Sebastien Derivaux, Steakhouse Financial | DeFi Architecture in 2026: Stablecoin, Vaults and RWA

The talk of the morning, I it will be quite high level because it's the morning, so we didn't get enough coffee yet. So, let's start high level and to give you some keys and thoughts to think about when you see all the panel and all the presentation to think about how it could create a coherent picture with everything. So, the talk is DeFi architecture in 2026, stablecoin, vaults, and real-world assets, and how they behave together. So, we will start with balance sheet. There will be a lot of balance sheet because I love balance sheets.

That's what I'm known for, so Who doesn't like a balance sheet at 10:00 a.m. in the morning on a Saturday? So, the most important part, as we are stable summit, so it's a stable coin. It's What is a stable coin?

A stable coin is really you have an asset on the asset side, that sounds like a good start, and on the liability side as that you are issuing the stable coin. And the stable coin, what is really important, it's a debt. It's a promise to repay. I know not all stable coin are promising to repay. It's a bit more complicated than that, but bear with me.

Usually, it's redeemable at face value. If you have a USDC, you can redeem it $1. If you have a DAI, you can redeem it for one USDC, for instance, which is independent on what is going on on the asset side. Ideally, it's protected by a surplus buffer because if you are not giving all the yield to the depositors with a stable coin that is not maybe not value accruing, like DAI, or USDS, you want to put They want to be protected by a surplus buffer. So, an extra cushion that if something happen on the asset side, the stable coin is still valued the same stuff, which is actually quite important for the following of this discussion because we see more and more that stable coin and are taking a bit more risk on the asset side.

And if the asset side, for instance, if you are going to the real world asset stuff, uh the real world asset price can fluctuate. So, if you don't have a capital buffer to protect from the fluctuation of price of real world asset, well, you are insolvent and that's not good and you don't have a stable coin, you have a dream. So, stable coin should be protected. And the quote is "Anyone can issue money, the problem is to be accepted." It's not the exact exact quote, but to give you the idea.

Anyone can emit a stable coin, I can, you can, anyone here. Now, no one will care most of the time. Uh it's really because your product, if you are issuing a stable coin, is the liability. And I see for the last 5 years, always the same issue, people are focusing on the asset side. Oh, I will invest in real world asset.

I will invest in vault. I will have this nice technical structure. But at the end, what you are targeting to sell is a stable coin. Why would should someone use your stable coin? And that's more integration, utility, brand, way more than what you are doing on the asset side, which, let's be honest, if you want to target the next billions of users, they don't care about the asset side.

Now, what is a real world asset? A real world asset is just an on-chain representation of an off-chain financial instrument. Oops. Uh wife coding, classic. He's always doing this.

So, took a tokenizer is taking an off-chain instrument, so it's not on the asset side, and on the liability side, you have the real world asset that is the token representation on-chain. So, now the question is, is it debt or equity? And that's a complex question that we will not uh solve it today because we are not uh we are at the stable summit. It's not that important. But uh remember that we can have sometimes a real asset is a debt.

So not uh a uh just uh a debt so you can try to redeem it for uh the underlying sometimes, not often, for the underlying, but most of the time for the face value. So if for instance, if you are tokenizing the S&P 500, you might have the S&P 500 on the asset side, so the stocks of the S&P 500, but on the liability side, uh you are just a token and you might let people to subscribe with USDC to go in and out. But you cannot access the stocks because the stocks obviously are off-chain. So ideally, you are using a strong legal structure and not uh some uh at least an SPV, so it's off balance sheet and you are not using a startup balance sheet to issue those kind of real world asset. And really, a good tokenization is a transparent bridge.

A bridge from the real world of the traditional world to the DeFi world. And now that begs the question about what are fiat-backed stablecoin? Because if you think about it, they could be seen as a real uh real world asset. For instance, Circle, it's just a a pass-through or tokenization from a money market fund and USDC is just a tokenized representation of the money market fund. Because they don't have so much uh capital surplus, they are not taking risk.

The only difference is that they are tokenizing, but they are not giving you the yield because you need to be protected, so they are keeping the yield for themselves by regulation. But otherwise, you can say, "Well, is it really a stablecoin because they are not doing much? There is no capital to protect. At the same time, it's quite safe on the asset side, so is there a need for the capital to protect?" But if you go look at the Tether, it's really more behaving as a stablecoin because first, the balance sheet is quite diversified.

They have plenty of stuff, some which carry risk. Uh BTC and gold are quite volatile as we saw the last few weeks. But they also have some kind of capital. Obviously, we will have to wait for the full audit which was which is now promised uh to see how much is it structured because currently we only have a attestation. So, it's very unclear if the capital is really here to protect or not.

But at least in the ID, I would have framed that circle is kind of a tokenization. Maybe more a real world asset and actually in the industry we are always saying real world asset for USDC. And Tether is more like behaving like a stablecoin as you can think of it. Now, just a quick story of real world assets uh because uh that's quite informative. Uh I remember in 2021 we started with primitive lending with a Sky and which which was a maker at the at the time.

Then in 2022, it was complex and probably an exotic uh very ahead of its time. Then in 2022, off-chain T-bills $2 billion invested with a Signum and uh I don't remember the US bank. Then 2023, you have the off-chain carry trade provided by Ethfinex which was a stablecoin but they were investing the asset on the off-chain carry trade. 2024, we saw a big wave thanks to the Spark Grand Prix of T-bill tokenization. T-bill warrant just Oh, Sky invest in T-bills and it's complicated.

No, it's a tokenizer tokenized provided on chain and Sky is buying it on chain. So, you have more transparency. 2025, we were speaking a lot about private credit last year and still this year. It's still a hotly debated topic. And 2026, I would say instant stocks uh are quite uh on the rise and we will discuss about high yield fixed income.

So, what next for real assets? First part and something we still didn't achieve is liquidity. Deep secondary market. We have actually no secondary market for real asset. Why is that?

For two reasons. Money market fund, why would you need a secondary market in the first place? Because you can go to the issuers, it's quite liquid. Depend on the issuers, but it's could be either atomic for some. For others, it's T plus one, T plus two.

So, why would you pay a fee to have your liquidity already if you can just go to the primary issuer and redeem? It's the same stuff for the issuers. And on the other side, we have private credit that is tokenized. But private credit, I mean, it's quite opaque in the sense that you don't know what is inside of it and how to value it. So, you can clearly have a secondary market with say someone saying, "Well, your accurate token, I'm willing to buy it at 10% discount on the NAV."

But who is buying Who is selling at 10% on the NAV? Except when there is liquidation. I mean, there wasn't liquidation, so we don't know. But if there was a liquidation, yeah, someone is a forced seller. But in the That's not a healthy market because it will just happen a few times a year.

No one will buy or sell at a 10% fee because we have a two too complex um too complex real asset. Refinancing, uh same stuff. There was a lot of stuff we can do with real asset. So far, on the lending, there is not much happening. Why?

Because you need to We still have a primitive lending. So, that means it's quite expensive to lend against real asset. It's not optimized. That's something we should work on. And we are still missing something between money market fund and private credit.

We have a tokenized the simplest stuff, the most complex stuff. Now, we need to do what is in between. And I think it will be high-yield short duration funds. So, what is a vault? A vault for me just an aggregation uh of a set of of assets.

Uh ideally, you have something very constrained at the smart contract uh level uh layer. And you can come to the vault summit next week to discuss more the topic. But the idea is it's again redeemable at uh for the underlying or face value. Usually, the face value again, but for instance, for morpho vaults, you can also redeem the underlying if there is a lack of liquidity. And for me, what is the important is to say that vaults are on the asset side.

The liability is not that important. Uh it's really an asset orchestration layer of DeFi. I think that's the most important part. And again, to I have another quote, "Diversification is the only free lunch in finance." It's really focused on the asset side.

And so, if you remember, uh we we had the stablecoin that was focused on the liability. It's a liability you are trying to get traction with. While the vault in more, you are spending more time on the asset side to optimize this this part. And the vault shares, no one know what or it's called, and no one cares because no one is using a vault share as uh as a something important. Uh and yeah, so here you have the difference between vault and stablecoin.

And you can see just visually, stablecoin, you have the the yellow box, which is important. While on the vault, it's more well, or it's composed the different assets. If you want to put them on a on a map, you have the user world. And user world is really uh uh retail-facing, real people in the real life, not people in the this room, but outside in Cannes, uh they will use stablecoins. Now, will they use the rest?

Probably not, because it's a bit complicated. Let's start with onboarding 1 billion users to use stable coin before going in all the complexities of uh of DeFi. So, stable coin are really a bridge between the user world and the DeFi world. And then in the DeFi world, you can see we have the vaults, which are the orchestration layer of DeFi, and the vault will invest in sub vaults or DeFi protocol, if you want, but also provide liquidity, maybe. Uh that's something we'll discuss a bit later as well.

Vaults are really yeah, the the asset side and how you compute all your orchestrate the asset side. And we have a second bridge, which are the real world asset. Real world asset are really a bridge betw- between the DeFi world and the TradFi world. So again, difference between the TradFi world and the user world. Real user world are real people outside.

The TradFi world is TradFi, which are different kind of real people, but very different. And they are more in the tower in New York or in London, so they are not in Cancun yet. They're just hanging around. So, I would I just want to to reflect a bit on the evolution of uh MakerDAO Sky, and it's not a perfect uh evolution, because it's complex, especially as you are on 10 billion dollar uh stable coin. It's a bit more complex than that.

But I remember in 2022, Maker was two two things on the asset side. They had native crypto back loans with the old lending system that is still around, but not used too much, and off-chain T-bills. So, it was a 2 billions invested off-chain with no transparency whatsoever or no on-chain transparency, at least. Then it moved to the star system, and in a way, if you think about it, it was kind of a move toward the vault system, which is star. So, you have Sky, and now you have a you you have a spark.

You have a groove, you have Obex. Each of those are asset allocators that are helping Sky to invest in different kind of assets. And in a way it's it could be seen each as a vault or a vault curator or vault curator of a set of vault and and underneath. And Sky itself is not doing anything anymore on the asset side. Sky is really focused on growing the adoption of the stable coin USDS.

So now you have on chain lending vault with a spark, you have on chain tokenized real world asset, you have tokenized off chain loan with Syrup and you have still complex real world asset which are again tokenized. Topic to think about, if you have a stable coin should you allocate directly yourself or use existing vault? There are some liquidity and specialization consideration to think about. Should stable coin allocate directly to real world assets to tokenized real world asset or go outside? We can see that some tokenized real world asset are more expensive than in going directly into TradFi.

I think that's something that is getting solved. You are not paying 10 times more than TradFi when you are buying real world assets those days, so that's good. Vault and balances capacity, vault use as liquidity for trading and liquidation. I think currently the vault are a bit simplistic and we can use them to grease the wheels of DeFi. And let's leave it here.

Thank you very much.