Inside Upshift - The Institutional Yield Layer on Morpho & Aave

From protocols to enterprise

Upshift & August launched its first vaults in 2025 under the Upshift brand, and Kantorovich says they have since scaled. The earliest products were built on Morpho and Aave, with a focus on crypto protocols and their ecosystems.

Kantorovich says Upshift & August has now moved toward enterprise clients such as wallets, neobanks and exchanges. She sees publicly traded and highly regulated asset issuers as the next group of clients. Underwriting comes from August Digital, which she says puts every borrower through a full underwriting process along with KYC checks.

Why reporting matters

Kantorovich says crypto reporting as it is done today will not be accepted by the top four auditors, Deloitte, KPMG and so forth. She also points to tax: the way a position is wrapped or looped can trigger a tax loss that a public company would then have to report in quarterly earnings. In her view, an independent third party should report NAV, rather than the self-reported NAV that some competitors use.

Yield and distribution

For Agora's AUSD, Upshift & August found institutional OTC borrowers to add liquidity on Morpho and other platforms. Kantorovich says the EarnAUSD vault yields around six to 8% on stables, which is above lending rates on Aave and Morpho. The vault is already integrated into the neobank Tria, and she says more neobanks and wallets are coming.

She cites an internal analysis of USDC lending across Morpho, Camino, Jupiter and Aave. It found a 2% higher yield and 40% lower rate volatility when lending is aggregated across those venues. Upshift & August is also exploring an instant redemption facility for RWAs.

Hacks and competition

Kantorovich says the last month of hacks has been tough on the industry. Institutions that were bullish on integrating DeFi now have risk teams that want to reanalyze risk. She asked vault providers to stop arguing with each other on Twitter and to work together on standards.