Institutional crypto has largely solved custody. Assets can be held securely, segregated, and audited at scale.

What’s changing in 2026 is how owners of digital assets can utilise those same assets across the market to generate yield and, more importantly, who performs the asset management function on assets that have been deployed.

A growing number of asset management firms are stepping on-chain not merely as allocators, but as vault “curators,” or vault managers that design strategies, set risk parameters and package yield exposures into asset management mandate-like products for holders of crypto-assets.

This shift is being driven by three forces: Stablecoin scale, yield fragmentation, and the emergence of vaults as a  new institutional wrapper.

Why Curators Are Emerging Now

Total stablecoin supply now sits at more than US$300 billion, and functions increasingly as a transactional and settlement infrastructure rather than just a means of payment on-chain or collateral for trading cryptocurrencies on-chain. 

As supply scales, Stablecoins begin to resemble treasury capital.

Treasury capital seeks structured yield.

This shift is beginning to influence traditional finance as well. On 27 January 2026, Reuters reported that Standard Chartered estimated up to US$500 billion of U.S. bank deposits could migrate toward Stablecoins by 2028, depending on the level of confidence in reserve structures and the yields available. 

Stablecoins may have become financial “plumbing,” which is helping the market to grow, , but it is also clear that institutional holders of Stablecoins want yield as well.

Yield Is Rising but is Affected by Complexity as Well as Risk