by Stablecoins Upgraded Money, Vaults Will Upgrade Asset Management
In 2025, stablecoins cemented a new layer of product–market fit for crypto. The world now embraces them as a new form of digital cash—programmable and global. Once seen as volatile, crypto found stability through stablecoins. But bringing the checking account onchain was only the first step; the next is bringing the savings account onchain through Vaults.
If stablecoins represent Money 2.0, vaults will be Asset Management 2.0.
Vaults as the Next Infrastructure for Asset Management
Vaults enable noncustodial and programmable asset management, which we DeFi-natives like to call asset curation.
In traditional finance, products are scattered across siloed infrastructures. Combining them into structured products is costly and inefficient. Every new integration is long, intermediaries are numerous, products ossify, and liquidity doesn’t flow freely.
Vaults change this. They act as a single bucket that can allocate across many types of assets and strategies, all within the same atomic onchain environment:
🔹 Their composable management enables more liquid, affordable, and personalized financial products.
🔹 Their ease of integration — anyone with a wallet and stablecoins can access them — drastically democratizes access to those products.
🔹 Their onchain programmability makes asset management safer than ever, providing transparent and irrevocable safeguards — advantages that come natively from being onchain.
One may ask: how do tokenized assets fit into this model? Tokenization matters because it bridges the traditional finance and DeFi worlds. But currently, it does not improve the quality of financial products — only the distribution of traditional finance to serve underinvested capital in crypto.
Tokenized assets are a useful transition tool, but to create fundamentally better financial products, issuers will need to move to vaults where everything exists in the same blockchain environment.
The Morpho Standard for Institutional-Grade Vaults
Morpho first introduced the concept of curation with Morpho Vaults V1, creating a new business model and coining the term “curator”. In less than 18 months, more than 30 independent curators have now operated on Morpho, generating tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. And it’s not just DeFi. Institutions and now banks are recognizing vaults as the foundation for large-scale asset management onchain.
With Morpho Vaults V2, we built on that foundation to develop an even more comprehensive asset management stack. Vaults are no longer limited to a single type of loan or strategy. They can allocate across any Morpho protocol — present or future — to enable even better financial products.
Morpho Vaults V2 also introduces features designed for institutional-scale use, including segregation of duties, enhanced noncustodial guarantees such as timelocks and in-kind redemptions, access controls like gates for accredited investors, and risk management through absolute and relative risk exposure limits.
Toward Asset Management 2.0
Over the coming 6–12 months, vaults will define the next phase of crypto’s growth. It may not be obvious yet, but their impact will rival — if not surpass — the role stablecoins have played in the broader adoption of crypto.
Every financial institution, bank, or fintechs will explore how they can integrate vaults into their offerings, adopting them to launch new products, and using them to scale lending and borrowing of stablecoins and other assets.
Stablecoins made money digital. Vaults will make money productive.