Chasing yield isn’t new - traditional finance has been doing it for decades through dividend stocks, real estate, and other financial instruments. However, while seemingly straightforward, the vast ma
2025-07-18 - 7 min read
Chasing yield isn’t new - traditional finance has been doing it for decades through dividend stocks, real estate, and other financial instruments. However, while seemingly straightforward, the vast majority of the population remains sidelined as value extraction still requires a solid understanding of finance. But DeFi has just changed this forever… By democratizing access to institutional-grade strategies through modular, transparent, and permissionless smart contracts called “vaults,” DeFi is opening up simpler and more lucrative financial opportunities for anyone with a non-custodial wallet. We call this the “Vaultization Era.” Vaults allow asset managers to automate strategies using a mix of off-chain intelligence and on-chain execution to generate yields and bring risk-adjusted strategies to institutional and retail participants. Vaults can also be “productified,” as seen with Gauntlet’s recent USD Alpha, where the vault can be embedded directly into decentralized applications, turning any Web3 application into a de facto savings account. And this is just the beginning. As DeFi scales, so does the infrastructure behind it. Standards like EIP-4626 are driving interoperability, while new players are emerging with distinct architectures and focus areas. In this article, we compare the four main vault infrastructures - Veda, Aera, IPOR, and Lagoon Finance - highlighting their differences in design, functionality, and gas fee structure. Thank you to @751_eth, @dara_khan, @0xpedro_eth, and @0xMeytab for providing valuable and insightful input and a final review of this piece. Veda: The Universal Yield Infrastructure As of July 2025, Veda stands as the largest vault infrastructure in DeFi, securing over $4.3 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL) through several asset managers and serving more than 100,000 users since its launch in March 2024. Veda’s architecture is modular and non-custodial, allowing developers to create smart contracts that manage yield strategies across multiple blockchains supporting EVM, SVM, and MoveVM environments. At the core of Veda is the BoringVault, named boring due to its modular architecture with minimal core contract logic and ~100 lines of code. The BoringVault is the barebones contract that offloads most of its functionality to external contracts, such as the Manager , the Teller , the Hook , the Accountant , the uManagers , the DecoderAndSanitzer and ultimately the oracles. In simple terms, the Manager rebalances the BoringVault and the Teller allows for deposits and withdrawals. With the Hook introducing optional compliance functionality such as whitelisting deposit addresses, locking shares to prevent transfers and other use cases more suited to institutional products. This very modular and chain-agnostic design ensures seamless integration with almost any protocol or asset, which unlocks a broad set of use cases from ether.fi’s eBTC and weETHs, Plasma’s Vault, and wallets such as Binance Wallet and Bybit Web3. Additionally, Merkle tree verification adds a layer of security since it makes it impossible for arbitrary transactions or strategy changes to occur given every action a vault can perform - whether deploying liquidity, staking or rebalancing - is pre-registered, hashed, and embedded in a Merkle tree Veda offers a developer-friendly SDKs and APIs allowing new vaults to be deployed in as little as 48 hours, making it an appealing solution for both retail and enterprise-grade DeFi products. Github: https://github.com/Se7en-Seas/boring-vault Aera: Scalable, Institutional-Grade Vault Infrastructure Aera is the permissionless, autonomous protocol built by Gauntlet , the leading vault curator and risk manager in Web3, providing institutional-grade risk management expertise to the largest protocols in the space. At the core of Aera is the BaseVault, a foundational smart contract that allows vault owners to whitelist guardians to execute vault operations. Guardians are external entities appointed by the vault owner that access independent off-chain intelligence to perform two main objectives: allocate assets and execute strategies. Each BaseVault can elect one or more guardians to submit operations, with each guardian running independent custom strategies. Aera’s flexibility allows it to create both single-depositor and multi-depositor vaults, supporting a variety of strategies, from yield generation to contributor payments automation, volatility trading, liquidity provision, and more. This makes it powerful for DAOs seeking to remain mission-aligned to their community while maintaining ownership of their funds and delegating the management to a set of whitelisted guardians. An additional feature offered by Aera is their FeeVault, which makes fees routing extremely flexible. This allows r vault owners and guardians to set flexible fee recipients to claim fees, independent of whether it is a single-depositor vault or a multi-depositor vault - abstracting away details about what