A yield-bearing vault sitting at the intersection of centralized and decentralized finance just cleared a milestone that would have seemed ambitious at launch. Ethena’s assets held within Coinbase’s DeFi earn product crossed $300 million on August 11, 2026.
The product in question is the Steakhouse High Yield USDC Vault, which went live around June 11-12, 2026. It crossed $100 million in deposits within four days of launch. By early August, it was sitting near $200 million.
How the vault actually works
Coinbase users deposit USDC into the vault, which then deploys that capital into a high-yield lending structure. The key differentiator is what sits on the other side as collateral: Ethena’s synthetic dollar asset USDe and its staked variant, sUSDe.
USDe is a synthetic dollar that Ethena constructs using a delta-neutral strategy, holding crypto collateral and offsetting price risk through perpetual futures short positions. The yield generated from that mechanism, combined with funding rates in derivatives markets, is what gives products built on top of Ethena a higher rate of return than conventional stablecoin lending.
