The DeFi “Vaultization” Era: Veda, Aera, IPOR, and Lagoon Finance

Analysis

2025-07-18 - 7 min read

Chasing yield isn’t new - traditional finance has been doing it for decades through dividend stocks, real estate, and other financial instruments. However, while seemingly straightforward, the vast majority of the population remains sidelined as value extraction still requires a solid understanding of finance. But DeFi has just changed this forever… By democratizing access to institutional-grade strategies through modular, transparent, and permissionless smart contracts called “vaults,” DeFi is opening up simpler and more lucrative financial opportunities for anyone with a non-custodial wallet. We call this the “Vaultization Era.” Vaults allow asset managers to automate strategies using a mix of off-chain intelligence and on-chain execution to generate yields and bring risk-adjusted strategies to institutional and retail participants. Vaults can also be “productified,” as seen with Gauntlet’s recent USD Alpha, where the vault can be embedded directly into decentralized applications, turning any Web3 application into a de facto savings account.

And this is just the beginning. As DeFi scales, so does the infrastructure behind it. Standards like EIP-4626 are driving interoperability, while new players are emerging with distinct architectures and focus areas. In this article, we compare the four main vault infrastructures - Veda, Aera, IPOR, and Lagoon Finance - highlighting their differences in design, functionality, and gas fee structure. Thank you to @751_eth, @dara_khan, @0xpedro_eth, and @0xMeytab for providing valuable and insightful input and a final review of this piece. Veda: The Universal Yield Infrastructure As of July 2025, Veda stands as the largest vault infrastructure in DeFi, securing over $4.3 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL) through several asset managers and serving more than 100,000 users since its launch in March 2024. Veda’s architecture is modular and non-custodial, allowing developers to create smart contracts that manage yield strategies across multiple blockchains supporting EVM, SVM, and MoveVM environments.

At the core of Veda is the BoringVault, named boring due to its modular architecture with minimal core contract logic and ~100 lines of code. The BoringVault is the barebones contract that offloads most of its functionality to external contracts, such as the Manager , the Teller , the Hook , the Accountant , the uManagers , the DecoderAndSanitzer and ultimately the oracles. In simple terms, the Manager rebalances the BoringVault and the Teller allows for deposits and withdrawals. With the Hook introducing optional compliance functionality such as whitelisting deposit addresses, locking shares to prevent transfers and other use cases more suited to institutional products. This very modular and chain-agnostic design ensures seamless integration with almost any protocol or asset, which unlocks a broad set of use cases from ether.fi’s eBTC and weETHs, Plasma’s Vault, and wallets such as Binance Wallet and Bybit Web3.

Additionally, Merkle tree verification adds a layer of security since it makes it impossible for arbitrary transactions or strategy changes to occur given every action a vault can perform - whether deploying liquidity, staking or rebalancing - is pre-registered, hashed, and embedded in a Merkle tree Veda offers a developer-friendly SDKs and APIs allowing new vaults to be deployed in as little as 48 hours, making it an appealing solution for both retail and enterprise-grade DeFi products. Github: https://github.com/Se7en-Seas/boring-vault Aera: Scalable, Institutional-Grade Vault Infrastructure Aera is the permissionless, autonomous protocol built by Gauntlet , the leading vault curator and risk manager in Web3, providing institutional-grade risk management expertise to the largest protocols in the space. At the core of Aera is the BaseVault, a foundational smart contract that allows vault owners to whitelist guardians to execute vault operations.

Guardians are external entities appointed by the vault owner that access independent off-chain intelligence to perform two main objectives: allocate assets and execute strategies. Each BaseVault can elect one or more guardians to submit operations, with each guardian running independent custom strategies. Aera’s flexibility allows it to create both single-depositor and multi-depositor vaults, supporting a variety of strategies, from yield generation to contributor payments automation, volatility trading, liquidity provision, and more. This makes it powerful for DAOs seeking to remain mission-aligned to their community while maintaining ownership of their funds and delegating the management to a set of whitelisted guardians. An additional feature offered by Aera is their FeeVault, which makes fees routing extremely flexible. This allows r vault owners and guardians to set flexible fee recipients to claim fees, independent of whether it is a single-depositor vault or a multi-depositor vault - abstracting away details about what types of fees are charged.

Similarly to Veda’s infrastructure, Aera V3 introduces Merkle tree verification to ensure only carefully curated operations can be executed on the vault. Github: https://github.com/aera-finance/aera-contracts-public IPOR At the core of IPOR Protocol is the ERC-4626 standard vault implementation with extensive integrations enabling an array of functionalities and configurations, making it compelling for both retail and institutional participants. As with most other vaults, IPOR Vaults are smart contracts designed to optimize yield by automating complex DeFi strategies such as lending, leveraged looping, arbitrage, or derivatives trading across a variety of protocols, including but not limited to Aave, Compound, and Morpho. Similarly to the BoringVault, IPOR provides modularity as part of its architecture, with the current components standing out: Fuses are immutable, non-upgradable smart contracts acting as “pipes” that connect vaults to external protocols.

Fuses hold no assets or state, which ensures all accounting and ownership remains at the vault level. Multiple vaults can share a single fuse, or a single vault can use multiple fuses - streamlining interoperability while reducing deployment costs. Atomists are strategists who define the vault’s strategy; they select fuses and set asset boundaries. An Atomist might restrict a vault to only interact with high-quality assets like USDC or WETH, preventing risky swaps. Alphas are off-chain bots that execute strategies within the Atomist’s predefined rules and handle all tasks such as rebalancing or capturing arbitrage opportunities, operating like traders with limited API keys. Alphas are free to act but unable to compromise core assets. Another interesting feature revolves around the governance of the vaults. IPOR Fusion integrates optional governance features, enabling vault shareholders to engage in decentralized decision-making.

Leveraging standards like OpenZeppelinVotes, this governance module allows shareholders to vote on critical vault administration decisions, such as approving or rejecting fuse changes via a timelock mechanism. This ensures decentralized control over execution parameters, preventing unilateral control by any single entity and fostering a transparent, community-driven approach to vault management. IPOR vaults adhere to Defipunk values, as vault owners retain full ownership of assets and depositors hold proportional shares. Github: https://github.com/IPOR-Labs Lagoon Finance: Curator-Driven Yield Curation Lagoon Finance is a novel, modular, wallet-agnostic and general-purpose vault infrastructure specifically designed to manage and scale on-chain and off-chain strategies using Safe {Wallet} and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) for custody and execution. At the core of Lagoon are the LagoonVaults, based on a modular implementation of the ERC7540 standard with four roles bringing different capacities: the Administrator , the Curator , the Valuation Oracle and the Whitelist Manager .

This novel approach roots its values in core Defipunk principles, unlocking fully permissionless, non-custodial asset management for DAOs and protocols that are looking to deploy mission-aligned capital in an open and transparent way. Comparative Analysis To provide a holistic view of these infrastructures, we evaluated them across key features on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 represents the highest performance. This analysis highlights trade-offs between efficiency, security, and usability, revealing how each protocol balances competing priorities. Veda excels in gas efficiency and operational flexibility but lags in security features, while Aera prioritizes security at the expense of gas optimization. IPOR stands out for DeFi integration, and Lagoon Finance leads in user experience. Overall averages show Aera with the highest score (4.0), followed closely by Lagoon Finance (3.8), Veda (3.6), and IPOR (3.6).

This scoring underscores the inherent trade-offs in DeFi vault design: protocols optimizing for gas efficiency (e.g., Veda) often simplify core logic at the potential cost of advanced security, while those with robust security (e.g., Aera) incorporate more hooks and validations that increase computational overhead. Gas Efficiency Analysis Gas costs are a critical factor in DeFi usability, especially for frequent operations like deposits, withdrawals, and rebalances. We analyzed estimated gas usage for common functions across these protocols, categorized by operation type. Estimates are based on typical EVM executions and highlight how architectural choices impact efficiency. Veda’s BoringVault consistently demonstrates the lowest gas usage due to its minimalistic design and offloading of logic to external contracts, making it ideal for high-frequency retail interactions. In contrast, IPOR and Aera incur higher costs from oracle calls, validations, and complex hooks, which enhance security and flexibility but may deter cost-sensitive users.

Lagoon Finance strikes a middle ground with asynchronous logic that optimizes for batched operations. Conclusion Veda, Aera, IPOR, and Lagoon Finance each offer a distinct blueprint for how onchain strategies can be designed, executed, and governed - Veda leads with a universal, chain-agnostic architecture optimized for modularity and compliance, making it suitable for both enterprise-grade and cross-chain retail applications, while Aera brings automation and risk-managed treasury execution through its guardian model, offering powerful tooling for DAOs that want to remain mission-aligned while delegating strategy. IPOR introduces a derivative-native approach with highly specialized architecture for structured yield and interest rate markets, while Lagoon, on the other hand, focuses on flexibility enabling curators to determine the safety, security and risk parameterization of the vaults.

As vault infrastructures continue to evolve and capital keeps flowing into DeFi, we look forward to seeing the continued development of all available implementations. Rather than competing head-on, these infrastructures are carving out specialized niches - each reflecting the growing maturity and diversity of DeFi use cases. From automated DAO treasuries and institutional yield solutions to decentralized curation and DeFi-native derivatives, the vault ecosystem is finding product-market fit across the spectrum. At ExaGroup, we strongly believe in the principles of Defipunk and proudly support Web3-native initiatives that emphasize transparency, ownership, and community alignment. As DeFi continues to scale and institutions enter the space, we believe vault infrastructures will serve as foundational primitives - enabling programmable capital, composable strategies, and more inclusive financial coordination on a global scale.

*This article was not commissioned by any of the protocols mentioned and it reflects our independent research and genuine commitment to advancing Web3-native solutions. About ExaGroup ExaGroup is a research, financial advisory and asset management boutique firm with a mission to improve capital efficiency through token engineering and asset management whilst helping founders and DAOs optimize value creation and protocol longevity in a Web3 approach. For enquiries send an email to research@exagroup.xyz or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn .