Trading Strategy's DeFi vault report data is now available as a real-time dashboard showing you the best stablecoin DeFi vaults to help you assess investment opportunities.
You can find the dashboard here
What are vaults?
In decentralised finance, a vault refers to a smart contract that manages assets in a self-custodial manner for several stakeholders. Typically, when you deposit into a vault, you receive share or liquidity provider tokens in return.
You can think of vaults as investment products that have been transformed into a smart contract. Most vaults are permissionless, allowing anyone to participate directly on the blockchain.
Common vault types include:
- Yield farming vaults that deploy assets across multiple protocols
- Lending optimisation representing deposits in money markets
- Liquidity provision for automated market makers and high-frequency market-making strategies
- Strategy vaults implementing complex DeFi trading strategies
- Real-world assets (RWA) for offchain lending and bonds
Although there are some ad-hoc vaults, most vaults are associated with the underlying digital asset management protocol. Common protocols associated with vaults include: Lagoon, Enzyme, Morpho, Euler, Velvet Capital, xWin, Gearbox and dHedge. Some perpetual futures DEXes have their native vaults. Such DEXes include Hyperliquid (popularised the concept), Lighter, Ekiden, and GRVT.
The top DeFi vaults dashboard
The dashboard for vaults is live now.
Currently, we track approximately 25,000 vaults. Due to the high number and varying characteristics of different blockchains and protocols, manually tracking all investment opportunities is a challenging task. The purpose of the Trading Strategy vault list is to make all vaults comparable to each other.
As an investor, you want to measure vaults on a few different axes:
- Risk
- Performance (profit)
- Diversification (overall portfolio risk across multiple different positions)
The top vault list answers the question of what opportunities are available on DeFi and where to find them.
How is Trading Strategy data unique?
The Trading Strategy vault data is designed from the ground up for use in trading and investment scenarios.
- Data is normalised across different protocols and blockchains
- We use only onchain data: all data is available on a public blockchain and verifiable by a third party
- We are including technical risk categorisation related to the protocols
- Data includes net figures (after fees)
- We calculate risk metrics like Sharpe to allow comparing market volatile vaults against each other more easily.
In traditional markets, risk-return is well understood today. For DeFi, due to the industry's young age, effective ways to measure risk and returns have not yet existed.
Automated investing with "vault of vaults"
The first question we hear from the community is that it is cumbersome for non-full-time DeFi users to stay on top of all this, and if we could offer them an automated solution.
We are soon launching vault of vaults strategies. This strategy involves constructing a portfolio by depositing in various vaults based on available data. The goal of this strategy is to build a diversified portfolio that focuses on non-correlated opportunities, also accounting for technical risk in the DeFi environment.
The goals for the vault of vaults strategy are
- Multistrategy
- Fully automated and non-discretionary (no curator risk)
- Secure
- Self-custodial
- Data-based, quantified and backtestable
- Real-time
By having solid data and an understanding of DeFi markets, we believe we can develop strategies that go beyond yield farming and lending optimisation.
API availability
The vault data is available programmatically over our API.
We aim to connect with DeFi developers, blockchain ecosystem actors, aggregators, and DeFi protocols to explore opportunities for collaboration that make use of DeFi easier and safer.
Future steps
Currently, we are listing top stablecoin vaults; however, we also have data for vaults denominated in volatile assets, such as ETH and BTC. We will include this in the upcoming releases.
We are also expanding outside EVM blockchains to native vaults. We will include native perp DEX vaults for
- Hyperliquid
- Lighter
- GRVT
Data points will also be vastly expanded. In the future, you will find
- Vault exposure to different assets and protocols
- Curator's own % money staked at the vault ("skin in the game")
- Reputation
For any questions or comments, please join our Discord. In particular, we would like to hear from you if you are a blockchain or protocol developer and your vaults are not yet visible on the list.