This post provides an introductory primer on blockchain ‘vault’ infrastructure: what it is, how it works, and how it maps to traditional fund management.
About us: RockSolid has built and operated vault infrastructure since September 2025, with $25M+ of AUM for partners including Rocket Pool, MAVAN (a Bitmine company) and MegaETH, with zero losses or exploits since inception. That experience shapes strataOS, our onchain asset management platform for institutions.
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The tokenization of funds is the next evolution of asset management. The world’s largest asset managers see this clearly: Larry Fink of BlackRock wrote in his 2025 letter to investors “I expect tokenized funds will become as familiar to investors as ETFs”; Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson has said “eventually I think ETFs and mutual funds are all going to be on blockchain.”
Moving funds onchain creates new ways to distribute them, enables new ways to use those assets as collateral, and brings new operational and cost savings.
However, realizing these benefits depends upon the infrastructure and operations behind the tokenization: who may invest, who can approve a strategy, where assets can move, and how subscriptions and redemptions are coordinated.
Vaults are the key piece of infrastructure to facilitate these processes. This post describes how and why vaults will help power the trillions of assets that will move onchain.
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What is a vault
A vault is a smart contract that replicates the roles of a traditional fund onchain. Investors deposit an asset and receive shares. The vault invests the pooled assets under rules set in its code, values them, charges fees, and pays investors out when they redeem.
If you run funds, you already know the parts. Here's what changes when they run through a vault:
| Function | Traditional fund | Onchain vault |
|---|---|---|
| Shares and register | Units recorded on the transfer agent's register | Tokens in investors' own wallets; the token ledger is the register |
| Who can hold | Checked by the transfer agent before it registers a holder | Enforced by the vault on every transfer |
| Dealing | Business days, with daily cut-off times | Any hour; instant, or at the fund's next dealing point |
| Settlement | T+1 for most US funds, with cash passing through several banks and agents | Shares and cash swap in a single transaction, within minutes |
| NAV | Calculated by the administrator | Proposed and approved by named roles in the vault, checked against onchain prices and controls |
| Investment mandate | Guidelines, monitored by the manager's compliance team and systems | Assets, venues and limits, enforced by code in the vault itself |
| Fees | Calculated by the administrator and paid out periodically | Calculated and collected by the vault's code at each valuation |
| Distribution | A separate agreement and setup with each platform and distributor | One standard (ERC-4626) that any supporting wallet, exchange or lending market can use |
| Investor reporting | Monthly or quarterly statements | Holdings and flows visible at any time |
Importantly, a vault doesn't replace the legal fund. The fund, its board, investment manager, transfer agent, administrator and custodian all still exist. The vault is the operating layer they work through.
How well these functions hold depends on policies and controls. See the “Lessons” section below on implementation best practices.
How vaults and tokenization benefit asset managers
1. Collateral utility across digital markets. Tokenized fund shares can be posted as collateral and moved between approved counterparties at any hour, not only when traditional markets are open. For example, BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized liquidity fund was accepted as collateral on Crypto.com and Deribit in June 2025. Investors can earn fund income while using eligible shares to support trading positions.
2. Distribution to onchain investors. Stablecoins alone hold about $300bn today, and Standard Chartered expects that number to rise to $2tn by 2030. Under the US GENIUS Act, stablecoin issuers can't pay holders yield, so this creates an opportunity for regulated funds and vaults to serve stablecoin holders seeking income. This nascent global market is currently underserved by traditional regulated assets.
3. Lower operating costs. Shared transaction records can reduce repeated data entry and reconciliation, and let investors check holdings, NAV and flows at any time instead of waiting for a month-end report. Calastone's survey of 26 asset managers estimates that tokenization could cut fund operating costs by 23% and reduce a 12-week fund launch by 3 weeks.
Lessons from operating vaults
RockSolid has been building and operating vault infrastructure since September 2025, with zero losses or exploits since inception. That time period included the largest liquidation day in crypto history, when about $19bn of positions were wiped out on 10 October 2025, as well as several high profile exploits (including the Stream Finance collapse, the Kelp bridge exploit and the $6.3bn Binance hack). Here is why our vaults came through without losses, and what lessons can be drawn for asset managers.
Policies and controls
Like a traditional fund, a vault needs rules that are enforced, not just written down. In our vaults, every transaction is checked against policy before it can be signed. Assets can only move to pre-approved protocols and addresses, exposure is capped per vault and per strategy, and anything outside the rules is rejected automatically. The asset manager proposes NAV each day, and the RockSolid platform checks it against onchain data before co-signing to prevent a malicious or erroneous misprice.
Separation of roles
No single party should be able to move a vault's assets on its own. In our vaults, asset managers propose strategies, but can only deploy once those proposals have been reviewed, approved, and whitelisted by the RockSolid platform. Changing those strategies needs multiple parties to sign. An independent security council can replace any party if they disappear or act maliciously. This control protects against asset manager failure: this was a gap at Stream Finance, which lost $93m in customer funds due to decisions by its asset manager.
Operational security
Attackers increasingly go after people and devices, not just code: the multibillion dollar Binance hack started with a compromised internal AI tool. The RockSolid platform assumes any laptop, person or service can be compromised, and sets up vaults so that no single actor can move funds outside the rules. Signing runs on an institutional MPC platform, and signing occurs in a secure enclave on a separate device (rather than on laptops). No complete key exists anywhere to steal. And even if a party is compromised, it is limited by the need for a second co-signing entity and pre-existing whitelists.
Standards and integrations
Composability only pays off if wallets, exchanges and lending markets can support your vault without extra work. Our v1 vaults launched using the ERC-7540 standard (an async extension of ERC-4626 that suits dealing cycles). However, that standard is less widely used, and it changes how ERC-4626's deposit and redeem functions behave (so wallets, lending markets and aggregators need extra work to support it). For strataOS, our second-generation platform, we kept standard ERC-4626 at its core and added queued deposits and redemptions alongside: integrators get the standard they know, and funds keep their dealing cycles.
strataOS, our onchain asset management platform
Early vault platforms were built for DeFi yield, and they do that well. Regulated funds need more: eligibility checks on every transfer; sanctions screening on every movement; a way to act on court orders; administrator sign-off on NAV; and share classes, notice periods and fee equalization. Few platforms cover all of these.
Based on these lessons, we've built strataOS. It gives each of a fund's regulated roles its own onchain permissions and adds what regulated funds need: investor eligibility and sanctions checks, NAV safeguards and queued dealing. And it builds in the controls that have kept assets in RockSolid’s vaults secure through recent periods of extreme volatility and security risk.
Stay tuned for our next post which introduces strataOS and its features in detail.