Galaxy launches onchain yield vaults for institutions

Galaxy Digital (GLXY) has launched an institutional vault curation business on decentralized lending protocol Morpho, expanding its push into onchain finance with a product designed to help clients earn yield on idle stablecoin balances without managing decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure themselves.

The offering, called Galaxy Curator, is available through Fireblocks Earn, giving the custody platform's more than 2,400 institutional clients access to curated onchain lending strategies from within their existing treasury and custody workflows, the company said in a press release Thursday.

The launch targets a longstanding challenge for institutional crypto holders. Large stablecoin balances often remain uninvested between settlements, deployments and operational holds due to the complexity and risk associated with directly interacting with decentralized finance protocols.

The rollout comes as professional vault curation has emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments of DeFi, with asset managers, trading firms and fintechs racing to package institutional-grade onchain yield products. Over the past year, firms including Bitwise, Gauntlet, Steakhouse Financial, Wintermute, Dialectic and RockawayX have launched or expanded curated vault offerings on Morpho.

Competition to package onchain investment products has intensified as crypto platforms push beyond simple trading. Robinhood (HOOD) this month expanded its tokenization strategy with Robinhood Chain , adding tokenized stocks, decentralized lending and other DeFi products as it seeks to bring traditional financial assets onchain. Kraken , meanwhile, has rolled out its xStocks ecosystem, which lets eligible users trade tokenized U.S. equities and use them across DeFi, including as collateral and in yield-generating strategies.

As competition shifts from tokenized assets to the infrastructure and products built around them, firms are also racing to attract institutional capital with curated onchain investment offerings.

“Galaxy brings years of experience navigating market cycles and building robust trading and risk management platforms directly into our Curation offering,” a company spokesperson said in emailed comments. “Institutions know exactly what they're getting: disciplined strategy and rigorous controls around downstream risk.

“This is an institutional-grade product, not a retail yield play, and reflects the natural next step for a firm with a long track record of building onchain capital markets,” the spokesperson added. “Retail-facing platforms aren't competitors, they're potential distribution partners. Our goal is to integrate Galaxy's vault products into both retail-facing and institutional platforms, with Fireblocks as our first of many, enabling partners to offer our crypto expertise and risk infrastructure directly to their users.”

Rather than requiring firms to build dedicated DeFi operations, Galaxy said its vaults apply the same collateral standards, exposure limits and market monitoring used across its institutional lending and trading businesses while allowing clients to retain control of assets at the protocol level. Transactions continue to flow through Fireblocks' existing approval, signing and policy controls.

The product launches with two strategies built on Morpho's lending infrastructure. A Quality Vault allocates capital exclusively to markets backed by blue-chip collateral with an emphasis on capital preservation, while an Enhanced Vault expands into higher-yielding assets, including liquid restaking tokens, Pendle principal tokens and Ethena products, in pursuit of higher returns with greater risk.

Galaxy said the business draws on its broader institutional platform, which includes an average loan book of $1.4 billion, more than $3 billion in staked assets across five custodians and a distribution network of more than 1,600 institutional counterparties.

Read more: Kraken unveils Bitcoin Vault, expanding yield push for BTC holders

CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.

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