Research report. Data as of October 19, 2026. Figures are from DefiLlama and Firelight’s onchain analytics (Dune) unless stated otherwise; figures from companies are labeled as self-reported.

Over the past year, more and more DeFi yield has been reaching users not through DeFi apps themselves, but through the “Earn” products of exchanges, wallets, and fintechs. The idea is simple - a user deposits with a few taps, and the platform routes that money into onchain vaults behind the scenes. Kraken’s DeFi Earn, for example, runs on Veda vaults with Sentora designing the strategies, while Coinbase offers USDC vaults on Morpho that are curated by Steakhouse. Even traditional asset managers like Bitwise have started curating Morpho vaults of their own. For the user, all of this shows up as a balance and a yield. What they don’t see is everything underneath it - the lending markets, collateral, price feeds, and liquidation engines that produce that yield in the first place.

The data shows just how much money is flowing this way. DefiLlama’s risk curators category, which tracks the firms that run these vaults, now holds $9.55 billion of TVL across 96 protocols - 26% more than it did in September 2025. What makes that number stand out is the backdrop: over the same period, lending TVL fell 39% and yield aggregators fell 74%.

That said, one problem still holds exchanges, fintechs, and institutions back from selling DeFi yield at full scale: when an underlying protocol gets hacked, depositors absorb the loss.

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