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Vault infrastructure overview

Mellow is vault infrastructure for onchain asset management. Mellow provides the management layer between onchain assets and the platforms that distribute financial products. Banks, fintechs, exchanges, wallets, custodians, brokers, payment platforms, asset issuers, asset managers, ecosystems, and agentic platforms can use Mellow to launch Earn, treasury, and managed strategy products under their own brand. Core Vaults are Mellow’s current architecture for new deployments.

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Core Vaults

Core Vaults combine strategy execution, accounting, liquidity management, and contract-level risk enforcement within one vault architecture. Each Core Vault operates under a mandate. The mandate defines:
  • Eligible depositors
  • Supported assets
  • Approved execution venues
  • Allocation limits
  • Liquidity requirements
  • Verifier rules
  • Oracle constraints
Every curator action passes through onchain verifiers. Operations outside the mandate revert. Core Vaults include:
  • Asynchronous deposit and redemption queues
  • Separate economic and withdrawable NAV
  • Verifier-bounded execution
  • More than 60 operation-level onchain permissions
  • Strategy isolation through subvaults
  • Multi-asset accounting
  • Oracle-defined NAV
  • Jurisdiction-aware eligibility controls
  • Crosschain execution through a bridge-agnostic architecture
Core Vaults use declarative verifier rules rather than protocol-specific adapters. New execution paths are added through configuration without changing the base vault architecture.

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Beyond ERC-4626

Core Vaults are architecturally beyond ERC-4626. ERC-4626 standardizes the interface for single-asset, single-strategy vaults with synchronous liquidity. It does not define multi-asset accounting, asynchronous liquidity, strategy isolation, externalized NAV, institutional permissions, or cross-venue execution. Core Vaults provide these functions within one consistent architecture.

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Products powered by Core Vaults

The same Core Vault architecture supports multiple product types. Each product is defined by its mandate.

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Earn products

Distribution partners can offer yield products under their own brand. The partner owns the customer relationship and product surface, while Mellow provides the vault infrastructure.

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Treasury management

Companies can manage stablecoin balances and other onchain assets under defined liquidity, allocation, venue, and compliance constraints.

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RWA allocation

Core Vaults can manage portfolios containing eligible tokenized treasuries, money-market funds, private credit, DeFi positions, and liquidity buffers. Asset availability depends on the vault mandate, integrations, jurisdiction, and issuer eligibility requirements.

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Curator-operated strategies

Asset managers, market makers, staking operators, and DeFi teams can operate strategies within contract-level limits defined by the vault mandate.

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Ecosystem vaults

Networks, protocols, foundations, and asset issuers can launch managed capital products around approved ecosystem venues and assets.

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Agentic asset management

Autonomous operators can manage capital inside the same verifier-bounded environment as human curators. The vault enforces approved functions, assets, venues, allocation bands, and sensitive-operation controls before execution.

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Meta-vaults

Meta-vaults provide an allocation layer above multiple approved vaults, curators, assets, and strategy sources.

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Operating model

A typical Mellow deployment includes four roles:
  • Depositors provide capital
  • Distribution partners own the product surface, brand, and customer relationship
  • Curators or vault managers operate the strategy within the mandate
  • Mellow provides the vault infrastructure
The distribution partner and vault manager may be the same entity, but they are often separate.

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Execution venues

Core Vaults support strategy execution across DeFi and CeFi venues. Live DeFi integrations include Aave, Morpho, Euler, Fluid, Gearbox, Curve, Uniswap, Cowswap, Pendle, Symbiotic, and EigenLayer. Live CeFi integrations are available through Copper ClearLoop and Ceffu. The vault mandate determines which integrations and operations are available to a specific product.

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Start here

The stRATEGY Vault is an example of a product deployed using Core Vault infrastructure.

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Historical architectures

Earlier generations of Mellow infrastructure include Mellow ALM, MultiVault and Restaking Vaults, Interoperable Vaults, Simple LRT, and DVstETH. Some existing products using these architectures may remain live. Their documentation is retained for deployment maintenance and historical reference. These systems are not the starting point for new Mellow deployments and should not be used to define Mellow’s current product category. Core Vaults are the current architecture.