Defi vaults systematized through architectures and governance models
A Systematization of Knowledge on DeFi Vaults: Architectures, Curation Mechanisms, and Strategy Design
Cryptography and SecurityComputational Engineering, Finance, and ScienceComputers and Society
Summary
Managing digital money in decentralized finance (DeFi) vaults can be complex and risky. The authors organize how these vaults work, how decisions about strategies and risks are made, and what can go wrong. They created clear models and categories to describe vault types, how people in charge are held responsible, and how strategies run. This helps make DeFi vaults safer and better understood by those building or using them.
What this means in practice
- •For decentralized finance developers: Use a unified model and taxonomies to design and verify safer DeFi vaults with clearer roles and failure modes.
- •For financial platform operators: Apply curator governance frameworks to improve risk management and accountability in managing asset strategies on blockchain.
A survey. It maps existing work.
Authors
Davide Mancino, Luca Pennella
Abstract
Decentralized finance (DeFi) vaults are smart-contract-based asset management systems that pool deposits, execute programmable strategies, and mint tokenized shares representing claims on underlying assets and strategy performance. As vault designs have evolved from early yield aggregators to modular, actively managed systems, a new control layer, curation, has emerged to select strategies, configure risk parameters, and coordinate operational execution, introducing principal-agent dynamics and new failure modes. This paper systematizes DeFi vault architectures and curator-mediated control planes through (i) a unified system model and formal definitions for share accounting, roles, and operational dependencies, and (ii) three complementary taxonomies covering vault exposures and objectives, curator governance and accountability mechanisms, and strategy execution patterns together with their failure modes. We further map a representative set of production protocols to the proposed dimensions. The frameworks in this work aim to support rigorous analysis and safer design of blockchain-based financial applications.