The Shyft to Smarter Onchain Yield

The way capital moves through markets is changing, especially in crypto. It’s less about chasing the highest APY and more about where that yield actually comes from.

This shift can already be seen across onchain markets as more assets and strategies move onchain. For instance, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) have reached almost $40 billion, a 10x increase in just over two years, while the total stablecoin value has surpassed $300 billion.

So, as institutional capital finds its way into yield-bearing stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, onchain credit and market-neutral strategies, the infrastructure is becoming more sophisticated, with investors just as concerned about the construction of yield opportunities, how secure they are and how to monitor where their capital is going as they are about the APY.

As Brandon Reid, Director of Business Development at Shyft, pointed out, among institutional investors, “there is more focus on where yield comes from, how it can be independently verified and what happens during extreme market volatility.”

Shyft is built to address this very shift from simply asking what a strategy can return to understanding its underlying mechanics, risks and reporting.

The yield management platform is designed to offer investors access to professionally curated onchain strategies covering crypto, real estate, gold and structured yield through self-custodial vaults. This way, Shyft is making strategies that usually require high minimums, private relationships and complicated onboarding easier to access, compare and verify for all kinds of investors.

Moreover, rather than having its users put together their individual positions across different protocols themselves, Shyft brings multiple strategies together within a unified capital allocation framework.

The platform is currently serving a retail audience while also positioning itself around the institutional side of the onchain yield market.

Its first two vaults are shCORE and shYIELD. Instead of relying on a single protocol or return source, these vaults combine different sources of yield within structured portfolios.

shYIELD is the performance-driven, multi-yield, higher-target-return strategy that combines high-frequency basis trading, private credit and curated DeFi opportunities through allocations to Radiant Prime, Maple’s syrupUSDC and Gauntlet USD Alpha.

shCORE takes a more balanced approach by blending T-Bills and controlled basis trading exposure to deliver stable and diversified returns through allocations to Radiant Prime, Ondo USDY and Sky’s sUSDS.

A new product that combines cross-chain staking, diversified real-world asset exposure and core single-asset yield strategies is also in the works.

These vaults remove the need for investors to navigate every protocol, strategy and risk individually, as Shyft brings them together within a single framework, thus providing a more structured way of allocating capital while maintaining onchain visibility into how that capital is deployed.

The underlying infrastructure of these vaults, offering access to crypto, real estate, gold and structured yield, is supplied by Ember Protocol.

The vault framework, Shyft says, uses the ERC-4626 standard, multi-role authorization, withdrawal controls, emergency timelocks, concentration limits, automated rebalancing and circuit breakers. Risks associated with onchain capital management are mitigated via smart contract audits, controls and testing across unit, integration, fuzz and invariant testing.

Furthermore, full transparency is offered via Accountable, RedStone and Chainlink PoR for off-exchange positions. This means allocators don’t have to take a manager’s word for performance; rather, they can actually check and verify it.

To bring shCORE and shYIELD to the market, Shyft has joined hands with GAP3 Partners, which is a VARA-licensed Virtual Asset Investment Advisor and acts as its Co-Curator. GAP3 provides research, analysis and recommendations around the vault strategies, adding an external investment-advisory layer to Shyft’s strategy-selection process.

It has also onboarded Blockchain Center Abu Dhabi as its Strategic Global Council, which “unites policy, institutional and vault curation expertise to accelerate Shyft’s global expansion,” the company announced on X. The government-adjacent institution advances digital asset initiatives by “connecting innovation with regulators and institutional capital in one of the world’s most ambitious markets.”

This partnership, Reid also shared, is intended to help the platform “build the right institutional relationships in the UAE.”

By targeting institutional allocations, regional partnerships and additional vault offerings, Shyft aims to expand beyond a small set of initial vaults into a broader platform for allocating capital across crypto-native and real-world financial opportunities.

At its core, what Shyft is trying to do is make onchain capital allocation less fragmented and more transparent by making the selection, combination, monitoring and accessibility of multi-yield sources possible through a structured vault-based framework.

“Onchain yield is evolving into a broader investment ecosystem, which means the next chapter of digital assets will be about creating frameworks that allow investors to access strategies in a more structured, transparent and efficient way,” said Reid.

As onchain finance continues to move toward larger and more sophisticated capital pools, Shyft is focused on bridging the gap between those strategies and the investors who want access to them without having to deal with the complex underlying infrastructure themselves, while making yield understandable, verifiable and accessible within a framework that investors can actually evaluate.