This $2B investment firm’s partner sees vaults as “the promise of DeFi”

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It’s not often that every new financial company manages to keep its footing in the ever-shifting bedrock of the crypto industry. Still, according to Samantha Bohbot, partner and chief growth officer at RockawayX, some products are simply ready for the growing institutional interest in the industry and have somehow found, and are gaining, traction.

A crypto-native investment firm with $2 billion in assets under management via a market neutral fund, a venture capital unit, and infrastructure, RockawayX has been an institutional DeFi lender for over five years, which makes it one of the bigger clients deploying into vaults. 

Now, vaults are top of mind for the firm, Bohbot said on Token Relations’ Talking Tokens podcast.

“[Vaults] are the embodiment of the promise of DeFi,” Bohbot said. “When you step back and you ask what's DeFi supposed to do, it's supposed to replace traditional financial functions.”

The most obvious DeFi primatives are lending and borrowing assets, as well as trading them. But for any of these areas to work, there has to be liquidity and a marketplace. Bohbot believes vaults are an evolution of those systems. “You can sort of think of it like a savings bank,” she said.

Unlike a classic savings bank, though, vaults have different returns, risk profiles and strategies. “We now have different collateral types […] a new buffet of actively managed products.”

In late March, RockawayX said it would launch three vaults on Morphofocused on USDC and wrapped ether, or wETH.

While vaults aren’t new, the hype around them has been growing in recent months. Bohbot said RockawayX decided to jump into the vault curation business last month because it felt its infrastructure was up to par and demand had started to catch up. 

“We've defined what collateral types are expected and accepted. We're setting the leverage limits. We're setting up those products for others to use.”

The first vault RockawayX launched is a “mixed-RWA pool,” analogous to an actively managed fund. They’re not akin to equity products, she noted, but instead provide working capital that is then lent to other productive uses. 

While vaults’ yield rates may look shiny, and sometimes people should “read the fine print,” the overcomplication of DeFi platforms is sometimes a friction point, Bohbot warned. 

Going forward, the biggest inhibitor to demand will be education. “You can’t just come into it blind,” Bohbot joked. 

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Samantha Bohbot, partner and chief growth officer at RockawayX, about why DeFi vaults have evolved from simple yield products into the foundation for actively managed, institutional-grade credit strategies. Samantha, who spent nearly four years as VP of growth at DCG before joining RockawayX, explains how the firm allocates over $2 billion across venture, liquid tokens, and onchain credit, and why it launched its own vaults on Morpho and Camino after spending years as one of the largest depositors into these products itself.

She walks through what separates a serious vault from a commoditized one, why credit underwriting and risk infrastructure matter more than yield numbers, and how AI agents could reshape how capital flows into DeFi. The conversation also covers the Resolve exploit, why prediction markets are overhyped relative to actual usage, how to spot confirmation bias in crypto venture, and why building real financial infrastructure takes longer than a hackathon.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Intro

01:14 – Samantha's background at DCG and path to RockawayX

01:49 – What RockawayX is: venture, liquid tokens, credit fund, and infrastructure

03:11 – Why vaults are the next stage of the DeFi promise

05:24 – How RockawayX differentiates its vault strategy from the crowd

07:22 – Why credit underwriting and risk infrastructure are what separate real vaults

08:21 – Why RockawayX decided to build vaults itself rather than wait

09:03 – How the first RWA mixed pool works

13:37 – Generative finance and how AI agents change vault UX and product fit

16:19 – Embedding vaults into fintech products to reach non-crypto users

19:45 – The Resolv exploit: how the attack worked and what curators got right

22:30 – RockawayX's 2026 priorities and where to allocate time and resources

26:02 – Why prediction markets are getting too much attention

27:14 – Running a market-neutral strategy on Polymarket and its liquidity limits

33:16 – Confirmation bias in crypto venture: pitching decks instead of businesses

40:09 – OCC charters and the future of crypto banking regulation

42:37 – Final advice: trust your gut on people and ideas 

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