Lendings are not vaults—stop the deceptive mimicry
I cant agree with Paul: Lendings are Web3's banks, permissionless protocols like Aave or Gearbox, where deposits earn yield from collateralized loans. Vaults are speculative funds that automatically optimize across various risk strategies, masking volatility behind "yield" facades.
During the xUSD depeg chaos, Morpho's vaults stung depositors with meager yields amid the same dangers, turning deposits into toxic traps. This flawed setup increases risks: borrowers can exit positions quickly to protect their margins, but lenders stuck at 100% utilization are stranded, unable to withdraw, and left holding the bag.
Paul's perspective reveals the truth: vaults are not safe retreats. They are high-stakes gambles posing as deposits, undermining confidence by copying bank-like assurances without real safeguards.
Education is only a temporary solution for poor design. Real growth requires honesty: vaults should acknowledge their fund-like risk, rather than pretending to be safe harbors and mimicking lending. Protocols that mix them create Frankenstein finance: risky, opaque, and exclusive to elites.
A vault is comparable to an onchain fund, and just like traditional funds, some will perform well and others won't, but this is what we must accept and mitigate if we want to build a truly open and decentralized system.
The fact that only 1 out of ~320 vaults on the Morpho App had limited exposure to xUSD isn't evidence that the model doesn't work — quite the opposite. Morpho's isolated market + vault model meant all 319+ other vaults and their depositors, each with different risk profiles, had zero exposure.
Many assume losses equal system failure. However, in open financial systems, losses are a natural consequence of risk-taking, even when systems operate exactly as designed. As an industry, we should not fall for the fallacy that yield is risk-free. Instead, we should focus on better surfacing and educating about risks — ourselves included.
For DeFi to be the backend of finance and scale to trillions in lending volume, lending infrastructure must remain separate from risk management. We firmly believe that this open and permissionless approach is the right one, and how DeFi was intended to work.
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