From Custody to Curation: Asset managers are moving onchain as vault “curators.” Here’s why that matters in 2026

22 hours ago
5 min read

A conductor standing over glowing DeFi “instruments” (lending, RWAs, staking), all connected into one flowing composition.

This article is sponsored by Summer.fi. Learn more at https://summer.fi/

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 (see Chart 1).

Chart 1

Line graph titled Total Stablecoin Supply shows stablecoin trends from Mar '25 to Jan '26. USDT leads with dark blue, others in shades.

Source: The Block Data.

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

Galaxy Research’s framework, The State of Onchain Yield, provides a clean institutional lens for evaluating yield. As with any financial assets, returns on Stablecoins are proportionate to the level of risk, but yield is also affected by the costs of operational complexity.

On-chain yields are governed by a wider range of factors: The volume of Stablecoin lending, the range of cryptocurrency staking and re-staking opportunities; the spreads between different types of credit; the liquidityof the investment, the ability of intermredairies to structure instruments to deliver a particular ratye, and the level of issuance of Real World Assets (RWAs) on to blockchains, notably in the form of tokenised money market funds.

As a result of these multiple factors, there are hundreds of blockchain protocols and thousands of yield opportunities with constantly luctuating yields. It is impossible for a treasury manager to analyse each opportunity individually. This is where “curators” can add value.

The “Curator” Opportunity

With Stablecoin and RWA issuance rising, and sources of yield becoming both fragmented and complicated, institutions require curated packages, not one-off exposures. That is the “curator” opportunity and some firms are seizing it already.

Bitwise, for example, announced a non-custodial vault curation service with the Morpho lending network in late January 2026. It is the first investment strategy to target stablecoin yield, with plans to expand.

Morpho says Steakhouse Financial is already the largest curator on Morpho, managing dozens of vaults across multiple blockchains and surpassing US$1 billion in assets under management. Morpho’s “prime” vault aims to optimise allocations across blue-chip crypto and RWA collateral markets.

Gauntlet is promoting “Gauntlet Vaults” not just as a point of access to the Morpho network but to Kamino Finance as well. Morpho presents Gauntlet as a fee-based curation model.

These pioneers establish a pattern. Crypto asset managers are using vaults as the foundation of an asset management strategy.

Summer.fi Institutional is directly supporting Asset Managers moving onchain, providing a single user interface to build and deploy capital across the entire onchain yielding market, from RWAs, DeFi lending, and staking.

Want to explore the wider digital asset custody landscape? Visit our Digital Asset Custody Directory for detailed insights, data, and profiles of over 120 institutional custodians worldwide at https://www.futureoffinance.biz/custody-directory

Why are asset managers doing this?

This shift is not simply about attracting customers by chasing yield. It’s about increased distribution (vaults enable asset managers to offer subscribable products) and operational efficiency (the investment strategy is coded once, and executes automatically within the constraints that are set).

Vaults also enable transparency. The ability to provide investors with observable allocations and performance histories is a competitive advantage.

Lastly, vaults offer faster adaptation to changing market conditions. They allow managers to alter asset allocations without having to rebuild the legal fund wrapper every time a change is made.

What investment strategies are being curated?

The strategies offered by vault providers are both native to the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) markets and the RWA token markets.

In DeFi-native strategies, investors are being offered Stablecoin lending optimisation; overcollateralised credit exposure; yield “stacking” with explicit complexity trade-offs; and structured rate instruments.

On the RWA side, asset managers are offering tokenised Treasury exposure and tokenised credit and structured debt products.

Together, these represent a broad range of vault-based investment strategies that can be packaged into investment mandates that operate within agreed bounds.

How can these products be accessed?

“Curated” vaults are offered through multiple “wrappers,” which vary according to the curator’s compliance needs, distribution partners and target users.

The wrappers include permissionless public vaults that aim to maximise distribution, but also white-listed vaults aimd at institutional money and segregated mandate vaults that operate like SEprately Managed Accunts (SMA) in TradFi.

Platforms also offer vault-based strategies, which aim to combine DeFi execution with a better user experience.

How is Summer.fi supporting “curated” vaults?

Summer.fi Institutional is not a retail product. It is an institutional infrastructure that enables asset managers, custodians, family offices, fintechs, and other professional allocators to deploy capital to capture on-chain yield exposures in the same way that traditional investment mandates are defined.

The Summer.fi service recognises that asset managers are not merely connectors to yield markets, but curators of capital that package mandates into programmable products for distribution to buyers.

Summer.fi vaults map to institutional mandates, with integrated compliance controls and risk management, automated execution within the constraints set, reporting compatible with back-office workflows and integration across public and private yield markets.

The service marks a step-change in the value of safekeeping services. The first era of institutional crypto was about custody. The second era is about “curation.”

Asset managers are no longer simply allocating to protocols. They are packaging mandates using programmable vault infrastructures that integrate custody, policy, automation, and reporting into a coherent institutional framework.

In 2026, the question is no longer whether institutions can access on-chain yield. It is whether they can “curate” it with governance, transparency, and discipline. The managers who master that model will define the next phase of digital asset capital flows.

To learn more about Summer.fi Institutional contact: