About Upshift
Upshift is the operating system for institutional onchain asset management.
Upshift lets teams design and launch vaults on 30+ chains with any DeFi and CeFi strategy, underpinned by a robust policy engine. Upshift vaults integrate with Upshift's institutional infrastructure layer — an onchain prime brokerage handling $7bn in monthly volume for institutions — unlocking a $500M+ distribution network of institutional LPs, as well as ancillary services such as margin lending against vault positions.
Broadly, Upshift enables:
- Custom Earn vault design — Teams ranging from crypto neobanks to institutional credit issuers can use Upshift to design yield strategies on and off chain, e.g. lending, basis trade, RWAs. Upshift vaults can deploy simultaneously to multiple protocols, meaning developers can build vaults customised to their users' risk profile.
- Seamless SDK integration — The Upshift SDK makes it simple to white-label any existing Upshift vault on third-party frontends. Functionality includes deposit/withdrawal, alongside metadata such as historical performance and total assets deposited.
- Institutional ancillary services — Through Upshift's institutional infrastructure layer, vault depositors under KYC can take out loans against vault receipt token collateral. Teams can also leverage its unique cross-margining architecture to design strategies combining DeFi and CeFi, e.g. a basis trade with legs simultaneously on Hyperliquid and Binance.
Supported chains today
Upshift supports the following chains, and we are looking to add more over time: Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Citrea, Ethereum, Flare, Fluent, HyperEVM, Monad, Solana, and Stellar.
Upshift's institutional infrastructure layer
Underneath the vault surface, Upshift operates institutional-grade web3 infrastructure (previously built under the Fractal name) that allows onchain financial assets to interact with and collateralize against each other via a universal margin account — starting with existing crypto assets and expanding to real world assets. The goal: make onchain finance as capital efficient as CeFi.
This is an institutional-grade platform — all borrowers go through KYC/KYB. It enables capital efficiency for institutions already deployed onchain, while giving institutions that cannot interact with DeFi directly a way to do so by bringing bilateral agreements onchain. Institutional clients benefit from:
- Cost of capital — Onchain finance today is primarily fully collateralized. Cross-margin collateralization tooling brings down the cost of capital, whether for an early stage fintech startup, a traditional or crypto native fund, or a DAO treasury.
- Access to credit — The account structure and risk engine unlock the collateral value of users' assets in a segregated and controlled environment.
- Transparency of risk and reserves — A fully transparent and programmable chain of credit provides better credit monitoring and trust between borrowers and lenders.
Supported today: DeFi protocols (via Account Abstraction and WalletConnect, restricted to whitelisted smart contract permissions), OTC bilateral agreements (tokenized options, forwards, total return and interest rate swaps with automated margining), and spot execution (onchain order algorithms such as TWAP and VWAP with verifiable proof of reserves), plus 24/7 client support for institutional clients.
How vaults connect to it
Upshift vaults move deposits into subaccounts on the institutional layer for deployment. Subaccounts are smart contract wallets offering multiple benefits:
- Vault curators execute strategies over a platform offering sophisticated trading algorithms, risk management and capital efficient cross-margining
- Policies are enforced on each subaccount, meaning vault curators must remain within the mandate of the vault strategy, e.g. only supply to the WETH market on Aave
- Teams launching vaults benefit from distribution to a network of institutional LPs, including asset managers, family offices and hedge funds
- Vault depositors can verify onchain positions in any subaccount
- Vault depositors may be able to borrow against their positions (requires KYC)
Protocol architecture
The institutional layer is composed of:
- On-chain loans — Segregated OTC loans where the lender whitelists the borrower's address, chain, collateral type, LTV, rate and term, as well as the contract calls the loaned assets can engage with and whether the loan faces a market maker and is delta-neutral.
- Lending pools — Segregated credit pools (permissioned, lender-specific credit facilities with specific risk constraints), integrations on DeFi-native lending protocols such as Clearpool, Maple, Morpho, Term or Aave, and public pools (USDC, ETH, WBTC) that are permissionless and composable.
- Subaccounts — The core smart contract wallet, owned by the customer with select functions exposed to the risk engine such as liquidation or emergency unwind.
- Strategy contracts — Adapters on top of existing DeFi protocols (Aave, Compound, Curve, Convex, Uniswap, GMX, Paraswap, 1inch and their forks across EVM chains), plus structured product contracts (total return swaps, interest rate swaps, forwards, options) with off-chain pricing feeds and automated margining.
- Risk engine — An off-chain module that monitors wallet health, triggers margin calls and liquidates positions when required. Underwriting is based on an adaptation of CME's SPAN methodology, using parameters such as volatility and price ranges, cross-asset correlation, holder distribution, and order book depth.
- Insurance pool — Initially capitalized by lenders/LPs in exchange for yield; as the network gains traction, part of network fees funds the pool until it becomes self-sustaining.