Everyone in DeFi is talking about the “Earn” Wars. Robinhood, Coinbase, Revolut, and Kraken are competing for retail balances. Protocols like Aave, Morpho, and Ethena are competing to be the borrowing strategy. Vault providers are competing to package it, and strategists like Steakhouse, Gauntlet, Sentora, and Chaos Labs compete to run risk on top. Every layer is racing to be the day one partner of whichever Fintech wins distribution. Almost no one is asking the obvious question. What actually solves users’ problems?
People wanted a car on demand, not a better taxi dispatcher, and Silicon Valley built Uber.
DeFi captured flows in past liquidity booms; it didn’t build relationships.
Without any inherent distribution themselves, DeFi is now racing to be perceived as having distribution. That is a very different game, and it produces very different outcomes.
The logic these companies are running is the same. If we get picked by enough platforms, we become the market’s default architecture. That is the pitch to investors and to boards, but it misreads the reality.
What the market is signaling is that pricing power is zero.
That is why the terms keep sliding in favor of the Fintechs and the banks.
Yields are being pushed up by subsidies from the platforms, vaults, and strategists themselves, or from the underlying protocols they deposit into. Even L2S are losing. Look at Robinhood Chain versus Arbitrum. The economics are moving in one direction, and it is not the direction of a product with real demand behind it. It is the direction of a product paying to be on the shelf. That is not distribution. Those are slotting fees.
And the pressure to keep selling into that shelf is what has stopped anyone from asking the harder question. Is the current product actually any good?
A lot of multi-strategy vaults work by depositing capital, leaving a meaningful portion sitting idle. It waits for the strategist to decide when and where to deploy it. It waits for the rebalancing cycle. It might even wait for governance to approve a new position. Meanwhile, your capital earns nothing, while the vault’s headline APY gets diluted by the cash drag underneath. The advertised yield and the yield you actually receive are two very different numbers, and no one on the marketing side is in a hurry to explain the gap.
Compare that to Fidelity. When you deposit into a money market account, your money is deployed immediately. There is no strategist standing between your deposit and your yield. The moment your capital arrives, it is already working.
That is what a real product looks like. And it is nothing like what some in DeFi are currently building for retail yield.
That constraint is gone. Gas on L2S is effectively free. Cross-chain rails like Circle’s CCTP, IBC, and Axelar have made moving stablecoins between venues a matter of seconds and cents. No RWA cares what chain it is on, as long as it has liquidity. A tokenized Treasury bill or money market fund is a ledger entry backed by real off-chain instruments. The chain is a rail, not a home. What is left is the vault as a cultural artifact, a workaround from 2020-2021 with a 2026 pitch deck.
The competitive pressure of the Earn Wars means every participant is so focused on winning shelf placement that no one is fixing the plumbing. No one is asking why capital sits idle. No one is asking whether the shared-vault model even makes sense anymore. No one is asking where strategists and curators add value, and what skills it takes to do that well. The race for distribution has consumed the appetite for product work.
The market underneath is changing too. The users moving into stablecoins now are treasurers, family offices, neobank operators, and Fintech builders. They want their capital transparently deployed the moment it arrives. They want to change their allocation without waiting for a strategist to notice. What fits that need looks a lot more like MPC wallet infrastructure than a shared vault. Every user gets their own execution environment, their own strategy logic, and rails underneath that handle the complexity. Products like Ymax and Ground (my company) are starting to build in that direction. The intelligence sits in the orchestration, not the vault. The user keeps the strategy. The platform earns its keep by making that strategy easier to execute, not by picking what the strategy should be.
The Earn Wars will keep going. The leaderboards will shift by basis points. But competitors are confusing being picked with being wanted. Getting slotted onto a Fintech’s yield page at concessional terms is not proof that your product is winning. It is the market telling you what it thinks your product is worth.
The vault was always a means to an end. The end was user control over yield, with capital actually deployed. Getting it right now means building backward from what users actually need, not forward from an artifact that outlived the problem it was built to solve.
Stephanie Vaughan is the COO of Ground, a company building the Stripe-like interface for TradFi institutions (neobanks, Fintechs, and wealth advisors) to access on-chain assets like DeFi and real-world assets (RWAs) without ever touching blockchain infrastructure themselves. Ground’s platform uses non-custodial MPC wallets so partners can offer their end users tokenized yield products, RWAs, and stablecoin-native services while maintaining full custody and compliance. Previously, Stephanie co-founded and served as COO of Veda, the DeFi engine that has secured over $6 billion in digital assets for leading protocols and Fintech platforms. Earlier, she held C-suite roles across Web3, including xx Network (founded by cryptography pioneer David Chaum), and was in investment banking at Houlihan Lokey. Stephanie is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, a Columbia MBA, and a former Captain in the Marine Corps. You can connect with Stephanie on X.