Awesome Vaults

A curated guide to onchain vaults, from your first ERC-4626 contract to production curator systems, async accounting, structured products, and the security work that keeps depositor funds safe.

A vault is a smart contract that takes a deposit, issues shares that represent a claim on a growing pool of assets, and puts that capital to work. The pattern now sits under a large share of DeFi: yield aggregators, curated lending, liquid staking and restaking wrappers, structured products, and institutional asset management all run on it. There are awesome lists for Solidity, for Diamonds, and for DeFi in general, but there was no single map for vaults. This is that map.

Every entry links to a primary source, an EIP page, an official doc, a protocol's own repository, or the author's own writing. Each has a one line description of what you learn and a level tag so you can read in order. A few historical protocols are included where their design still teaches something builders reinvent today, and they are labeled as such.

Levels: (beginner) first exposure to the idea, (intermediate) you can already read Solidity and want the mechanism, (advanced) protocol-grade architecture, accounting internals, and security.

Contents

• Standards and EIPs
• Foundations: What Is a Vault
• Reference Implementations and Libraries
• Security: Attacks and Defenses
• Testing and Formal Verification
• Yield Aggregator Vaults
• Curated Lending Vaults
• Curators and Curation
• Institutional and Generalized Vault Frameworks
• Structured Products and Tranched Vaults
• Structured Credit Foundations (TradFi)
• Options and Structured-Note Vaults
• Restaking and LRT Vaults
• BTC Yield Vaults
• Credit and RWA Vaults
• Stablecoin and Synthetic-Dollar Vaults
• Liquidity Management Vaults
• Perp Liquidity Vaults
• Asynchronous and Multi-Strategy Architecture
• Deep-Dive Articles and Research
• Videos, Talks, and Courses
• Live Data, Dashboards, and Risk
• Vault Distribution and Routing

Standards and EIPs

The specifications that define what a vault is and how it must behave.

• ERC-4626: Tokenized Vaults - The core specification defining the tokenized vault interface, the deposit, mint, withdraw, and redeem methods, the share-to-asset conversion functions, and the required rounding directions. (intermediate)
• ERC-7540: Asynchronous ERC-4626 Tokenized Vaults - Extends ERC-4626 with request-based asynchronous deposit and redemption flows and a pending, claimable, claimed request lifecycle for vaults that cannot settle in a single transaction. (advanced)
• ERC-7575: Multi-Asset ERC-4626 Vaults - Separates the share token from the vault entry points so a single share can be backed by multiple assets, and externalizes the ERC-20 share accounting. (advanced)
• ERC-7535: Native Asset ERC-4626 Tokenized Vault - Adapts ERC-4626 to use native ETH as the underlying asset through the 0xEee address convention and payable deposit paths. (intermediate)
• ERC-6909: Minimal Multi-Token Interface - A minimal multi-token standard that drops callbacks and batching from ERC-1155 and uses a combined allowance and operator permission model, increasingly used for vault share accounting. (intermediate)
• ERC-5115: SY Token, Standardized Yield - Defines the Standardized Yield interface that wraps yield-bearing assets behind uniform deposit, redeem, and exchange-rate methods, covering AMM LP and reward-token mechanisms that ERC-4626 alone cannot represent. (advanced)
• EIP-4626 Discussion Thread - The original Ethereum Magicians thread where the standard was debated, covering fee handling, rounding, fee-on-transfer tokens, and the rationale for keeping both withdraw and redeem. (advanced)
• EIP-7540 Discussion Thread - The thread behind the async vault standard, documenting the design debate over request lifecycle states, operator permissions, and backward compatibility with ERC-4626. (advanced)
• ERC-7741: Authorize Operator - Specifies EIP-712 signature-based granting and revoking of operator permissions for contracts using the setOperator/isOperator model, letting ERC-7540 and ERC-6909 vault users authorize request managers without an on-chain transaction. (advanced)
• ERC-7887: Cancelation for ERC-7540 Tokenized Vaults - Extends ERC-7540 with an asynchronous cancelation lifecycle for pending deposit and redeem requests, adding methods to submit a cancelation, view its pending or claimable status, and claim back the assets or shares. (advanced)
• ERC-8161: Transferable Tokenized Vault Requests - A Final extension of ERC-7540 that makes pending deposit and redeem requests optionally transferable between addresses, enabling wallet migration and secondary liquidity for unsettled vault positions. (advanced)
• ERC-8113: Series Accounting for Incentivized Vaults - Formalizes a series accounting method for ERC-4626 and ERC-7540 vaults in which each batch of claimed deposits is tracked as an independent series with its own highwater mark, so performance fees can be charged without the free-rider problem. (advanced)

Foundations: What Is a Vault

Start here if vaults are new to you. These explain the share and asset model before you touch production code.

• ERC-4626 Tokenized Vault Standard - A plain-language introduction from ethereum.org explaining what a tokenized vault is and how shares represent proportional ownership of a single underlying ERC-20 asset. (beginner)
• ERC-4626 Interface Explained - A function-by-function walkthrough from RareSkills showing how share and asset accounting works and how deposits, redemptions, and yield accrual move the share price. (intermediate)
• How to Use ERC-4626 with Your Smart Contract - A hands-on QuickNode guide that builds a vault by inheriting an ERC-4626 base contract, deploys it to a testnet, and deposits an underlying token to mint shares. (intermediate)
• ERC4626 Vaults: Secure Design, Risks, and Best Practices - A build-oriented Speedrun Ethereum guide pairing the core vault functions with the first-depositor inflation attack, reentrancy, rounding, and fuzz-testing practice. (intermediate)
• ERC-4626: Tokenized Vaults (L2IV Research) - An overview covering deposit and withdraw mechanics, share conversion, fee handling, EIP-2612 permits, and security lessons drawn from the Rari and Cream incidents. (intermediate)
• The Complete Guide to DeFi Vaults in 2026 - A conceptual primer tracing vaults from Yearn's 2020 aggregators to the 2026 curator model, explaining how deposits mint proportional shares and how curators enforce risk limits with timelocks and guardians. (beginner)
• The State of Onchain Vaults: TVL, Chains, and Trends in 2026 - A March 2026 market snapshot from vault infrastructure provider Lagoon sizing vault TVL by standard, asset class, and chain, and explaining what problems ERC-4626 and ERC-7540 solved for integrators and institutions. (beginner)

Reference Implementations and Libraries

Battle-tested code to read, inherit, or fork. Reading these side by side is one of the fastest ways to learn the standard.

• OpenZeppelin ERC4626.sol - The production ERC-4626 base contract showing how the rounding rules and the virtual assets and shares inflation-attack mitigation are implemented in Solidity. (intermediate)
• OpenZeppelin ERC-4626 Documentation - Explains the inflation attack against empty vaults and the virtual-shares-with-decimals-offset defense, with a worked example of adding entry and exit fees while keeping preview functions accurate. (intermediate)
• Solmate ERC4626.sol - A minimal implementation using fixed-point math with beforeWithdraw and afterDeposit hooks, useful for reading the standard's accounting stripped to essentials. (advanced)
• Solady ERC4626.sol - A gas-optimized ERC-4626 implementation that exposes virtual shares and a decimals offset through overridable functions. (advanced)
• snekmate ERC-4626 (Vyper) - Pcaversaccio's audited, security-focused Vyper library, including a modern gas-efficient ERC-4626 vault with unit, property-based, and invariant tests, the canonical Vyper counterpart to the Solidity implementations. (intermediate)
• yield-daddy - ERC-4626 wrapper contracts and factories that adapt Aave V2 and V3, Compound, Euler, and Lido stETH positions into the vault interface. (intermediate)
• PoolTogether V5 PrizeVault (pt-v5-vault) - The maintained PoolTogether V5 PrizeVault, an ERC-4626 wrapper that routes deposits into an underlying yield source and contributes the accrued yield to a shared prize pool instead of paying it out pro rata. (intermediate)
• ERC-7540 Reference Implementations - Four minimal async vaults, controlled async deposit, controlled async redeem, fully async, and timelocked redeem, that show how the request lifecycle is coded over ERC-4626. (intermediate)

Security: Attacks and Defenses

The failure modes that have drained real vaults, and the patterns that prevent them. Read this section before you ship.

• A Novel Defense Against ERC4626 Inflation Attacks - Walks through how the inflation attack works and compares router, internal-balance, and dead-shares mitigations before deriving the virtual-offset defense used in the reference implementation. (advanced)
• Overview of the Inflation Attack - A step-by-step derivation from MixBytes of how share-price manipulation through direct token donation lets an attacker capture a later depositor's funds, with the arithmetic worked out. (intermediate)
• Exchange Rate Manipulation in ERC4626 Vaults - Catalogs first-deposit frontrunning along with direct, stealth, flash-loan, and debt-repayment donation variants, then weighs mitigations such as dead shares, virtual deposits, and internal balance tracking. (advanced)
• Exploring ERC-4626: A Security Primer - Walks through recurring pitfalls including rounding direction, fee-on-transfer tokens, decimal mismatches, and preview-versus-convert misuse, using the Rari and Cream failures as examples. (intermediate)
• ERC-4626 Tokens in DeFi: Exchange Rate Manipulation Risks - Focuses on the integrator side and shows how a protocol that prices ERC-4626 shares off the vault's internal assets-per-share can be exploited even when the vault itself is compliant. (intermediate)
• Solodit Checklist Explained: Donation Attacks - An auditor checklist entry from Cyfrin showing with code how direct token transfers manipulate balance-based accounting and which patterns prevent it. (intermediate)
• So You Want to Use a Price Oracle - samczsun's landmark writeup on oracle manipulation, dissecting the bZx, Harvest, and Synthetix exploits and the defenses, the foundational reference for why reading a spot price mid-transaction is dangerous. (advanced)
• ResupplyFi Hack Analysis - Post-mortem from Ackee of the 2025 Resupply exploit, tracing how a donation into a nearly empty ERC-4626 vault drove the exchange rate to zero through floor division and bypassed the solvency check. (advanced)
• StakedUSDeV2 Breaks the ERC-4626 Standard - A Code4rena finding on Ethena's staking vault showing how a cooldown-gated withdraw path can make a live vault non-compliant with ERC-4626, a concrete example of standard-conformance risk. (advanced)
• ERC4626 Inflation Attack Mitigation (PR #3979) - The pull request that added virtual shares to OpenZeppelin's ERC4626, with review discussion covering the math and trade-offs of the decimals offset. (advanced)
• Balancer Hack Analysis and Guidance for the DeFi Ecosystem - Trail of Bits analyzes the November 2025 Balancer v2 exploit, a rounding direction error in stable pool exact-out swaps, and derives guidance on documenting precision-loss invariants, mutation testing, fuzzing, and formal verification. (advanced)
• How an Attacker Drained $128M from Balancer Through Rounding Error Exploitation - A transaction-level forensic walkthrough of the Balancer v2 drain showing how mulDown precision loss compounded across 65 micro-swaps in a single batchSwap to suppress BPT prices before repeated arbitrage cycles extracted the pools. (advanced)
• Explained: The GMX Hack (July 2025) - Post-mortem of the July 2025 GMX v1 exploit, where reentrancy through an order execution refund let the attacker open shorts without updating the global average short price, inflating GLP share valuation for a $42M drain. (intermediate)
• Explained: The Solv Hack (March 2026) - Post-mortem of a double-minting reentrancy in Solv's BitcoinReserveOffering vault, where an ERC-3525 deposit's onERC721Received callback triggered a second mint before the first completed, leading to roughly $2.7M in losses. (intermediate)
• ERC-7540 Async Vault Security Guide - A guide from Recon to the bug classes specific to ERC-7540 asynchronous vaults, covering request lifecycle correctness, claim ordering, and share accounting across pending and fulfilled states, and arguing for fuzzing the request-claim state machine. (intermediate)

Testing and Formal Verification

Prove your vault meets the spec rather than hoping it does.

• a16z erc4626-tests - A Foundry property-test suite that checks any ERC-4626 vault for round-trip behavior, balance and allowance updates, non-reverting view functions, and preview accuracy, meant to be inherited by your own test contract. (advanced)
• crytic/properties ERC-4626 Suite - Reusable Echidna and Medusa invariants from Trail of Bits grouped into accounting, rounding, and security property sets that a vault can fuzz against for conformance and inflation resistance. (advanced)
• Reusable Properties for Ethereum Contracts - The Trail of Bits writeup explaining the reasoning behind the reusable ERC-4626 and ERC-20 invariants and how to wire them into a fuzzing harness. (intermediate)
• How to Fuzz ERC-4626 Vaults - A hands-on Recon guide to building an invariant-fuzzing harness for a synchronous vault, covering the properties to assert and the setup that catches accounting and rounding bugs. (intermediate)
• How to Fuzz ERC-7540 Async Vaults - The async counterpart from Recon, showing how to model the request lifecycle and settlement so a fuzzer can reach the states where async vaults break. (advanced)
• erc7540-reusable-properties - A set of reusable ERC-7540 invariants (properties 7540-1 through 7540-7) from Recon, built with Centrifuge and validated against production deployments, with Foundry and Medusa configs, ready to inherit into an async vault's test suite. (advanced)
• The Recon Book - A free handbook on invariant testing and fuzzing for Solidity, useful as the broader method behind the vault-specific fuzzing guides. (intermediate)
• Is My ERC-4626 Vault Token Up to the Standard? - Runtime Verification compares the a16z property suite and the ERCx service and covers round-trip properties and functional correctness for both deployed and undeployed contracts, the formal-methods complement to fuzzing. (advanced)
• Certora Prover - The formal verification engine Certora open sourced under GPL-3.0 in February 2025, which checks user-written correctness rules against EVM bytecode and has been applied to ERC-4626 vault properties in production verification work. (advanced)
• Unleashing Medusa - The Trail of Bits announcement of Medusa v1, a parallelized coverage-guided smart contract fuzzer that runs the same property suites as Echidna and now backs the reusable ERC-4626 invariants. (intermediate)
• create-chimera-app - A Foundry starter template built on the Chimera framework so one invariant suite runs under Echidna, Medusa, Halmos, and Foundry, the scaffolding the Recon vault fuzzing guides assume. (intermediate)
• The ERC-4626 Donation Attack Explained and Tested - A Recon walkthrough of the first depositor share inflation attack with vulnerable code, four mitigations, and an invariant harness whose properties catch the donation sequence. (intermediate)
• Euler Vault Kit Invariant Suite - The production invariant testing suite for Euler's ERC-4626 lending vaults, with handler, hook, and spec layers plus a Crytic-to-Foundry harness that shows how a live protocol structures fuzzing at scale. (advanced)

Yield Aggregator Vaults

Vaults that route deposits into strategies and compound the returns. The original vault use case.

• Yearn V3 Vaults Overview - Describes how Yearn V3 separates the system into allocator vaults, standalone ERC-4626 tokenized strategies, and optional periphery contracts such as accountants and debt allocators. (intermediate)
• Yearn V3 Tokenized Strategy Specification - Documents the immutable-proxy delegatecall pattern that routes ERC-4626 and accounting logic to a shared implementation, leaving each strategy to hold only yield-source-specific code. (advanced)
• yearn/tokenized-strategy - Source for the Yearn V3 TokenizedStrategy base and BaseStrategy that single-strategy ERC-4626 vaults delegate their standardized vault logic to. (advanced)
• yearn-vaults-v3 Technical Specification - Details the Vyper multi-strategy allocator vault, its factory deployment, debt management across strategies, and the profit-reporting and loss-accounting flows. (advanced)
• Yearn V2 Vaults Overview - Describes the earlier model where up to twenty per-vault strategies with capital limits are ordered in a withdrawal queue and harvested by keeper bots. (intermediate)
• yearn-vaults-v2 Specification - Archived specification of the superseded Yearn V2 vaults, still a clear reference for vault accounting, strategy debt ratios, harvest and report mechanics, and the governance, guardian, and strategist role model. (advanced)
• Beefy Vault Contract - Walks through the BeefyVaultV7 contract that mints mooToken shares and routes deposited tokens into a separate, upgradeable strategy contract to isolate strategy risk. (intermediate)
• Beefy Strategy Contract - Explains the Beefy strategy contract and its harvest flow that claims farm rewards, swaps them to the underlying asset, and redeposits to auto-compound. (intermediate)
• beefyfinance/beefy-contracts - Public repository of Beefy vault and strategy contracts with the deployment and testing scripts used for community-submitted auto-compounding strategies. (advanced)
• Auto Finance Autopool System Overview - Documents how the Autopool vault system, formerly Tokemak Autopilot, deploys deposits across a set of liquidity destinations, rebalances them by return and risk profile, auto-compounds rewards, and reports debt back to the vault on a periodic cycle. (advanced)
• OasisDEX/summer-earn-protocol - Monorepo holding the FleetCommander vault, roughly forty Ark strategy adapters, and the Raft reward contracts of the wound-down Lazy Summer protocol, kept as a reference for its keeper-driven, constraint-checked rebalancing design. (advanced)
• Idle Best Yield Architecture - Covers how the Best Yield IdleToken vault allocates a single asset across lending protocols using off-chain-computed allocations that trigger on-chain rebalances. (intermediate)
• Idle Yield Tranches Architecture - Describes the IdleCDO contract that pools deposits, mints senior AA and junior BB tranche tokens, and routes funds through a strategy proxy to a downstream yield source. (advanced)
• Sommelier Protocol V2 Contract Architecture - Explains the Cellar V2 system of ERC-4626 vaults together with the Registry and PriceRouter contracts that price multi-token positions and constrain permitted adaptors. (intermediate)
• Sommelier Building Adaptors - Details how adaptor contracts let a strategist call external DeFi protocols while the registry limits which positions are allowed. (advanced)
• Harvest Finance Vaults - Introduces the model where deposits mint fToken shares whose price rises as the attached strategy harvests and reinvests rewards. (beginner)
• Harvest Coding Strategies Guide - Explains the vault-callable strategy interface and the doHardWork method that invests underlying tokens, liquidates reward crops, and reinvests the proceeds. (advanced)
• Lazy Summer Hack Analysis: Stale-Asset Donation - Analyzes the July 2026 Lazy Summer exploit in which donating impaired tokens to a capped but still-active strategy adapter inflated the ERC-4626 share price, showing why offboarded strategies must be excluded from totalAssets rather than only blocked from new deposits. (advanced)
• Lazy Summer USDC Vault Exploit Post-Mortem - Official post-mortem explaining how an Ark with its deposit cap set to zero stayed in the vault's net asset value calculation, letting a token donation raise the share price about 9.5 percent before redemptions extracted $6.04M. (intermediate)

Curated Lending Vaults

The curator model, where a permissioned role allocates pooled deposits across isolated lending markets under caps. One of the fastest-growing vault categories.

• Introducing MetaMorpho: Permissionless Lending Vaults on Morpho Blue - Explains how a MetaMorpho ERC-4626 vault pools depositor liquidity and allocates it across isolated Morpho Blue markets under supply caps set by a curator. (beginner)
• Curator (Morpho Docs) - Defines what the curator role controls in a Morpho vault, which markets are enabled, exposure caps, appointing allocators, and the timelocks that gate those changes. (beginner)
• Morpho Vault V2 (Morpho Docs) - Documents the second-generation vault, covering its adapter system for routing to multiple protocols, the abstract id-and-cap risk model, and the owner, curator, allocator, sentinel role separation. (intermediate)
• Security Considerations for Vault Curators - Catalogues the attack surface a curator must guard against, including faulty and reverting oracles, ERC-4626 donation and inflation manipulation, and adapter-removal frontrunning. (advanced)
• Gates in Morpho Vaults - Describes the gate contracts that let a curator restrict who can deposit, receive, send, or withdraw shares to build permissioned or compliance-constrained vaults. (intermediate)
• morpho-org/metamorpho - Source for the original MetaMorpho ERC-4626 vault, showing the supply and withdraw queue logic, per-market caps, timelocked cap changes, and the role-based access modifiers. (advanced)
• morpho-org/metamorpho-v1.1 - The V1.1 fork, useful for diffing its bad-debt handling, mutable name and symbol, and deployment changes against the original implementation. (advanced)
• Euler Vault Kit Whitepaper - Describes how the Euler Vault Kit builds ERC-4626 credit vaults with borrowing and how the Ethereum Vault Connector links vaults together as collateral and liabilities. (advanced)
• Euler Vault Kit Overview (Euler Docs) - Documents the EVault contract's components including oracle, interest rate model, hooks, and debt token, its caps and LTV configuration, and the difference between governed vaults and finalized vaults with governance revoked. (intermediate)
• Introducing Euler Earn - Introduces an ERC-4626 meta-vault that lets a curator allocate one deposited asset across selected Euler markets or other approved ERC-4626 vaults. (intermediate)
• euler-xyz/euler-earn - Source for Euler Earn, a MetaMorpho-v1.1 fork, showing how the supply queue, withdraw queue, and per-strategy caps adapt to allocate over generic ERC-4626 strategy vaults. (advanced)
• Gearbox: One Pool, Many Markets - Documents the model where a single passive ERC-4626 liquidity pool funds multiple isolated credit markets, each capped by its own debt ceiling. (intermediate)
• silo-finance/silo-contracts-v3 - Monorepo for Silo V3, which builds isolated lending markets as paired ERC-4626 vaults so each collateral asset's risk stays contained within its own market. (advanced)
• Sturdy V2 Documentation - Documents the two-tier design of Sturdy V2, a protocol that has since largely wound down, where siloed lending pairs isolate collateral risk and a Yearn V3 aggregator vault allocates a single deposited asset across whitelisted silos. (advanced)
• Morpho Vaults V2: A New Standard for Asset Curation - Launch announcement for Vault V2 covering allocation to any Morpho protocol version through adapters, absolute and relative exposure caps set per risk id, role separation for institutional compliance, and flash-loan powered in-kind redemptions. (beginner)
• morpho-org/vault-v2 - Source for Morpho Vault V2, showing the adapter contracts that hold positions in underlying markets, the id-based absolute and relative cap system, timelocked curator actions, and the forceDeallocate in-kind exit path. (advanced)
• Introduction to Silo Vaults (Silo Docs) - Documents Silo Vaults, ERC-4626 vaults built on top of isolated Silo markets where a third-party manager allocates deposits across markets for a performance fee while depositors keep non-custodial exits. (intermediate)
• DeFi Lending Is Modularizing: The Risk Management War Among Morpho, Euler, and Aave - Compares the risk-isolation architectures of Morpho Blue, Aave v4, and Euler v2 and analyzes how curator quality became the deciding risk-management variable in the multi-billion dollar curated vault market after the Stream Finance incident. (intermediate)

Curators and Curation

Vaults are only as good as the people allocating them. This section covers how professional curators reason about risk, and the writeups that dissect the model's incentives and failures.

• Gauntlet VaultBook - A live methodology hub from one of the largest curators, explaining its curation approach, risk factors, and the per-vault optimization and risk parameters it sets. (intermediate)
• Steakhouse Financial: Risk Management Framework - Documents Steakhouse's multilayered risk rating framework that grades collateral across asset, platform, and market layers on a letter scale. (advanced)
• Introducing the Re7 Risk Index - A curator's own methodology for scoring protocols across smart-contract, governance, economic, and third-party risk to size vault positions. (intermediate)
• Curve Market Health Scores Methodology - LlamaRisk explains how it computes quantitative market health scores for lending markets, including the inputs and thresholds that flag conditions needing action. (advanced)
• Gauging Slashing Risks of Symbiotic Networks - MEV Capital details a weighted, multi-category scoring method for evaluating the slashing risk a restaking vault takes on when it backs a network. (advanced)
• The Physics of On-Chain Lending (II) - A deep analyst treatment of the curator role model, the fee economics, and the game theory of vault runs. (advanced)
• DeFi's Black Box: How Risk and Yield Are Repackaged - A risk-analyst critique of curator incentive misalignment and the structural weaknesses of the curator model. (intermediate)
• Collapse of the DeFi Jenga: The Stream Finance Breakdown - An analyst post-mortem of a real curation failure and how the losses propagated through curator-managed vaults. (intermediate)
• Headstands and Summervaults: A Statement on Crypto Vaults and Lending Strategies - SEC Commissioner Peirce's July 2026 statement placing vaults on a spectrum from purely programmatic to discretionary and explaining when a curator's allocation discretion can trigger securities and investment adviser laws. (intermediate)
• Credora Rating Methodologies - Documents a simulation-based framework that rates assets, lending markets, and curated vaults on an A+ to D scale using Monte Carlo simulations and a probability-of-significant-loss metric, with two-step simulations for rehypothecated pools. (advanced)
• DeFi's Vault Curation Revolution - A security researcher's overview of the curator model covering supply caps, timelocks, guardian veto roles, oracle risks, and the fee-versus-tail-risk incentive misalignment exposed by the Stream Finance collapse. (beginner)

Institutional and Generalized Vault Frameworks

Generalized vault stacks built for professional asset managers, where a strategist executes whitelisted actions and an off-chain valuer prices the shares.

• Veda-Labs/boring-vault - Source for BoringVault, whose minimal core contract holds assets while the Teller handles deposits and withdrawals, the Accountant prices shares, and ManagerWithMerkleVerification plus DecoderAndSanitizer restrict strategist calls to merkle-whitelisted actions. (advanced)
• Veda Architecture and Flow of Funds - Traces how deposits, share issuance, oracle-based pricing, strategy execution, and queued withdrawals move between the BoringVault, Teller, Accountant, Manager, and DecoderAndSanitizer modules. (advanced)
• How DeFi Vaults Work: The Infrastructure Abstracting Onchain Yield - An introductory explanation of the BoringVault module split and merkle-tree whitelisting for readers new to how institutional vaults restrict strategist actions. (beginner)
• Aera BaseVault and Core Interactions - Aera V3 documentation on the BaseVault contract, covering guardian-submitted operations verified by merkle proofs, mandatory whitelisting, operation chaining, and configurable pre and post-operation hooks. (advanced)
• aera-finance/aera-contracts-public - Versioned contract snapshots of Aera's SingleDepositorVault and MultiDepositorVault implementations and their guardian-based execution layer. (advanced)
• Lagoon Vault Architecture Overview - Documentation on Lagoon's ERC-7540 request-and-settle flow, where a valuation provider posts NAV and a curator settles pending deposits and redemptions at a defined valuation point. (intermediate)
• superform-xyz/v2-periphery - Source for Superform v2 SuperVaults, an ERC-7540 vault with synchronous deposits and asynchronous redemptions that executes merkle-verified hook bundles through its strategy, aggregator, and escrow contracts. (advanced)
• Fluid (Instadapp) contracts - Public source for Fluid, whose liquidity layer underpins smart lending and smart vaults that share a single collateral and debt accounting system across products. (advanced)
• YelayLiteVault - Source for a diamond-style ERC-1155 single-asset vault that routes deposits through configurable strategy queues managed by role-based operators. (advanced)
• Index Coop index-protocol (Set Protocol V2) - A modular framework for tokenized, manager-curated asset baskets where a manager enables modules for issuance, trading, and strategy, maintained as a Set Protocol V2 fork. (advanced)
• IPOR Fusion Documentation - Documents a vault framework where a PlasmaVault holds assets and modular Fuse connector contracts route them to external protocols, while a curator role (Atomist) authorizes actions and an allocator agent (Alpha) rebalances across strategies. (intermediate)
• IPOR-Labs/ipor-fusion - Solidity source for IPOR Fusion, including the PlasmaVault, the Fuse connectors that whitelist protocol interactions, and the access-managed roles that gate allocation and rebalancing. (advanced)
• Enzyme (Onyx) Architecture Overview - Architecture docs for the oldest onchain asset-management vault protocol, whose modular shares-plus-components design deliberately extends beyond ERC-4626 for custom fees, multi-asset strategies, and granular permissions. (intermediate)
• VaultCraft V2 Safe Smart Vaults - Documents a vault framework built as Safe modules, letting a manager run strategies from a Safe multisig while depositors hold tokenized shares. (intermediate)
• Concrete Vault Documentation - Introduces a vault framework with bounded off-chain value updates and modular strategy routing for building managed earn products. (intermediate)
• Upshift Documentation - Documentation for an institutional structured-yield vault platform that packages curated strategies into permissioned deposit products. (intermediate)
• Matador by Steer - A policy-enforcement layer for smart accounts that compiles readable rules into onchain bytecode, letting a vault bound a manager to specific callers, targets, functions, values, and state-dependent conditions instead of a blanket key. (advanced)
• superform-xyz/v2-core - Source for the Superform v2 core layer, where ERC-7579 smart-account executors run chains of composable hook contracts and merkle-proof validators authorize batched multi-chain operations under a single signature, with a ledger tracking cost basis across vault standards. (advanced)
• hopperlabsxyz/lagoon-v0 - Source for the Lagoon ERC-7540 vault, with versioned implementations showing how the request, NAV valuation, settle, and claim cycle is implemented behind upgradeable proxies. (advanced)

Structured Products and Tranched Vaults

Vaults that split risk and return into distinct layers: principal and yield, or senior and junior tranches.

• Strata Protocol Overview - Documents how Strata splits yield from a base asset into ERC-4626 Senior and Junior tranches, with a CDO orchestrator routing user actions and a gain-split that targets a benchmark Senior APR while Junior TVL absorbs first losses. (intermediate)
• Strata-Markets/contracts - Solidity source for Strata's tranching vaults, where the CDO orchestrator forwards deposits and withdrawals to two ERC-4626 meta vaults for the Junior and Senior tranches alongside separate Accounting, Strategy, and APR Feed contracts. (advanced)
• Royco Dawn Documentation - Docs for Royco's tranching product, which splits a yield source into Senior, Junior, and Senior Liquidity Provider tranches so depositors choose a risk and liquidity profile. (intermediate)
• roycoprotocol/royco-dawn - Source for Royco Dawn, a legacy deployment no longer under active development, whose Kernel and Accountant enforce senior coverage ratios and a Yield Distribution Model routes senior yield to junior tranches, with Certora specs and audits included. (advanced)
• Pendle Documentation: Introduction - Explains how Pendle wraps yield-bearing tokens into SY and splits them into Principal Tokens and Yield Tokens so fixed principal and variable yield can be traded separately. (beginner)
• Pendle AMM Mechanics - Describes how the V2 AMM concentrates liquidity in a yield range that tightens toward maturity and serves both PT and YT trades from one PT/SY pool through flash swaps. (intermediate)
• Pendle V2 AMM Whitepaper - Derives the time-dependent AMM invariant, Principal Token pricing, and fee model that Pendle V2 uses to price and trade yield. (advanced)
• Yield Tokenization Protocols, How They Are Made: Pendle - An auditor's walkthrough from MixBytes of Pendle's SY standard, PT and YT minting, market and router contracts, AMM curve, and the oracle and ratchet protections against manipulation. (advanced)
• Tranchess Whitepaper - Documents how a single asset-tracking fund (QUEEN) splits into a low-volatility yield tranche (BISHOP) and a leveraged tranche (ROOK) that lend to and borrow from each other, with automatic rebalancing when leverage crosses thresholds. (intermediate)
• tranchess/contract-core - Solidity source for the Tranchess fund, implementing primary-market creation of QUEEN shares and their split into BISHOP and ROOK tranche tokens. (advanced)
• Buttonwood Tranche - Contracts that deposit a collateral token into a bond and mint a series of tranche tokens redeemed in a maturity waterfall, where senior tranches are repaid first and junior tranches absorb losses and capture upside. (advanced)
• Notional V3: What Is fCash - Documents fCash, a zero-coupon-bond token defined by currency and maturity whose positive and negative balances represent fixed-rate lending and borrowing claims. (intermediate)
• notional-finance/contracts-v3 - Source for Notional V3, showing how fCash markets, fixed-to-variable settlement, and leveraged vault strategies are implemented. (advanced)
• Napier: PT and YT, Tokenized Yield - Introduces stripping an ERC-5115 target asset into a Principal Token that redeems 1:1 at maturity and a Yield Token that captures accrued yield, deployed in permissionless isolated markets. (beginner)
• Spectra: Principal and Yield Token - Explains how Spectra splits an interest-bearing token into a discounted Principal Token redeemable 1:1 at maturity and a Yield Token that accrues future yield. (intermediate)
• perspectivefi/spectra-core - Implementation of Spectra's yield tokenization, including its EIP-5095 Principal Token, Yield Token, router, and factory contracts built with Foundry. (advanced)
• Sense Finance: Core Concepts - Historical docs for Sense Finance, wound down in 2023, whose Divider and Adapter architecture for stripping a target asset into fixed-term Principal and Yield Tokens traded on a YieldSpace-based AMM remains a clean reference design. (intermediate)
• IPOR Protocol: Interest Rate Derivative - Documents IPOR's on-chain interest-rate swap in which payer and receiver exchange fixed and floating cash-flow streams against a liquidity-pool counterparty. (intermediate)
• Term Finance Documentation - Describes a non-custodial fixed-rate lending protocol modeled on tri-party repo where recurring sealed-bid auctions clear borrowers and lenders at a single market rate. (intermediate)
• BarnBridge Litepaper - Outlines SMART Yield fixed-rate tranching of variable lending yield and SMART Alpha volatility tranching, both structured as senior and junior risk layers. (intermediate)
• BarnBridge Docs: Junior Tranches - Specifies junior-token accounting in SMART Yield, including how juniors absorb yield shortfalls below the senior guarantee and exit through maturing jBOND NFTs. (advanced)
• SOFA.org Protocols - Documents an onchain structured-products system that locks deposits in ERC-1155 vaults minting position tokens for capital-protected and leveraged payoffs settled at a fixed strike and expiry. (intermediate)
• Alchemix v3: Self-Repaying Loans - Explains how Alchemix v3 issues synthetic alAssets against ETH or USDC collateral routed into a curated yield basket, with debt repaid by vault yield and fixed-duration Transmuter redemptions rather than accruing interest. (intermediate)
• Saffron Finance (saffron-finance/saffron) - A historical but instructive monorepo whose senior and junior tranche pools route a fixed lower yield to senior providers and a variable residual to junior providers layered over Compound lending. (advanced)
• Element Finance (delvtech/elf-contracts) - A historical principal-and-yield-token design that splits a yield-bearing position into a principal token redeemable 1:1 at maturity and a separate yield token, a clean study of the zero-coupon split that predates much of the current PT/YT ecosystem. (advanced)
• 88mph (88mphapp/88mph-contracts) - A historical fixed-rate design where the DInterest contract pools variable-yield deposits and pays each depositor a locked fixed rate, funded by selling the corresponding floating-rate bond to a counterparty. (advanced)
• Yield Protocol v2 (yieldprotocol/vault-v2) - A historical but rigorous fyToken design, ERC-20 zero-coupon tokens redeemable 1:1 after maturity that trade at a discount to give collateralized fixed-rate borrowing and lending. (advanced)
• Pendle Boros Overview - Documents Boros, Pendle's margin trading platform that tokenizes a floating yield stream into Yield Units so traders can swap fixed against floating rates such as perp funding, with oracle-based rate accounting and liquidation mechanics. (intermediate)
• Chaos Labs: Building Risk Infrastructure for Boros - Chaos Labs' methodology for margining onchain funding-rate swaps, covering a maintenance margin formula driven by rate volatility and time to maturity, TWAP bands and deviation caps against oracle manipulation, and auto-deleveraging calibrated by Monte Carlo simulation. (advanced)
• Resolv Docs: RLP - Documents RLP, the junior tranche of the Resolv stablecoin system, which holds the collateral in excess of USR's backing and absorbs market and counterparty losses first in exchange for a larger share of strategy yield. (intermediate)
• infiniFi Documentation - Docs for infiniFi's fractional-reserve design where USDC deposits mint iUSD that can be staked into liquid siUSD or locked into maturity-dated liUSD tranches, with losses allocated down a waterfall from locked to liquid holders. (intermediate)
• Twyne Documentation - Docs for Twyne, a credit delegation layer built on Euler's EVC and EVK stack where lenders delegate unused borrowing capacity to leverage-seeking borrowers for a fee, creating layered risk positions with a deterministic loss order on top of existing lending markets. (intermediate)

Structured Credit Foundations (TradFi)

The traditional structured-credit machinery that onchain tranching is slowly rebuilding: waterfalls, coverage tests, and the CLO track record that came from them.

• Hastructure - An open-source structured-finance cashflow engine that models waterfalls, coverage triggers, and interest and principal priorities as data, a rare look at how a mature system structures the logic onchain tranching reimplements. (advanced)
• absbox - A Python analytics library over the Hastructure engine for cashflow projection and structured-credit analysis, usable as an offchain reference or differential-test oracle for an onchain waterfall. (advanced)
• CLO Coverage Tests - Explains the overcollateralization and interest-coverage tests, their trigger levels, the impaired-asset haircuts, and the cash-diversion cure that reroutes junior cash to pay down senior notes, the covenant machinery onchain vaults mostly lack. (intermediate)
• Understanding Collateralized Loan Obligations - A clear primer on CLO structure, the tranche stack from AAA down to equity, subordination, and the manager's role, useful context for anyone bringing the model onchain. (beginner)
• CLO Equity Performance (Cordell, Roberts, Schwert) - An empirical study of realized CLO equity returns across hundreds of deals, the clearest data on what the first-loss tranche is actually paid to hold the risk. (advanced)
• The Waterfall (Pemberton CLO Insights Series) - Walks through a real CLO priority of payments step by step, from senior fees and AAA interest down to the equity residual, showing how breached coverage tests divert interest to redeem senior notes and where deferred interest and manager incentive fees sit in the stack. (intermediate)
• The Economics of Structured Finance (Coval, Jurek, Stafford) - Explains how pooling and tranching manufacture highly rated securities from risky collateral and why tranche ratings are acutely sensitive to small errors in default-probability and correlation estimates. (intermediate)
• Risk and Valuation of Collateralized Debt Obligations (Duffie, Garleanu) - The foundational treatment of cash-flow CDO valuation, showing how default correlation and payment prioritization drive the risk and pricing of each tranche, including the diversity-score measure rating agencies used for collateral pools. (advanced)

Options and Structured-Note Vaults

Vaults that sell options or shape a payoff to generate premium, hedge, or underwrite risk.

• Building Decentralized Option Vaults - Part one of a Paradigm-hosted series written by Polygon DeFi researchers introducing the DeFi option vault model and walking through how covered-call and protective-put strategies generate premium for depositors. (beginner)
• Ribbon Finance: Theta Vault Architecture - Historical documentation of the original DeFi options vault pattern, where a vault mints short options against collateral each week, auctions them for premium, and rolls at expiry; Ribbon later merged into Aevo and these vaults were decommissioned after a December 2025 exploit of the legacy contracts. (intermediate)
• ribbon-finance/ribbon-v2 - A historical but production-grade reference for how a weekly-roll option-selling vault is implemented, covering vault accounting, auction settlement, and Opyn otoken minting. (advanced)
• Opyn Squeeth Monorepo - Contracts for the Crab Strategy vault, a rare onchain example of an automated short-volatility vault that pairs long ETH collateral with short Squeeth power-perpetual debt and rebalances to stay delta-neutral. (advanced)
• Squeeth Primer - Explains the Squeeth power perpetual and how the Crab vault earns funding by selling volatility while staying delta-neutral to ETH, the conceptual bridge to the contracts. (intermediate)
• Thetanuts: Basic Vaults - Legacy v3 documentation of Thetanuts Basic Vaults, which sold out-of-the-money European cash-settled options to market makers via weekly auctions and tokenized the call and put positions into transferable LP tokens, kept as a record of the auction-based DOV design now that Thetanuts has moved to an RFQ-based v4. (intermediate)
• Y2K Finance: Earthquake - Source for a historical two-sided depeg-insurance vault built on an ERC-4626 variant with ERC-1155 epoch receipts, where a risk side underwrites stablecoin depeg coverage and a hedge side buys it, with collateral moving to the winning side at settlement. (advanced)
• An Explanation of DeFi Options Vaults (DOVs) - QCP's primer on the DeFi option vault model, how vaults systematically sell out-of-the-money options for premium and the risk and return profile depositors take on. (beginner)
• sofa-org/sofa-protocol - Core smart contracts for SOFA's structured product vaults, which tokenize positions sharing a strike and expiry as ERC-1155 ids so principal-protected Earn and unprotected Surge payoffs can be issued, traded, and settled under one vault contract. (advanced)
• Rysk Documentation - Documents Rysk's RFQ-based options protocol on HyperEVM and Ethereum mainnet, where depositors underwrite covered calls and cash-secured puts on assets such as ETH, BTC, HYPE, and LSTs and collect the premium onchain. (intermediate)
• Derive: Vault Smart Contracts - Describes Derive's tokenized subaccount vaults, upgradeable ERC-20 wrappers that hold yield-bearing collateral such as weETH or sUSDe and run covered call and call spread strategies against it, including the bridge and deposit flow onto Derive Chain. (intermediate)
• Explained: The Aevo / Ribbon Finance Hack - A post-mortem of the December 2025 exploit of Aevo's legacy Ribbon option vaults, where an oracle upgrade's 8 versus 18 decimal mismatch combined with open expiry-price setting let an attacker mint oTokens against minimal collateral and drain about 2.7 million dollars at settlement. (intermediate)

Restaking and LRT Vaults

Vaults built for restaking and liquid restaking, where deposits back external networks and take on slashing risk.

• Symbiotic Vault (Core Concepts) - Documents how a Symbiotic vault holds and delegates restaked collateral to networks, and how deposit, withdraw, and slashing accounting work across epochs. (intermediate)
• symbioticfi/core - Source for Symbiotic's core restaking contracts, including the vault, delegator, and slasher modules that compose into a restaking market. (advanced)
• Mellow Vault Architecture - Explains Mellow's modular LRT vault design, how a vault composes deposit, strategy, and validator-management modules to build a liquid restaking token. (intermediate)
• mellow-finance/flexible-vaults - Source for Mellow's flexible vault framework, a modular system for assembling restaking and yield vaults from swappable components. (advanced)
• Mellow Flexible Vaults: Architecture, Workflows, and Security Model - A detailed third-party walkthrough of the Flexible Vaults architecture, the deposit and withdrawal workflows, and the security model. (advanced)
• Byzantine-Finance/byzantine-contracts - Source for a restaking aggregation layer that deploys strategy vaults routing deposits across EigenLayer, Symbiotic, and native staking. (advanced)
• Layr-Labs/eigenlayer-contracts - Source for EigenLayer's core restaking contracts, where StrategyManager and EigenPodManager act as the vault layer holding LST and native ETH deposits that DelegationManager and AllocationManager expose to slashing. (advanced)
• EigenLayer AllocationManager Docs - Documents the contract that registers operators to operator sets and manages allocation, deallocation, and slashing of slashable stake using magnitude-based accounting with configurable delays. (advanced)
• ELIP-002: Slashing via Unique Stake and Operator Sets - The design spec for EigenLayer's slashing model that went live on mainnet in April 2025, explaining operator sets, unique stake allocation that isolates slashing risk to one AVS at a time, and the delay windows protecting stakers. (intermediate)
• ELIP-006: Redistributable Slashing - Specifies how slashed funds can flow to an immutable AVS-designated recipient instead of being burned, via a two-step mark-then-clear flow in StrategyManager that keeps slashOperator unable to fail. (advanced)
• etherfi-protocol/smart-contracts - Source for ether.fi's production liquid restaking system, covering the eETH liquidity pool, native restaking through EigenLayer, withdrawal processing, and cross-chain weETH, with Certora formal verification in the repo. (advanced)

BTC Yield Vaults

Bitcoin-denominated vault designs that emerged as their own lane in 2025-2026, from native-BTC collateral vaults to covered-call exchange-rate yield and leveraged LP constructions.

• Lombard: Yield Products - Lombard's docs on LBTC yield via a covered-call strategy accruing through a rising exchange rate, and the Bitcoin Earn meta-vault that allocates across managed BTC strategies. (beginner)
• Babylon Labs Docs - Documentation for Bitcoin staking and Trustless Bitcoin Vaults, which lock native BTC on Bitcoin and let it be borrowed against on Ethereum without bridges or wrapped assets. (advanced)
• Intro to Yield Basis V3 - Explains how Yield Basis pairs deposited BTC with borrowed crvUSD at constant 2x leverage so LP equity tracks spot BTC, including the rebalancing arbitrage loop and the temporary redemption discount risk. (intermediate)
• BTCFi in 2026 (Spark Research) - A landscape analysis of Bitcoin DeFi covering Babylon, Lombard, Solv, and tBTC, focused on which yield models survived after token emissions ended. (intermediate)

Credit and RWA Vaults

Vaults that fund undercollateralized credit or tokenized real-world assets, usually with a senior and junior structure.

• Maple Smart Contract Architecture - Documents how Maple structures lending pools, pool delegates, loan managers, and withdrawal queues for institutional undercollateralized lending. (intermediate)
• maple-labs/pool-v2 - Source for Maple's V2 pools, showing the ERC-4626 pool, pool manager, loan manager, and withdrawal-manager contracts that run a managed credit book. (advanced)
• Huma Tranche Deposit Mechanics - Explains how Huma splits a receivables-financing pool into a senior tranche with capped fixed yield and a junior tranche that takes first loss for the residual. (intermediate)
• 00labs/huma-contracts-v2 - Source for Huma Protocol V2, implementing tranched pools, credit lines, and the receivable-backed lending flow. (advanced)
• OpenTrade Blockchain Protocol - Documents a vault-based protocol for tokenized fixed-income and treasury products, covering the deposit, settlement, and redemption flow for institutional RWA yield. (intermediate)
• Goldfinch Protocol - Historical design from the now wound-down Goldfinch protocol (maintenance mode since mid-2026) that structured each borrower pool into a junior first-loss tranche funded by backers and a senior second-loss tranche funded by a pooled senior vault, applying repayments to the senior tranche first. (intermediate)
• MetaStreet v2 - Pools lender capital into per-collection NFT lending vaults where depositors set their own price ticks, composing those ticks into senior and junior tranche exposure without an external oracle. (advanced)
• Tinlake (Centrifuge legacy) - Centrifuge's historical V1 securitization contracts that pool NFT-collateralized real-world assets and issue a senior DROP tranche protected against defaults and a junior TIN tranche that takes first loss for higher yield. (advanced)
• midas-apps/contracts - Source for the Midas protocol, where role-gated deposit and redemption vaults mint and burn mTokens such as mTBILL against stablecoin collateral using Chainlink price feed wrappers and a central access control contract. (advanced)
• wildcat-finance/v2-protocol - Source for Wildcat V2, where borrowers deploy undercollateralized credit markets with self-set rates and lenders hold rebasing market tokens, with hooks contracts enforcing access control and fixed-term withdrawal cycles. (advanced)
• superstateinc/ustb - Source for Superstate's USTB tokenized treasury fund share, an upgradeable ERC-7246 token whose transfers and encumbrances are gated by an upgradeable AllowList, showing the compliance layer tokenized money market funds put around their shares. (advanced)

Stablecoin and Synthetic-Dollar Vaults

Yield-bearing stablecoins and synthetic dollars implemented as vaults.

• Sky sUSDS (SUsds.sol) - Source for the sUSDS savings token, an ERC-4626 vault that accrues the Sky Savings Rate to USDS depositors through an internal rate-per-second accumulator. (advanced)
• Ethena StakedUSDeV2 (deployed verified source) - Verified deployed source for sUSDe (StakedUSDeV2), an ERC-4626 staking vault that vests protocol rewards linearly over 8 hours and routes cooldown-gated withdrawals through a separate silo contract. (advanced)
• Origin ARM (Automated Redemption Manager) - Source for Origin's ARM vaults, which hold a liquidity buffer and arbitrage redemption queues to quote instant swaps for pegged pairs, with live deployments covering stETH, eETH, sUSDe/USDe, PYUSD/USDG/USDC, and OS on Sonic. (advanced)
• Resolv: Staking stUSR and wstUSR - Documents how the USR synthetic dollar is staked into the yield-bearing stUSR and its wrapped ERC-4626 form wstUSR, and how insurance-pool yield is distributed. (intermediate)
• Aave Stable Vault - Source for a cross-chain fixed-rate savings vault where deposits into per-asset SubVaults earn a fixed per-second rate, funds are deployed into yield strategies such as Aave lending across chains, and a two-step request-and-execute withdrawal returns principal ahead of accrued interest when yield falls short. (advanced)
• Ethena: Staking USDe Technical Design - Documents the sUSDe staking contract design, including its ERC-4626 interface, 8-hour linear reward vesting that blunts yield frontrunning, and the cooldown withdrawal path through the USDeSilo contract. (intermediate)
• Sky Protocol Docs: sUSDS (Savings USDS) - Official developer reference for sUSDS covering its ERC-4626 interface, share-to-asset conversion against the per-second savings-rate accumulator, and its UUPS proxy upgrade pattern. (intermediate)
• Cap cap-contracts - Source for Cap's cUSD stablecoin and staked stcUSD, where staked reserves fund a credit marketplace of borrower operators and undercollateralized positions are liquidated against underwriter collateral delegated from shared security networks so cUSD stays fully backed. (advanced)
• Anatomy of a $285M DeFi Contagion: The Stream Finance xUSD Collapse - Case study of the November 2025 Stream Finance xUSD collapse covering recursive looping that manufactured phantom collateral, hardcoded oracle prices that blocked liquidations, and circular cross-minting between synthetic dollars. (intermediate)
• Resolv Postmortem: March 22, 2026 Incident - Postmortem of the incident in which compromised off-chain signing infrastructure minted 80M unbacked USR, arguing for on-chain mint caps, per-period limits, and automated pausing that do not depend on off-chain controls. (intermediate)

Liquidity Management Vaults

Vaults that manage concentrated liquidity positions and rebalance their price ranges.

• Gamma Strategies Hypervisor - A widely forked fungible-share vault that manages a concentrated Uniswap V3 liquidity position and rebalances its price ranges through a supervisor contract. (intermediate)
• Arrakis Modular Documentation - Documents the Arrakis Modular architecture, in which a core meta vault whitelists per-DEX modules and an optional Uniswap v4 hook so one vault can manage concentrated liquidity across venues while offchain infrastructure submits rebalancing instructions. (intermediate)
• Steer Protocol Documentation - Documents a framework for automated concentrated-liquidity management vaults where off-chain strategy executors rebalance ranges within on-chain guardrails. (intermediate)
• Charm Alpha Vaults Contracts - Source for Alpha Vaults, the early passive rebalancing design that holds a full-range base order plus a single-sided limit order on Uniswap V3 so the vault re-centers its range without ever swapping. (intermediate)
• Beefy CLM Documentation - Documents Beefy's Cowcentrated Liquidity Manager, which pairs a 50/50 main position with a single-sided alt position so rebalances avoid realizing impermanent loss through swaps, and gates deposits with TWAP calm-period checks against price manipulation. (intermediate)
• Bunni v2 - Source for a Uniswap v4 hook that shapes pool liquidity with programmable liquidity density functions, rebalances autonomously, and rehypothecates idle tokens to lending markets; the protocol wound down after a September 2025 exploit, so read it as a design reference rather than production code. (advanced)
• Bunni Exploit Post Mortem - Post-mortem of the September 2025 Bunni exploit, showing how a round-down in the idle-balance withdrawal calculation, safe for a single operation, let 44 tiny withdrawals deflate a pool's liquidity estimate and enable an 8.4M dollar extraction. (intermediate)

Perp Liquidity Vaults

Counterparty vaults for perp DEXs, where depositors underwrite market making, liquidations, and trader PnL rather than earning lending or strategy yield.

• Hyperliquid Protocol Vaults (HLP) - Official docs for HLP, the community-owned vault that runs Hyperliquid's market-making and liquidation strategies and passes all PnL to depositors under a 4-day lockup. (beginner)
• GMX V2 Providing Liquidity (GM and GLV) - GMX docs on single-market GM pools and multi-market auto-rebalancing GLV vaults, covering reserve factors, fully backed versus synthetic markets, and how trader PnL flows to LPs. (intermediate)
• Gains Network gToken Vaults - Docs for the ERC-4626 counterparty vaults behind gTrade, with the exchange-rate formula combining accumulated fees and trader PnL, an overcollateralization buffer, and epoch-based PnL snapshots. (intermediate)
• A Hyperliquid Vault of Vaults on Lagoon - Walkthrough of a Lagoon-based vault on HyperEVM that allocates capital across ranked Hyperliquid trading vaults, covering the allocation strategy, PnL sharing, and redemption constraints. (intermediate)

Asynchronous and Multi-Strategy Architecture

Vaults that cannot settle atomically, where deposits and redemptions become requests fulfilled in a later epoch, and vaults that allocate across many strategies at once.

• OpenZeppelin ERC-7540: Asynchronous Tokenized Vaults - Documents a modular ERC-7540 base with admin-controlled and time-delayed fulfillment strategies, covering the request lifecycle, controller and operator authorization, and preview-function security. (advanced)
• Centrifuge Protocol Vaults Architecture - Explains how Centrifuge structures BaseVault, async and sync-deposit vault variants, request managers, and transfer hooks within its hub-and-spoke multi-chain design. (advanced)
• centrifuge/protocol - The onchain asset-management protocol combining an immutable core with modular extensions for vaults, cross-chain adapters, valuation, and balance-sheet accounting. (advanced)
• Centrifuge V3.2: The Onchain Portfolio Manager - Describes the strategy-execution layer that authorizes whole multi-step workflows rather than single actions through an onchain VM, letting one vault rebalance tokenized treasuries, credit, and DeFi positions across chains under unified NAV accounting. (advanced)
• Securing Lagoon's Asynchronous ERC-7540 Vaults from V1 to V5 - An auditor's account from Nethermind of the failure modes specific to async vaults, including pending-to-settled state transition errors, races between synchronous and asynchronous paths, and share-price manipulation. (advanced)
• Manage Adapters (Morpho Vaults V2) - Walks through registering adapters via the timelocked flow, setting caps on adapter, collateral, and market ids, and safely delisting adapters by zeroing caps first. (advanced)

Deep-Dive Articles and Research

Long-form analysis of vault design and the economy that has grown around it.

• The Steakhouse View on Vaults - Argues that a vault should meet three properties: trustless onchain NAV accounting, a strategy that is transparent and announced in advance, and strict noncustodiality that keeps depositors in control of their withdrawals. (intermediate)
• Curators Explained - Introduces the curator role, how curators set strategy and earn management and performance fees, and four dimensions for evaluating one: track record, transparency, communication, and conflicts of interest. (beginner)
• Morpho Vaults V2: The Latest DeFi Breakthrough - Describes Vaults V2, the owner, curator, allocator, sentinel role split, the adapter layer that routes a single vault to multiple protocols, and the exposure caps and access controls. (intermediate)
• DeFi Curators in 2025: Navigating Chaos, Building Resilience - Traces curator TVL growth and analyzes how the 2025 Balancer exploit and Stream Finance collapse propagated through curator-managed vaults. (intermediate)
• The Vault Economy - Surveys vault types from single-protocol earn vaults to multi-strategy cross-chain deployments and presents a risk taxonomy that treats collateral selection as the central curation decision. (intermediate)
• Institutionalizing Risk Curation in Decentralized Credit - An academic study modeling DeFi lending as a two-layer system of ERC-4626 vaults and third-party curators, measuring curator concentration and correlated tail risk across Aave, Morpho, and Euler, and proposing standardized onchain disclosures. (advanced)
• YieldSpace: An Automated Liquidity Provider for Fixed Yield Tokens - The paper deriving the YieldSpace constant-power invariant, an AMM curve whose marginal price tracks a constant interest rate to maturity so a pool can quote fixed yields on discount tokens. (advanced)
• The Road to the Complete Vault - Traces the vault standard from ERC-4626 through 7540, 7575, and 6909 to BoringVault and the curator era, ending in a rubric for what a complete vault needs. (intermediate)
• From Tokenization to Vaults: The Onchain Capital Stack - Centrifuge's thesis that tokenization is only the first layer, and institutional assets need multi-asset, multi-execution-path, multichain, multi-share-class vault infrastructure composable enough to let vaults build on vaults. (intermediate)
• Tranching in DeFi - A survey of onchain tranching that separates tranching-as-a-product from tranching-as-a-service and maps the current senior and junior wave. (intermediate)
• An Overview of Senior-Junior Tranches in DeFi - A running research series tracking current tranching protocols mechanism by mechanism, including how thin junior liquidity forces the split ratio. (intermediate)
• Who Eats the Loss - Argues that DeFi yield needs structured loss protection and walks through why senior and junior tranching is the mechanism, from a protocol building it. (beginner)
• DeFi Risk Transfer: Towards A Fully Decentralized Insurance Protocol - An early formalization showing that DeFi insurance and DeFi tranching are the same mechanism seen from two sides, where the junior tranche is the insurance. (advanced)
• Risk as a Product - Frames tranching as allocation infrastructure that splits a yield strategy into a floor-protected senior and a first-loss junior, and walks through observation periods, loss handling, and the use of senior tranches as collateral. (intermediate)
• Vault as a Credit Instrument - Proposes five credit risk metrics for DeFi lending vault depositors, organized into mechanical loss channels, governance quality, and smart contract integrity, and combines them into an implementable vault credit score. (advanced)
• A Systematization of Knowledge on DeFi Vaults: Architectures, Curation Mechanisms, and Strategy Design - An academic systematization of DeFi vault architectures, curation mechanisms, and strategy design that treats curation as a distinct control layer introducing principal-agent dynamics between curators and depositors. (advanced)
• DeFi Yield Aggregators: Analysing Investment Strategies and Structural Dependencies - An empirical study of Yearn and Cian vault operations from May 2024 to May 2025 showing that strategic complexity in yield aggregation expands risk exposure without necessarily improving returns. (intermediate)
• Not All Vaults Are Created Equal - Classifies vaults on a spectrum from protocol-constrained to discretionary fund wrappers and gives three checks for evaluating any vault: execution enforcement, strategy scope, and how NAV is determined. (beginner)

Videos, Talks, and Courses

Watch someone build and reason through a vault.

• Vault | Solidity 0.8 - Implements a minimal vault contract in Solidity and derives the shares-to-assets mint and burn math that ERC-4626 later standardized. (beginner)
• ERC4626 Vault Smart Contract Tutorial - A build-along tutorial that implements a tokenized vault on the standard and adds an entry and exit fee variant with source code. (beginner)
• Solidity Fridays with Joey Santoro: ERC 4626 Discussion - A discussion with ERC-4626 co-author Joey Santoro on the motivation behind the standard and its interface design decisions. (intermediate)
• Unchaining DeFi With ERC-4626: The Tokenized Vault Standard - Explains how ERC-4626 standardizes yield-bearing vault interfaces and what that composability enables for integrators and aggregators. (intermediate)
• Yearn V3: Permissionless Vaults with ERC4626 and Tokenized Strategies - Covers Yearn V3's modular architecture, where ERC-4626 tokenized strategies plug into multi-strategy vaults with optional periphery contracts. (advanced)
• Securing ERC4626 Implementations - Reviews common security pitfalls including the first-depositor inflation attack, rounding direction, and donation manipulation. (advanced)
• Advanced Smart Contract Development With Foundry - A free multi-project Cyfrin course covering DeFi protocol, stablecoin, and cross-chain rebase token development with vault accounting and testing practice. (intermediate)
• Adversarial ERC-4626: How Vault-Share Manipulation Still Bypasses Listing Screens in 2025 - A DeFi Security Summit 2025 talk by an OpenZeppelin security researcher on how vault share-price manipulation still slips past the listing checks integrators run on ERC-4626 vaults. (advanced)
• Bounding Rounding Errors in Integer Maths - A DeFi Security Summit 2025 talk by a ChainSecurity engineer that derives absolute and relative rounding-error bounds for integer DeFi math and dissects OpenZeppelin's virtual-shares ERC-4626 conversion formula against the real-valued version. (advanced)
• Morpho Vaults Explained - A Coinbase Developer Platform session on how a Morpho vault routes a single-asset deposit across isolated lending markets and what the curator role controls. (intermediate)

Live Data, Dashboards, and Risk

Study real vaults in production, and the tools that rate their risk. Tie the numbers you see back to the accounting you have read.

• DeFiLlama Yields - Ranks live yield-bearing pools and vaults across chains by TVL and APY, with filters for ERC-4626 vaults and a view of each pool's underlying strategy. (beginner)
• vaults.fyi - Aggregates ERC-4626 and curator-managed vaults across networks into one table of TVL, seven-day yield, and holder counts for side-by-side comparison. (beginner)
• Yearn Vaults Explorer - Lists Yearn v2 and v3 vaults with net APY after fees, TVL, and chain, letting you tie front-end numbers back to on-chain vault accounting. (beginner)
• Morpho App - The production interface for MetaMorpho vaults, where each vault shows its allocation across Morpho Blue markets, supply caps, curator, and live rates. (beginner)
• Morpho Data Dashboards - Morpho's documentation index of its official Dune dashboards, including vault performance and vault curators, pointing to the canonical MetaMorpho analytics. (intermediate)
• Morpho Vaults and Curators Analysis (Dune) - An official Dune dashboard breaking MetaMorpho vaults and their curators down by TVL, allocation, reallocation activity, and yield on Ethereum and Base. (intermediate)
• Veda Dashboard (Dune) - A Dune dashboard tracking TVL and capital flows across Veda's BoringVault deployments. (intermediate)
• Xerberus Documentation - Documents Xerberus's public REST API for its vault and registry datasets, exposing per-vault dendrogram risk reports and scores across protocols, pools, organisations, and assets. (intermediate)
• DD.xyz by Webacy - A risk intelligence platform from Webacy that assigns live 0 to 100 risk scores and listing verdicts to ERC-4626 vaults across Morpho, Aave, Compound, and Yearn, alongside stablecoin peg and RWA monitoring. (intermediate)
• DIA DeFi Vaults and Lending Map - Tracks thousands of vaults across many chains with per-vault audits, TVL, oracle and timelock configuration, and curator track records. (intermediate)
• Dune Curated Vaults Data Catalog - Documents the decoded on-chain event tables Dune exposes for Morpho, Euler v2, Aave v3, Fluid, and other vault protocols, the raw tables for writing custom vault queries. (advanced)
• List All ERC-4626 Vaults On-Chain - A tutorial that programmatically enumerates every ERC-4626 vault across chains from on-chain data, showing how to detect and read deployed vaults directly instead of through a front-end. (advanced)
• Credora Risk Ratings - Publishes independent A+ to D risk ratings for DeFi vaults, lending markets, and assets, built on Monte Carlo simulation of each market's annualized probability of losing more than 1% of principal to bad debt. (intermediate)
• CuratorWatch - Tracks DeFi vault curators across Morpho, Aave, Euler, Compound, Spark, and other protocols, showing per-curator TVL, vault count, asset composition, net APY, concentration metrics, and a curator stress index, refreshed every six hours. (intermediate)
• Stablewatch - Tracks yield-bearing stablecoins across more than 60 assets with APY, TVL, flows, and a risk categorization that separates tokenized treasury wrappers from delta-neutral synthetic dollars instead of comparing on headline APY alone. (beginner)
• On-chain Vaults: Mechanics, Landscape and Risk (Coin Metrics) - A Coin Metrics State of the Network research note surveying the on-chain vault landscape, covering ERC-4626 mechanics, interest-bearing stablecoins, curated lending vaults, and the liquidity, collateral quality, and oracle risks that curators manage. (beginner)

Vault Distribution and Routing

The infrastructure layer that formed between vaults and users in 2025-2026: omnichain access standards, yield APIs behind wallet earn tabs, and routing engines that bundle deposits and migrations.

• LayerZero OVault Standard - Specifies a hub-and-spoke design where one ERC-4626 vault lives on a hub chain and a composer plus asset and share OFT meshes let users deposit and redeem from any connected chain in one transaction. (advanced)
• vaults.fyi API - API reference for vault discovery, APY and TVL data, portfolio insights, and ready-to-sign transaction payloads across more than 20 EVM networks, used by wallets to power non-custodial earn features. (beginner)
• Superform Docs - Documentation for Superform's smart-account architecture for single-signature execution across chains and vaults, including hook development and SuperVault operations. (intermediate)
• Enso Docs - Developer docs for Enso's route and bundle APIs, which construct vault deposits, migrations, and cross-chain DeFi transactions without per-protocol integrations. (intermediate)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and held to a high bar. Read CONTRIBUTING.md for the format and the quality checklist before opening a pull request. In short: link to the primary source, describe what the reader learns in one neutral sentence, tag the level, and keep hype out.

License

Released under CC0 1.0.