Gyld x Concrete: Introducing Active Staking Vaults

For most of its history, staking has been viewed as a passive activity: stake, wait, and collect rewards. But modern PoS networks behave very differently. Staking rewards move with transaction volumes, priority fees, and MEV — all of which react instantly to market volatility, new protocol launches, liquidations, and other activity cycles. Variable activation and exit queues also introduce real liquidity and timing constraints to every staked position.

This makes staking rewards fundamentally different from the passive income stream they once appeared to be. And with Gyld’s term-structured staking instruments combined with Concrete’s institutional-grade vault infrastructure, an entirely new class of actively managed staking-based trading strategies is now possible for the first time.

Gyld and Concrete — a leading institutional platform operating secure, automated, and transparent vault infrastructure with close to $1B in TVL — plans to bring this new category of strategies to life in early 2026.

What Active Staking Vaults Enable

Active Staking Vaults unlock a broad universe of strategies across both USD-denominated and PoS-asset-denominated portfolios. They make it possible to:

• Rotate across liquid, native, and term-staked positions
• Express duration views using term structures and capture term premia
• Monetise staking reward volatility across chains
• Build higher-Sharpe basis and curve strategies
• Construct fully hedged or delta-neutral exposures to capture basis

Staking has evolved into a new asset class with its own term structure, reward dynamics, and liquidity profile; Active Staking Vaults offer the framework to allocate, hedge, and manage it with institutional discipline.

Gyld’s Role: Making Staking Rewards Tradeable

Gyld introduces the first institutional-grade suite of cross-asset term-based staking instruments:

• Staked positions are separated into principal and coupon strips, making both the capital and the reward stream independently tradable and composable.
• Term instruments are issued that match futures expiries dates, allowing matched asset/future trades
• Fully compliant, bankruptcy-remote structure suitable for ETF/ETP inclusion as well as DeFi-native use cases.

These instruments are powered by partnerships with Figment and Blockdaemon on the validator side, and Zodia Custody and Copper for institutional custody.

The result: staking reward streams that are mark-to-market, duration-defined, transferable, and usable across both TradFi and DeFi. This is the financial foundation that finally makes active staking management possible.

Concrete’s Role: Turning Strategies Into Institutional Vaults

Concrete brings nearly $1B in TVL and a reputation for delivering amongst the most robust and transparent institutional vault infrastructures in DeFi. Its platform combines secure execution with strict programmatic controls, enabling allocators to run complex, actively managed strategies safely.

Core features include:

• Allocator-only strategy control
• Role-based automation and permissions
• Independent daily accounting and NAV
• Programmatic limits, whitelists, and full transparency across all transactions
• Continuous monitoring and audited vault operations

The Initial Family of Active Staking Vaults

Together, Gyld and Concrete are introducing three foundational strategy types — the first of many possible with these new primitives.

1. Staking Money Market Vault

The first unlevered, actively managed staking portfolio.

This vault treats staking exposure like that of a money-market fund, targeting outperformance of chain-level staking reward benchmarks (such as CESR for Ethereum) while carefully managing liquidity risk.

• Curators dynamically allocate across liquid, native, and fixed-term staking positions to harvest term premia, with volatile, high-fee periods creating additional opportunities for outperformance.
• Performance is measured against standardized on-chain reward benchmarks (e.g., CESR for ETH).

Its receipt token offers a higher-reward, actively managed alternative to LSTs — delivering clearer pricing, greater transparency, and deeper composability across DeFi.

2. Levered Staking Vault

A controlled-leverage staking strategy designed to enhance returns.

This vault monetizes the spread between low on-chain borrow rates and elevated term-staking rewards, with strict risk controls enforced by Concrete’s institutional vault architecture.

• Curators borrow ETH/SOL and deploy into higher-reward Gyld term instruments, capturing term premia in a disciplined framework.
• Leverage, collateralization, and venue selection are tightly governed, ensuring transparency, safety, and predictable risk boundaries.

The result is a disciplined leverage strategy designed to enhance returns by monetising the gap between on-chain borrowing rates and term-staked reward rates.

3. USD Term Basis Vault

An upgraded, multi-dimensional version of the classic USD basis trade.

• Curators pair long-term staked or term-staked positions with short-dated futures to create a smoother, lower-volatility carry profile than traditional spot/perp arbitrage.
• By introducing term-based staked exposures and coupon strip cash flows, the strategy captures term premia on both sides: across the staking term curve and the futures curve.
• Flexible hedging windows, tenor selection, and delta-hedging tools give portfolio managers more dimensions to optimize basis spreads across market conditions.

The result is a next-generation USD-denominated basis strategy with higher carry, lower volatility, and a more diversified, resilient return profile.

Looking Ahead

Active Staking Vaults mark the beginning of a new era where staking rewards become a true financial market — one with term structures, benchmarks, hedging tools, and professionally managed strategies.

With Gyld providing the instruments and Concrete providing the vault architecture, institutions and DeFi managers can now build portfolios that treat staking rewards as dynamic, optimisable primitives rather than passive income streams.

A first wave of strategies — the Staking Money Market Vault, the Active Levered Staking Vault, and the USD Term Basis Vault — will go live in early 2026, with additional multi-chain and multi-tenor strategies to follow.

A broader ecosystem of active staking strategies will follow — spanning chains, tenors, and risk profiles. This is only the beginning of treating staking rewards as a professional asset class.