Leveraged Staking Vault
Turns the thin staking spread into something a fund can actually hold. The client gets the yield. They never touch a DeFi protocol.
The problem
Base staking pays a thin spread, around the consensus and execution rewards on the chain. An institution cannot allocate to a spreadsheet of DeFi steps. They need a product: a single mandate, risk bounded, run by a manager, not a power-user clicking through five protocols at 2am with a hardware wallet.
What I designed
An isolated, non-custodial vault in the spirit of Lido stVaults. The client's ETH stays segregated, never pooled with anyone else's. It is staked into a liquid staking token, wrapped to wstETH, and that becomes the engine of the loop. The operator holds validator keys only, never the assets. Same non-custodial line I hold everywhere.
The loop, precisely
Stake ETH, receive the LST, wrap to wstETH, post it as collateral on a money market like Aave or Morpho, borrow ETH against it, re-stake, repeat. The leverage is bounded by the target loan-to-value, so total exposure converges to a finite multiple, not infinity. The yield is the staking APR on the levered notional minus the borrow cost on the financed part.
The risk envelope is the actual product
Anyone can write the loop. The work is the box around it. Where the liquidation LTV sits and how much buffer you leave below it. What a staking-token depeg does to your collateral. How the carry inverts the day ETH borrow demand spikes. Which leverage genuinely pays once fees are real and not theoretical. None of that is guessed. The parameters come straight from the carry index and are monitored live, so the vault is bounded by evidence, not by hope.
The wrapper that makes it institutional
Packaged as a managed mandate, the kind of separately managed account a fund already understands. Clean separation between the strategy layer that makes the allocation calls and the infrastructure layer that runs validators and takes no custody. Reporting a risk committee can read, and the compliance frame carried inside from day one. That is the difference between a clever yield and something an allocator can defend to their own board.