Exclusive: Top Vault Protocol Veda is Expanding to Solana

A year after it launched, decentralized finance (DeFi) vault protocol Veda is a leader in a category that was in its infancy at the time of its creation. In an exclusive interview with The Defiant, the category leader revealed the protocol’s plans to expand to the Solana blockchain.

With a total value locked (TVL) of $2.3 billion and about 100,000 users across all of its different vault products, Veda has been growing fast. Its TVL is up 283% in the last 30 days, according to data from DeFiLlama, making it the largest managed token pool by TVL.

It’s been growing faster than any other DeFi protocol that launched in 2024 except for decentralized lending protocol Morpho, according to Sunand Raghupathi, co-founder and CEO of Veda.

Not to be confused with secure offline crypto storage facilities, crypto vaults are smart contracts that store and manage cryptocurrencies, creating automated investment platforms that generate yield by executing predefined strategies for users.

“It’s a smart contract that hits a specific risk-return profile,” Raghupathi told the Defiant, continuing: “You might have low-risk, lower yielding products, things that are comparable but a little better than Treasury yields. You might have really degen stuff that's doing a ton of cross-chain, complex strategies. Our goal with Veda is to be able to support any kind of risk-return profile.”

Veda thinks there’s a vault product for everyone, Raghupathi said. “The way you do that is by building a platform that makes it really easy to create these products securely.”

That's what Veda is, he said. “It's a machine for packaging up DeFi into a consumable product without sacrificing on the security and transparency.”

Distribution is key

While Veda is celebrating its first anniversary, Raghupathi and his team have been working on vaults for four years.

“What that enabled us to do is get the technology right,” he said. “The thing we got right with Veda is the distribution.”

That means partnering with projects like Ether.fi and Lombard, which are essentially white-labeling Veda’s vaults, and blockchains like Movement, Berachain and Sonic.

On the decision to expand to Solana — currently the second most popular layer-1 blockchain in terms of daily active users — Raghupathi told The Defiant:

Eventually, Raghupathi wants to bring Veda’s vaults to more mainstream outlets, the Robinhoods and Coinbases, and to institutional players like the largest asset managers.

“We think there’s demand for these structured products across the whole spectrum, and the only way you're going to be able to sell to these players is by reaching a certain scale. So that has informed our business strategy, but it's just the beginning. We're not going to stop until there's a trillion dollars in our system.”

Ambitious goals

A trillion dollars is a mighty ambitious number, Raghupathi concedes, and it’s not something Veda can do alone.

“Specifically, DeFi needs to scale,” he said. “That’s a core conviction that we have. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think DeFi was going to be the future of finance. That’s kind of a prerequisite, that there’s a trillion dollars of demand for DeFi.”

And that’s on more of a five- to 10-year timeframe, he said.

Even so, DeFi as it exists now “is never going to be directly accessible to normal people,” Raghupathi said. “It’s just too complex.”

What is needed, he said, is “layers of curation” that make DeFi simple enough to be accessible to the masses without sacrificing the benefits of DeFi.

“I think what we’ve done is proven this concept among the DeFi natives, the crypto natives, but my parents aren’t using this technology,” he said. “The end game is that these products are the best possible way to package up DeFi and distribute it to normal people who don't have access to the financial life you can live onchain.”