receipt tokens, which function as the onchain accounting mechanism for user funds, also needed to move over securely without compromise. Our vault stack successfully powered this migration, with no user action required at any step in the process.

“This was a first-of-its-kind migration. Other vault architectures aren’t built to execute such a move at scale,” said Sunand Raghupathi, CEO and co-founder of Veda. “Our job was to ensure EtherFi’s products migrated in a secure and swift manner.” 

During this process, EtherFi Cash cards continued to see significant user activity, with over $1 million in transactions processed per day.

How it worked

With Veda’s vault architecture, crosschain migrations involve the movement of user receipt tokens to an identical vault on the destination blockchain. Once receipt tokens have moved over, the vault deployment on the prior chain can be deprecated.

The vault’s risk manager, or curator, can choose to re-allocate depositor funds to DeFi protocols on the new blockchain if desired. However, because Veda vaults support multichain allocation, this is not required. Our vaults can live on one blockchain while allocating funds to markets on another. 

All Veda vaults involved in a crosschain migration continue to be non-custodial throughout the process. This means users retain the ability to initiate withdrawals, and neither Veda nor the enterprise partner can withdraw user funds. 

Making migration seamless

Working with the EtherFi team, we:

1. Deployed 5 new vaults on Optimism for sETHFI, eBTC, eUSD, LiquidUSD, and LiquidBTC
2. Reconfigured the existing LiquidETH vault on Optimism with new module deployments to enable deposits, withdrawals, and receipt token bridging
3. Enabled asset bridging on all 6 vaults from Ethereum mainnet to Optimism
4. Turned off deposits on the 6 corresponding vault instances on Scroll, beginning the controlled deprecation process
5. Set up extra asset bridging routes from Scroll to Ethereum mainnet
6. Enabled vault receipt token bridging from Ethereum mainnet to Optimism with elevated rate limits sized for the migration volume
7. Facilitated the vault receipt token move from Scroll to Ethereum mainnet to Optimism

After this, our team tightened the Ethereum mainnet to Optimism receipt token bridging rate limits back to standard operating levels and lowered the Ethereum to Scroll limits to deprecation thresholds.

Throughout this three-day period, we generated and executed complex transactions across Scroll, Optimism, and Ethereum to enable receipt token and asset bridging, and reviewed transactions EtherFi originated to confirm accuracy before execution. EtherFi’s curators then moved the underlying funds along the same route, completing the migration process. 

In its assessment of the migration, the Optimism team wrote: “Institutional observers who run compliance desks and treasury operations at scale saw $220M move cleanly and flagged it as remarkable: no incident report, no customer communication, no ‘we apologize for the inconvenience.’”

The Veda difference

Our BoringVault architecture has several capabilities that make crosschain moves efficient and straightforward:

Crosschain vault receipt tokens – These tokens move between supported chains as first-class objects rather than being torn down and reissued, preserving the relationship between depositor and balance throughout the move.

Deterministic deployments – Vaults on a destination chain can be deployed to predictable addresses, simplifying coordination across an enterprise stack.

Multichain yield strategies – A vault on one chain can deploy capital across other chains and protocols, so the destination chain doesn't need to host every protocol the yield strategy uses.

Modular vaults – Existing vaults on the desired chain can be reconfigured with new modules, as we did for LiquidETH on Optimism, to meet changing needs. Our stack can support 20+ chains and multiple bridging solutions. 

Why this matters for enterprise

As more institutions integrate onchain yield, chain decisions will keep evolving. New L2s will launch. Existing chains will gain or lose momentum. Fees, performance, and reach will shift. 

Because of this, businesses no longer have to treat their initial chain choice as permanent. When a move needs to happen, migration must be timely and secure, not a multi-month engineering project that puts user activity and funds at risk.

“What stood out to us in this migration wasn't just the speed, it was that our users never had to think about it. 70,000 cardholders kept swiping, deposits and withdrawals kept moving, and the entire underlying ecosystem shifted around them. That's the kind of infrastructure work that should be invisible, and Veda delivered it." - Charles Mountain, Head of Ecosystem at EtherFi

There can be many reasons why an enterprise platform may need to switch to a new chain. A blockchain may experience market volatility, higher fees, liquidity changes, deprecation, or other downstream effects that can impact the end user experience. Flexibility to migrate chains if needed is important because these network effects can ultimately impact the long-term success of the product. When integrating with Veda, businesses can rest easy knowing the option to migrate chains, switch curators, or add additional features remains open. 

The Veda stack is built so that crosschain migration is a routine operational capability when it needs to occur. Our deployments can live on any chain and be reconfigured and rebalanced anytime.

$220 million, 300,000 accounts, 70,000 active cards. 3 chains, 3 days, zero downtime. 

Seamless embedded infrastructure is core to everything we do. We make risk and compliance controls robust, and crosschain moves easy.