Steakhouse Financial

Steakhouse Financial is a curator: it runs lending vaults on Morpho, where a deposit of USDC (or another asset) is spread across isolated lending markets. Steakhouse chooses which collateral each vault may lend against, sets a cap per market and moves liquidity between them. It never takes custody. The vaults are smart contracts, and adding a new market goes through a timelock set out in its vault controls documentation, so depositors can see a change coming and leave.

The firm came out of MakerDAO. Co-founder Sébastien Derivaux set up Maker's first decentralised core unit, which handled real-world assets and financial reporting; Steakhouse wrote Maker's monthly RWA reports and helped bring Treasury bills onto its balance sheet. That line continues: in June 2025 its subsidiary Grove Labs incubated Grove, a credit protocol inside the Sky ecosystem that launched with a $1 billion allocation to a tokenised Janus Henderson AAA CLO fund.

Most of its growth comes through distribution partners. Since 18 September 2025 Coinbase's in-app USDC lending has routed deposits through Steakhouse-curated vaults on Base, and in June 2026 Coinbase added a second, higher-yield tier. That is why Base rose from 41.4% to 58.2% of Steakhouse TVL in the second quarter of 2026.

Steakhouse USDC is the vault line people usually mean. It started with a whitelisting request on 9 November 2023 for an RWA-backed flagship USDC vault. The stated policy for the flagship series is blue-chip crypto collateral (BTC and ETH wrappers) and tokenised traditional assets only. Newer lines loosen that: the Coinbase High Yield vault launched on 11 June 2026 and the Ethena x Steakhouse USDC vault launched the next day both accept Ethena-issued collateral.

Steakhouse's own site quotes a larger number, $4.41 billion of 'noncustodial assets supplied'. That figure covers everything routed through its products, not just the gross TVL of its vaults, so the two are not in conflict.

Record: we found no loss on a Steakhouse vault. That includes the November 2025 xUSD, deUSD and USDX depegs, which left bad debt in vaults run by other curators, and the Resolv USR exploit of March 2026, which hit Gauntlet's Morpho vaults. A clean record at the brand level does not transfer to a single vault, so check the market list of the specific vault on Morpho before depositing.

The co-founders are Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, who worked at Goldman Sachs and Bain & Company, and Sébastien Derivaux, the MakerDAO core-unit founder. LinkedIn lists the company in Zug, Switzerland, with an office in Grand Cayman and 22 staff; it also runs Senepol, a governance and directorship service for crypto projects in the Cayman Islands.

The founding date depends on which source you ask. LinkedIn gives 2023, probably the date of the current entity, while the team was already working for MakerDAO in 2022. We leave the year blank rather than pick one.