Amsterdam, 1774. In the aftermath of a credit crisis that sent shockwaves through Dutch banking houses, a broker named Abraham van Ketwich launched something the world had never seen: a pooled investment vehicle. He called it Eendragt Maakt Magt – “Unity Makes Strength”.
Small investors could buy into a diversified portfolio of foreign government bonds, with management separated from administration to prevent conflicts of interest. Van Ketwich’s fund was eventually liquidated, but the idea proved indomitable. It resurfaced in London in 1868 with the Foreign & Colonial Government Trust, crossed the Atlantic in 1924 when MFS launched the first open-end mutual fund with redeemable shares, and evolved again with index funds and ETFs. Every iteration followed the same pattern: a crisis exposed the fragility of existing structures, and a new wrapper emerged to pool capital, diversify risk, and democratise access.
Fast-forward to 2026, and programmable funds emerge in the form of onchain vaults – smart contracts that do what Van Ketwich did with pen, paper, and two commissioners; but in code on a public blockchain. Users deposit stablecoins and receive share tokens representing their claim on pooled capital. The vault deploys that capital across decentralized lending markets, liquidity pools, and real-world asset strategies, automatically harvesting yield and rebalancing positions.
The comparison with traditional funds is structural, not metaphorical. Net asset value is calculated continuously by oracles and verifiable by anyone. Fee extraction is automated with hard caps written into the contract. Unlike ETF shares sitting in brokerage accounts, vault shares are composable tokens that can be reused as collateral or layered into further strategies the moment they are minted. That composability has no parallel in traditional fund architecture. Bitwise, a $15 billion asset manager, formalized this in its 2026 outlook, describing vaults as “ETFs 2.0” and predicting their assets under management would double this year.
Something shifted in early 2026. Apollo signed a deal to acquire up to 9% of Morpho’s token supply. Bitwise launched as a vault curator on the same protocol. Kraken began routing exchange deposits into on-chain vault infrastructure. Coinbase integrated Morpho into its lending stack. These are not experiments, they are infrastructure commitments. Tokenised real-world assets quadrupled in a year, crossing $26 billion. Coinbase proved vault infrastructure could be embedded into a consumer app serving millions. While the October 2025 drawdown was painful, it showed institutions that the architecture could absorb stress without systemic collapse, unlike the centralized lenders that imploded in previous cycles. Risk has become more measurable, and measurable risk is something Wall Street knows how to price.
If 1774 was the year of the fund, 2026 is certainly the year of the vault. Eendragt Maakt Magt – and this time, it’s written in code.
McKinsey projects the tokenized asset market could reach $2 trillion by 2030. But the growth is only meaningful if the assets have somewhere to go. For years, tokenization stalled at the same question: you put the asset onchain, but then what? As more treasuries, private credit, and structured products are tokenized, vaults are becoming the answer – the default routing layer accepting regulated assets, deploying them into compliant yield strategies, and issuing composable shares.
They also bridge a structural gap. Most institutional issuers currently require permissioned controls over their tokens, but permissioned assets don’t naturally compose with permissionless DeFi. Vaults wrap regulated tokens in compliant strategies that meet issuer requirements while plugging into open liquidity. The infrastructure beneath them is maturing to match: Kamino, a leading Solana lending protocol, recently accepted SEC-registered tokenised equities as collateral for the first time, not by relaxing compliance, but by engineering around it.
Still, vaults are not a solved problem. Smart contract vulnerabilities remain real, and the concentration of institutional curators raises centralization concerns. Regulatory frameworks lag behind the technology, and the legal enforceability of vault share tokens’ claims on underlying real-world assets is still being tested. Every generation built the proverbial plane while flying it. Every generation’s wrapper was dismissed as too risky, too novel, too unregulated.
Van Ketwich’s fund failed, but the principles he established – pooled capital, diversified risk, separated governance, and transferrable participation – conquered the world. The more than $70 trillion global fund industry did not emerge overnight. It took crises, regulation, and the slow accumulation of trust. Onchain vaults are at the beginning of that arc, but the forces driving their adoption – the demand for automation, the movement of real-world assets onto blockchains, and the institutional search for transparent and composable yield – are not cyclical. They are the same gravitational pull that turned a Dutch broker’s idea into the foundation of modern asset management.
R3 is betting on exactly this. After a decade building private blockchain infrastructure for the world’s largest banks and central banks, with over $10 billion in tokenised assets across its networks, R3 is now launching professionally curated RWA yield vaults on Solana through Corda Protocol, applying the compliance infrastructure banks already rely on to vault architecture that is natively composable with DeFi.
