Vault Curation and On-Chain Asset Management with Steakhouse Financial
“Vaults are a transformational trend for finance because they can offer stronger and stricter risk and transparency guarantees than traditional products. The real value is non-custodiality — full visibility into what the curator is doing, enforced by cryptographic guarantees rather than trust.”
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Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic and Sébastien Derivaux are the co-founders of Steakhouse Financial, an internet-native asset manager focused on building non-custodial, on-chain investment products for stablecoins. Emerging from a deep DeFi-native background, Steakhouse operates at the intersection of decentralized finance, institutional asset management, and next-generation financial infrastructure.
Prior to starting Steakhouse, Adrian spent time at Goldman Sachs and Bain & Company, and Sébastien created the first decentralized Core Unit at MakerDAO, focused on Real-World Asset and financial reporting. Their combined experience has helped shape some of DeFi’s most influential projects, with a focus on transparency, risk management, and cryptographically enforced guarantees.
At Steakhouse, they focus on vault curation as a new primitive for asset management, designing products that offer institutional-grade risk management, liquidity, and non-custodial protections. Their work currently centers on asset management products and services for the stablecoin economy and showcases how vaults can scale as a credible alternative — and complement — to traditional investment structures like ETFs.
Please enjoy the following insights from Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic and Sébastien Derivaux of Steakhouse Financial.
Vaults Offer What ETFs Can’t
Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic of Steakhouse Financial explains why non-custodial vaults represent a step-change for asset management. While investors can already access yield through traditional products like ETFs, vaults offer something fundamentally different: stronger risk constraints, full transparency, and cryptographically enforced guarantees. The ability to improve trust, not just distribution, is why vaults matter as finance moves on-chain.
🎬 Watch: Why Vaults Are a New Asset Management Primitive
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Removing Counterparty Risk — Without Removing Institutions
Sébastien Derivaux of Steakhouse Financial explains how vaults redefine counterparty risk, reducing or eliminating asset manager risk – an optimization possible with DeFi intrastructure but not in TradFi. Rather than eliminating all counterparty exposure, DeFi enables the isolation of counterparty risk, for instance to large, regulated actors like Circle and Coinbase only. By minimizing trust in the curator and enforcing asset management rules cryptographically, vaults enable open innovation and composability — without forcing users to rely on intermediaries.
🎬 Watch: How Vaults Isolate Counterparty Risk
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Stablecoins Don’t Kill Credit, They Reshape It
Sébastien Derivaux and Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic of Steakhouse Financial explain why the consequences of stablecoin-driven deposit flight are overstated. While some regulators worry that stablecoins could drain bank deposits and contract credit, the realities of financial innovation point to a different outcome: even within stablecoins' constraint of full collateralization, on-chain systems can support a vibrant credit economy. By enabling new forms of origination on stablecoin rails, vaults represent a meaningful challenge to traditional banking, putting pressure on incumbents to deliver better outcomes for customers.
🎬 Watch: How Stablecoins Change Credit Markets
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The Growth of On-Chain Finance Has Decoupled from Crypto Prices
It’s easy to think of the on-chain financial system as a function of crypto asset market caps, but that framing is outdated. Today, dollars, euros, and yen can move seamlessly from traditional bank accounts into fintech apps and platforms like Coinbase — and from there into on-chain lending and yield strategies. As fiat money flows seamlessly onto stablecoin rails, DeFi gains a direct connection to the real economy, unlocking entirely new paths for scale.
🎬 Watch: How Capital Flows From Banks Into DeFi
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🎬 Watch the Full Episode
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