The Crypto Council for Innovation has assembled a coalition of heavyweight crypto firms with a singular mission: figure out the rules for vaults before regulators write them first.
The Vault Coalition, announced on June 5 during the Vault Summit, brings together Galaxy, Morpho, a16z crypto, the Avalanche Policy Coalition, BitGo, and Sharplink to tackle the legal and regulatory ambiguity surrounding one of DeFi’s fastest-growing primitives. The effort is led by CCI, a policy advocacy group founded in 2021 and headed by CEO Ji Hun Kim.
What vaults actually are, and why they need their own coalition
Think of a vault like a pooled investment vehicle, except it runs on smart contracts instead of spreadsheets and fund administrators. Users deposit digital assets into a vault, which deploys those assets across various strategies to generate yield. In return, depositors receive transferable tokens representing their proportional share of the pool.
The legal status of these vaults in the US remains genuinely unclear. Are the receipt tokens securities? Is the vault operator a custodian? Does deploying pooled assets to earn yield make the smart contract an investment company? These are not hypothetical questions. They’re the exact kind of ambiguity that has historically triggered enforcement actions from the SEC.
