Coinbase, Morpho, Steakhouse: Who Actually Decides Where Your Stablecoins Earn

A curator that holds nothing

Steakhouse Financial never holds the money, he says. It writes and enforces the mandate that decides what stablecoin deposits are allowed to lend against. Morpho supplies the lending markets, which he says focus strongly on repo, or borrow-lend, a component he calls necessary for on-chain GDP to be meaningful.

When Stream Finance and Elixir collapsed in late 2025, Steakhouse Financial was the only major curator with zero bad debt across any mandate.

Mainstream distribution

The Coinbase High Yield Vault that Steakhouse Financial curates sits in the $270 million range. In July the firm became exclusive risk curator for Robinhood Earn, and it is also curating a MetaMask earn integration. Cachinero Vasiljevic notes that a Coinbase customer's main money is already a stablecoin.

Rates and liquidity

He says DeFi thinks in variable rates because it moves quickly, with atomicity and composability as core strengths. Morpho Midnight is an experiment in fixed rates that will let users configure their term; "We think that this this time, it will work," he says.

He describes Bitcoin-backed loans as deep markets, with 90% of the cbtc market borrowed at equilibrium. High-yield vaults in smaller assets carry a different risk: in stress, depositors may have to wait for the market to rebalance before withdrawing.

Stablecoins as money

Cachinero Vasiljevic calls stablecoins the digital format for money and compares them to Apple iTunes dollars, which behave like stablecoins but cannot be transferred or seen. He points to telcos in Asia Pacific and Africa as next frontiers. He says there has been no meaningful flight of bank deposits so far, but expects some migration if stablecoins are the better money.

He calls Groove one of the most interesting experiments in DeFi. Its Groove Basin redemption facility for tokenized money market funds, he says, will allow rate arbitrage within 12-second increments.