Veda brings the vault stack behind Kraken DeFi Earn to Privy's 2,000-plus developer teams

Vault infrastructure provider Veda is making its vaults available to the developer teams building on Privy, the wallet infrastructure company Stripe acquired last June, the two companies said Tuesday. The announcement was made at Proof of Talk 2026 at the Louvre Palace in Paris.

Until now, Veda's vaults reached the market through one-off institutional integrations. Kraken used them to launch Kraken DeFi Earn, and EtherFi used them to build its Liquid product. Each of those took dedicated engineering and months of coordination, the kind of commitment most companies cannot justify. The Privy integration turns that into a standard API call.

"Until now, we didn't have a way to bring our proven vault stack to thousands of startups who want to integrate onchain yield," Sunand Raghupathi, Veda's co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. "Any team building on Privy can now offer their users the same vault infrastructure that the biggest platforms in crypto use every day."

Privy builds embedded crypto wallets that let fintechs and other businesses spin up easy-to-use wallets for their customers without seed phrases or external apps. The company now powers more than 120 million accounts across over 2,000 developer teams. In an interview ahead of the announcement, Raghupathi described it as close to a monopoly in its category, calling it "the largest embedded wallet solution in the world."

That reach is the point for Veda. "This is like a match made in heaven, because what Privy gives Veda access to is distribution with some of the largest fintechs," Raghupathi told The Block.

Beyond lending

The integration makes Veda the first yield provider on Privy that is not built around lending, Raghupathi said in the interview. Privy had previously connected lending protocols like Aave, which he characterized as simple, single-asset solutions. Veda's two launch vaults instead use diversified, multi-protocol strategies across leading EVM ecosystems, with developers free to set their own fee on top.

The vaults support major stablecoins, and Veda plans to add more allocation pathways, including top lending protocols, after general availability. The company said specific configurations and live yield networks will be published in its product documentation at launch. Raghupathi told The Block that the firm is eyeing yield opportunities across EVM chains and also Solana.

Raghupathi argued that yield is becoming a default expectation for any company holding stablecoins, for three reasons: retaining balances, attracting new users, and taking a cut of the yield as a new revenue stream. "Anyone who has stablecoins on their platform, which will eventually be every fintech on the planet, will eventually integrate yield," he said.

The shift is already visible inside Privy's own footprint. Stablecoins now make up 70% of assets held in Privy-powered wallets, up from 20% a year ago, according to the companies.

Security and regulation

Amid a concerning uptick of hacks across DeFi, Veda notes that it has never had a major security incident, and Raghupathi said that record comes down to time in the market rather than any single safeguard. "Our core team has been building in this space for almost five years now, and there are some lessons that you can only learn with experience at scale," he said, citing stablecoin depegs, protocol exploits, and liquidity crunches the team has worked through.

He did not downplay the stakes. "If I said anything other than security is my top priority, I think it would just destroy my credibility," he said, framing it as a question of survival for the broader category. "The setup for crypto is unbelievable right now... and this feels inevitable, except if we ruin it by taking shortcuts, not taking security seriously, and just destroying the credibility of the industry."

Veda recently hired Alberto Cuesta Cañada, a co-author of the ERC-4626 tokenized vault standard who previously led security at Optimism, as its VP of onchain security, Raghupathi told The Block. Last year, it brought on TuongVy Le, formerly general counsel at Anchorage and a six-year veteran of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as its own general counsel.

On compliance, Raghupathi said vaults carry different obligations than the permissionless protocols underneath them because they sit directly in front of users. Veda screens for OFAC sanctions and can restrict vaults to a whitelist of approved users, useful for a fintech that does not want its assets pooled with other companies'. He noted that SEC Chair Paul Atkins recently weighed in publicly on vaults and said that clearer rules would help the category. "In my opinion, regulation is actually really important for this category to succeed," Raghupathi said.

He also drew a line on what Veda will support. "There are some products that we will just not support, and those are the ones that look more like opaque, very risky bets that are not worth it on a risk-return basis," he said.

Enterprise as the on-ramp

For Raghupathi, the Privy deal fits a broader bet that mainstream users will reach DeFi through apps they already trust rather than by going onchain themselves.

"There used to be this dream that we're going to onboard the next billion users directly onchain," he said. "But the reality is that's not what's going to happen. What's actually going to happen is users are going to access these products through the apps that they already trust, whether it's their exchanges like Kraken, whether it's their brokerage accounts."

He pointed to Kraken DeFi Earn as proof. The product has drawn more than $250 million in deposits in under four months, according to Veda, making it what the company calls the largest enterprise DeFi earn product on the market.

Raghupathi said success will be measured on two fronts: the range of enterprises Veda can onboard, and total value locked and user counts. Neobanks are driving early traction, he said, with payments and remittances companies likely next.

Privy CEO Henri Stern said the integration widens what developers can build. "Providing seamless access to Veda's vault infrastructure through Privy's APIs means any of our 2,000-plus developer teams can now launch a yield product that was previously only accessible to the largest institutions in crypto," he said in a statement.

Access to Veda vaults for developers building on Privy is currently waitlisted, with the integration's general launch planned for next month.