As De matures beyond the high leverage speculation of past cycles, the industry's focus is shifting towards sustainable risk adjusted yields.
Now Blueprint has announced that Concrete integrated its institutional grade vault infrastructure directly into the finance wallet, giving tens of millions of users seamless access to events USDT yield strategy.
Now Blueprint managing over $1 billion in total. across its concrete protocol and Ethereum as well as Glow Finance on Salon joining us this morning to weigh in is Nic Roberts-Huntley, the CEO and founder of Blueprint Finance,s.
Good morning, Nick, and thank you so much for joining us.
So first and foremost for viewers out there, could you tell us a little bit about this integration of concrete's vault strategies directly into Binance wallet?
What does it mean when it comes to trading volume?
Yeah, we are very fortunate to get integrated directly into the Binance kind of wallet interface for users on the exchange to be able to deposit stablecoins, specifically USDT directly into a vault there.
And that vault then effectively gets allocated er out to our yield bearing strategies across Defi more broadly, which effectively means from within the centralized exchange, a user can start to get exposure and access to kind of best in class risk adjusted rates of return across DeFi.
Without having to take on some of the complexities of being what we would consider a more on-chain or blockchain native er participant.
And so we received, I think it was about $140 million of deposits within the first few hours, which was quite a, quite a shock to the system, but very grateful for the support there.
And I do want to get your take on returns, Nick.
I understand you've stated that Defi is finally moving away from unsustainable yield chasing.
So how do your vaults actually factor in things such as volatility as well as liquidity depth when it comes to delivering returns instead of just speculation?
Absolutely, I think one of the complexities around vaults is often lost and the vault itself should remain relatively simple.
It is all of the inner workings and monitoring systems that go around it to handle the accounting, exposure, particularly cost of execution.
When we've seen the drawdown in aggregate flow in crypto more broadly over the last few months, realistically.
We have noticed that the cost of execution has gone up quite dramatically, meaning that on-chain trades and the cost of unwinding positions has expanded.
So you have to be able to 1, identify the venues with enough liquidity and depth to bear the size that we want to put to work, and 2, be in a position that should it need to be adjusted because it has not performed as expected, or we've found something that is much more, you know, appealing and likely to outperform our previous rates.
It doesn't kind of draw down too much on the yield to date from unwinding and moving that liquidity across chain.
So I think we're seeing less rotation right now in some of our positions that have been consistent, and we're seeing liquidity kind of mold around very, very specific protocols that have had durability and consistent rates over a long duration.
We're seeing less kind of sharp rises in certain asset performance.
Um, there's some great builders out there shipping some fantastic new primitives across DeFi, and we've been fortunate to allocate some of our capital directly into those for our users.
Yes, and Nick, when we take a step back, the first half of 2026 has been volatile across all asset classes, and of course when we take a look at crypto, we know that price action has not recovered so far in 2026 and.
Finance does oversee both concrete on Ethereum as well as Glow on Solana.
So when it comes to your coop models preventing lending as well as liquidation losses for users, especially in this fragile market, give us an idea of what you're seeing right now.
Yep, I think it's uh been a bit of a flat year for most of us in terms of watching price action kind of get beaten up quite, you know, religiously throughout the year.
Um, we don't necessarily feel as though flows are where they should be, uh, in order for the market to expand very quickly.
We've seen a huge rush of liquidity into tokenized stocks, uh, tokenized equities being obviously a huge.
Kind of boom, an area where a lot of people are spending time and deploying a lot of liquidity.
What we are consistently starting to see though is increased appetite for kind of real world asset plays, real world asset, um, yield opportunities particularly, and we're seeing a maturation on actually fixed term and fixed yield opportunities, which is where we're spending a huge amount of our time, uh, assessing and modeling out.
I think for us the challenge is always going to be, How long can people sit in positions in crypto?
Historically it's an environment where people are in and out relatively quickly because of its volatility.
These larger, deeper pockets of liquidity that can, you know, take a few $100 million of opportunity in order to get, you know, high single digit, low double digit consistent returns are really appealing to a lot of the long-term partners we work with.
I think for us, the question is how do you create an ability to unwind those positions in the moment that you require short-term liquidity, and that's why we prefer our vault up er infrastructure so that you can actually take a vault share which is effectively your receipt token er for being a participant in the opportunity and then moving that to another user or using it as collateral itself, which is a kind of a novel and primitive expansion on some of the quantitative work we've been doing.
And Nick, finally, before I let you go, concrete separates custody as well as strategy execution, as well as accounting into enforceable modular layers here.
So why is this system preferable when it comes to TRADI entities compared to say, standard DeFI lending pools?
Yeah, I think we've really taken the approach of being full stack infrastructure.
So we provide a vault layer, accounting, uh, trade execution, uh, and also kind of full safety and operational security modules which make most of our more traditional finance or institutional partners a little bit more comfortable.
Uh, a lot of the other offerings of the market are a little piecemeal where you suddenly have to kind of purchase 5 different items in order to get what you require to be an effective participant.
And for us it's a case of.
The transparency that you get by taking on just one provider of infrastructure creates a huge edge.
Uh, it also reduces the amount of trust in a system that you're learning to understand.
You know, if you start to piecemeal all of these different parts together, you have so many counterparties, it's hard to kind of see the wood for the trees.
But with concrete, you get to use everything from front to back, including moving that liquidity around, as well as doing LTV monitoring on any lending pools that you might touch or participate with.
Um, so that's why we've taken this very much 360 or holistic view.
To kind of on-chain finance and infrastructure, and I think that's why we're kind of making our headway into the institutional finance realms.
Well, Nick, we will have to leave it there for today, but thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for sharing your insights as well as your perspective.
Thank you very much.
