Vault Bridge Questions Answered

Vault Bridge is a yield-routing protocol built specifically for chains connected to the Agglayer. It takes assets that users bridge onto your chain and puts them to work. Those assets are deposited into Morpho vaults on Ethereum, where they earn yield through institutional-grade lending strategies. That yield is then streamed back to your chain automatically. The whole cycle — bridge, deploy, earn, return — happens without requiring your team to build or maintain any new infrastructure.

At launch, Vault Bridge supports ETH, USDC, USDT, USDS, and WBTC. These are the assets with the deepest liquidity in Morpho's vault ecosystem, which is why they were chosen first. Additional assets can be added as vault coverage expands. Each supported asset maps to a corresponding ERC-4626-compliant vault, which is the standard that makes the yield accounting clean and auditable.

No. Vault Bridge works alongside your canonical bridge, not in place of it. Integration adds a yield-routing layer on top of the existing bridge flow. Users receive 1:1 representations of their assets on your chain, exactly as before. Nothing changes from their perspective unless you explicitly expose the opt-in or opt-out interface.

No. Existing chains — meaning chains that already have live state, users, and TVL — can integrate Vault Bridge just as easily. The protocol applies to new bridged assets going forward; it does not retroactively touch deposits made before the integration date. Think of it as a switch you flip: from the moment it is on, new inflows begin generating revenue.

Bridged assets sit idle in the bridge contract while they are on your chain. Vault Bridge routes that idle capital into Morpho vaults on Ethereum mainnet. Morpho is a non-custodial, immutable lending protocol — it does not have an admin key that can rug depositors. Inside those vaults, assets are lent to borrowers through strategies curated by Gauntlet and Steakhouse Financial, two of the most recognized risk managers in DeFi. Interest paid by borrowers flows back to the vault, and from there to your chain via the Vault Bridge contracts.

Yield rates are market-driven. They reflect supply and demand in the underlying Morpho lending markets at any given time. There is no fixed APY and no guarantee — rates move with borrowing activity. What Vault Bridge provides is the infrastructure to capture that yield without you having to build your own vault logic. In practice, rates for USDC and USDT on Morpho have historically ranged from 4% to 12% annualized depending on market conditions, but those figures can go higher or lower.

You configure an on-chain address when you integrate Vault Bridge. That address receives the streamed yield. What happens next is entirely up to your chain's governance or ops team. Common uses include sponsoring gas for end users, funding developer grants, covering sequencer costs, or distributing revenue to token holders. The protocol does not prescribe how you spend it. A few chains have used it to bootstrap activity in specific apps — gaming chains, for instance, have used it to fund free transactions for new players.

Chains connected to the Agglayer use Vault Bridge at no cost. That is one of the concrete benefits of building inside the Agglayer ecosystem. The protocol itself is free to integrate and free to run. The underlying Morpho vaults carry their own fee structures set by the vault curators, but those are taken out of gross yield — you receive net yield, with the deduction already accounted for.

The Vault Bridge contracts undergo independent security audits before deployment. Morpho's core protocol has been audited multiple times by firms including Spearbit and Certora. The vaults used by Vault Bridge follow the ERC-4626 tokenized vault standard, which provides a well-understood and widely-reviewed interface. Immutability is a key design property of Morpho — there is no upgrade key, which eliminates an entire class of governance attack vectors. That said, no smart contract system is risk-free. The team behind Vault Bridge recommends reviewing the audit reports linked in the documentation before integrating.

Bad debt is a real risk in any lending market. If a borrower in a Morpho market cannot be fully liquidated, the resulting loss is socialized across vault depositors. Gauntlet and Steakhouse Financial manage this risk through conservative loan-to-value ratios, diversified collateral exposure, and active monitoring. Vault Bridge allows chains to configure how much of their bridged TVL is deployed into vaults at any time — this parameter lets you dial down exposure if your chain's risk profile warrants a more conservative stance.

Yes, if the chain operator enables it. Vault Bridge is configurable: chains can present users with a choice at bridge time — participate in yield generation or opt out and bridge through the standard path. Some chains may choose to make yield routing the default with opt-out available; others may make it strictly opt-in. That decision sits with the chain's governance. Either way, a user's assets are never silently redirected without a configuration the chain has explicitly set.

Yes, through bridge partner integrations. Vault Bridge natively targets EVM chains on the Agglayer, but partnerships with other bridge providers extend support to non-EVM ecosystems including Solana (SVM), Cosmos, and Move-based chains like Aptos and Sui. The yield infrastructure on the Ethereum side stays the same — what changes is the bridge adapter connecting your chain to the Vault Bridge contracts. If you are building on a non-EVM chain and want to explore this, the best first step is to contact the team directly.

For an EVM chain already connected to the Agglayer, integration is designed to be quick. The Vault Bridge team provides deployment scripts, configuration guides, and direct engineering support. Most chains have completed integration in under two weeks from first contact to mainnet deployment. The time is mostly spent on security review, parameter configuration (which assets to support, what percentage of TVL to route, where to send yield), and a final audit pass on the integration-specific code.

Building a custom vault means writing, auditing, and maintaining bespoke smart contracts — an expensive and time-consuming process. You also need to establish relationships with risk managers, manage vault parameters over time, and handle edge cases like liquidations and bad debt. Vault Bridge offloads all of that. You inherit Morpho's battle-tested infrastructure, Gauntlet's active risk management, and an integration that the Vault Bridge team will support long-term. For most chains, the opportunity cost of building in-house far exceeds the cost of using a purpose-built protocol. The home page has a more detailed breakdown of the economic model.