CASE STUDY
Kraken partnered with Sentora to bring institutional-grade curation to DeFi Earn, its onchain yield program. Sentora serves as risk manager across all four vaults in the program (Balanced Yield USDC, Boosted Yield USDC, Advanced Strategies USDC, and the recently launched Advanced Strategies BTC). These vaults powered the growth of Kraken's DeFi Earn, reaching $600 million in balances and surpassing 80,000 active depositors within six months.
Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms, trusted by millions of institutions, professional traders, and consumers. Kraken clients trade more than 600 digital assets alongside traditional assets such as U.S. futures and U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs, all on one of the fastest, most liquid, and most performant trading platforms available. Beyond trading, clients can buy, sell, stake, earn rewards, and access derivatives and portfolio management tools. In January 2026, Kraken launched DeFi Earn to give customers a simplified path to onchain yield, routing deposits directly into audited vaults instead of opaque internal products. The launch addressed a structural gap in centralized yield offerings: customers wanted transparent, verifiable returns without managing external wallets, seed phrases, or gas fees.
Give customers a simplified, non-custodial path to onchain DeFi yield directly through their existing Kraken account.
Offer a tiered vault structure, including an advanced strategies option for customers seeking actively managed, higher-yield exposure.
Maintain full onchain traceability of deployed capital within a disciplined, non-custodial risk framework.
Extend the same simplified, non-custodial model to Bitcoin holders, allowing BTC to generate yield directly through a Kraken account.
Design and curation across Kraken's stablecoin Earn vaults (Balanced Yield USDC, Boosted Yield USDC, and Advanced Strategies USDC), built on Veda's BoringVault infrastructure and deployed across Ethereum mainnet and Ink.
Expansion of the vault opportunity set through multi-protocol, multi-strategy deployment, enabling access to a broader yield surface and more sophisticated risk-managed strategies.
Execution of simple lending, leveraged looping, and liquidity provisioning strategies across vetted protocols including Aave, Euler, Morpho, and Curve.
Application of a three-layer, defense-in-depth risk framework: pre-deployment research and due diligence, automated onchain rebalancing triggers, and continuous quantitative monitoring across six risk categories.
Setting up the Kraken Bitcoin Vault, using a single-cycle supervised loan strategy that borrows stablecoins against BTC and kBTC collateral without recursive leverage.
Maintenance of collateral buffers of 10 to 20% below maximum borrowing capacity, supported by autonomous deleveraging ahead of liquidation thresholds.
$611M Total Deposits | 80,000+ Active Depositors | 4 of 4 Kraken Vaults Under Curation |
Kraken DeFi Earn vaults surpassed $600 million in total balance across four Sentora-curated vaults and more than 80,000 active depositors only 6 months after launch.
The Advanced Strategies BTC and Advanced Strategies USDC vaults account for over $560 million of total platform deposits, the majority of Kraken DeFi Earn's balance.
Lifetime depositors across Kraken DeFi Earn vaults approached 90,000 addresses by the end of June 2026, up from roughly 50,000 within the program's first four months.
Weekly net yield distributed to depositors scaled toward $360,000 by late June 2026, growing in step with vault balances.
The vault infrastructure maintained a $0 liquidation record, consistent with Sentora's broader multi-year track record across supervised loan strategies.
Kraken DeFi Earn Vaults, curated by Sentora, as of July 2026:
Vault | Balance (USD) | Avg Net Yield (30D) | Performance Fee |
Advanced Strategies BTC | $320M+ | 1.8%, denominated in BTC | 25% |
Advanced Strategies USDC | $240M+ | ~6% | 25% |
Boosted Yield USDC | $30M+ | ~4% | 25% |
Balanced Yield USDC | $22M+ | ~2% | 25% |
Source: Blockworks, Veda dashboard.
Sentora combines institutional-grade research, non-custodial vault infrastructure, and continuous automated risk monitoring to convert curated strategy design into measurable scale. For Kraken, this approach delivered the highest-yielding vault in the DeFi Earn program, extended the partnership into a dedicated Bitcoin Vault within four months of launch, and helped push total Kraken DeFi Earn vault deposits past $600 million while sustaining a $0 liquidation record. Sentora's disciplined, defense-in-depth risk model turned a straightforward CeDeFi product into a durable growth engine for onchain earn programs.
