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The pursuit of making DeFi invisible
Most developers in the DeFi space talk about disrupting banks. While that’s important to Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, co-founder of Steakhouse Financial, these days he’s thinking a couple of steps beyond that: What children today will expect money to feel like by the time they're old enough to use it.
He likens that thought to how the best Swiss bankers spend more time with their clients’ children than with their clients themselves.
“The client will eventually retire or die, and eventually it'll be the turn of the new generation,” Cachinero Vasiljevic said. “And so [we ask] what will that new generation expect? How will they behave? What are the sort of things that will interest them? [That] is a very useful [way] to think about how to build stablecoin products and how to do things in a digitally native way.”
Cachinero Vasiljevic says Steakhouse has come this far by taking that long-horizon perspective and not chasing every new opportunity in DeFi. As a result, he shared that Steakhouse manages over $4.5 billion in onchain assets and powers some yield products via companies like Coinbase, MetaMask and Robinhood.
"Our philosophy is we're just gonna focus on building products that fit what we think institutions will eventually be asking for, and make the least amount of bad decisions," he said on StrataMedia's Talking Tokens podcast. "That reflects in TVL over time, trust and brand value."
Put simply, Steakhouse builds a credit layer for stablecoins. It offers vaults, onchain structures that let stablecoin holders lend assets without handing over control to an intermediary, and offers governance tools to limit what the vault curator can or can’t do.
The pursuit of making DeFi “invisible” governs how Steakhouse builds its vaults, Cachinero Vasiljevic said. The firm works primarily within the Morpho ecosystem, where its core smart contract is minimal, at around 600 to 700 lines of code, and does little more than track who owes what to whom and what happens during liquidation.
"DeFi works best when it does the least," Cachinero Vasiljevic said. The hacks that rattled DeFi earlier this year, with over $600 million lost across the ecosystem, almost universally involved systems with complex off-chain components that turned into attack surfaces, he noted. That’s why he argues for simpler systems that are harder to break.
He says that discipline also shapes how Steakhouse approaches real-world assets, which is where the firm's ambitions extend beyond DeFi. Through Grove, a protocol developed on behalf of Sky, Steakhouse is allocating roughly $2.8 billion into real-world assets, and building DeFi infrastructure for them.
Its flagship product is Grove Basin, a settlement financing facility that allows tokenized money market funds to subscribe and redeem atomically, is trying to solve a problem DeFi has struggled with for years: While money market funds exist onchain, redemptions still follow off-chain cycles with quarterly windows, extended notice periods, and manual processes. Cachinero Vasiljevic thinks that makes tokenized money market funds less liquid than they should be, distorts pricing, and makes it nearly impossible to build proper repo markets on top.
The traditional finance ecosystem’s resistance to all of this is real, he said, as every dollar that migrates to a stablecoin is one less available for deposit-funded credit.
"If stablecoins could really take off, they would significantly impair the commercial viability of banks that depend on having deposits," he said. The opposition to stablecoin yield, which has been framed publicly as consumer protection is, in Cachinero Vasiljevic’s view, partly competitive blocking to remove interest rates as a tool that stablecoins can use to compete.
“I think you will see more adoption faster from the fintech space and especially the crypto-adjacent one,” Cachinero Vasiljevic said, noting Coinbase and Robinhood as examples. “You'll get more competitive pressure from these types of players before the banks really start paying attention.”
Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.
If you're building with stablecoins, the question isn't just can you issue one, it's who you trust to do it right.
Regulated stablecoin issuance starts with Anchorage Digital.
Home to America's first federally chartered digital asset bank, Anchorage Digital brings a level of regulatory standing most players in this space simply don't have. That means end-to-end stablecoin issuance built on a compliant foundation.
Pair that with correspondent banking that connects stablecoins to the traditional financial system, and tokenization infrastructure that lets institutions bring real-world assets on-chain, securely, and within the rules.
To find out more, visit anchorage.com.
The latest Talking Tokens podcast 🎙️
For today’s episode, I interviewed Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, co-founder of Steakhouse Financial, the onchain powerhouse managing over $4.5 billion in assets and powering the yield products for giants like Coinbase, MetaMask, and Robinhood.
Adrian breaks down his journey from Goldman Sachs to building onchain credit. He reveals why traditional banks are secretly terrified of stablecoins, the brutal reality of why tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs) actually takes months, and why the safest smart contracts are often the "dumbest" ones. Plus, we dive into how protocols like Grove and Sky are attempting to achieve the holy grail of decentralized finance: bringing the risk-free rate onchain.
Timestamps:
00:10 Stablecoins, DeFi Risk & the Future of Finance
00:47 Meet Adrian, Co-Founder of Steakhouse Financial
01:16 From Goldman Sachs to DeFi
02:15 Building a Better Financial System with MakerDAO
03:41 How Mature Is DeFi Today?
05:15 When Will Institutional Finance Move Onchain?
06:15 Bringing Tokenized Assets Onchain with Grove
07:25 What Does an Onchain Asset Manager Actually Do?
08:50 Will Stablecoins Become the Future of Payments?
10:47 Are Traditional Banks Ready for Stablecoins?
13:23 Why Banks See Stablecoins as a Threat
15:28 How Coinbase & Robinhood Evaluate DeFi Products
17:40 Bringing Non-Crypto Companies Onchain
19:06 Why DeFi Still Misunderstands Risk
21:43 Why Simpler DeFi Is Safer
23:57 Why DeFi Vaults Are Exploding
27:16 Will the DeFi Vault Market Keep Expanding?
28:42 How Big Can Onchain Credit Become?
31:30 Could DeFi Vaults Replace Traditional Lending?
32:55 Building DeFi Products for Institutions vs. Retail
34:44 Grove, RWAs & the Future of Onchain Finance
37:33 Why Crypto Needs Real-World Assets
39:06 Building an Onchain Risk-Free Rate
40:24 What the Next Generation Will Expect From Money
42:16 Adrian’s Advice for Builders
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Please note this content is for informational and educational purposes only. Any views shared should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research. We may have a direct or indirect financial interest in content mentioned in this newsletter.