A vault is the onchain analog of an open-end, actively managed investment fund, with the mandate enforced by contract rather than by law.

That sentence carries two commitments. The first is the economics: depositors pool money, receive equal shares, and hire a manager (the curator) whose ongoing choices among genuinely different destinations are the thing depositors are buying; depositors earn what the portfolio earns and can leave at the going share price. The second is the boundary: what admits a product to this sector is not fund-shaped economics alone, but the contract itself doing the enforcement work that a prospectus, a custodian, and a legal wrapper do in traditional finance.

Why the line sits where it does. This dashboard is a fund analytics product: every row reports a share-price (NAV) series, a portfolio-derived APY, a curator attribution, and an allocation breakdown. A product is included if and only if those numbers are true statements about it, with each number measuring what its column header claims. Every exclusion is, at bottom, the same sentence: the numbers this dashboard reports would be semantically wrong for that product.

Vault Types

Passing all seven questions (see The Seven Questions) is the gate. Classified vaults are then typed by what they allocate to.

• Type 1a, Lending Allocator: deposits are allocated across multiple lending markets or reserves. Examples: Morpho vaults, Euler Earn, Kamino Earn Vault, Lista MoolahVault.
• Type 1b, DEX Liquidity Allocator: deposits are deployed into concentrated-liquidity positions, where the destination universe is the configuration space of pools, price ranges, and fee tiers. The archetype is the CLMM manager (e.g., Kamino Liquidity); the first Type 1b registry entries are in progress.
• Type 2, Flexible Strategy: the mandate spans genuinely heterogeneous strategies and protocol surfaces rather than a single venue category. Example: Yearn V3 Allocator Vaults with mixed-strategy mandates.

Asset class (crypto-native, RWA, mixed) is an attribute tagged on any type, never a type of its own. Type is descriptive, not a grade; quality is scored separately by the assessment framework.

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This tab is a compression of the full classification framework (operative criteria and practitioner's guide). Named products illustrate the questions; they never carry them. Every determination rests on the operative criteria text and is auditable in the registry.

The Seven Questions

A product is a vault only if it passes all seven. There is no partial credit and no offsetting strength. The Q1 to Q7 columns in the classification results table refer to these questions.

A collective vehicle

Q1. Is this an onchain pool that more than one independent depositor can put money into?

Q2. Does every depositor share gains and losses in the same proportion, with no one's money protected ahead of anyone else's?

Actively managed under a contract-enforced mandate

Q3. Is there an accountable manager who chooses where the money goes, and who cannot take it for themselves?

Q4. Does the manager choose among multiple genuinely different places to put the money?

Q5. Is the money invested in outside positions the product could exit and redeploy, or is the pool itself the business?

Open-end and portfolio-funded

Q6. Do depositors earn exactly what the investments earn, no more and no less, possibly on a delay?

Q7. Can any depositor ask for their money back at the going share price, at any time, without needing anyone's permission?

Three rules of the road

• Classification is product-level, never brand-level. The same protocol, even the same codebase, routinely ships both vaults and non-vaults, because classification attaches to a deployed configuration. Same infrastructure, different product.
• Quality is deliberately not part of the definition. TVL, audits, track record, timelocks, pause powers, exit speed: none of these appears in the seven questions. An unaudited, concentrated, poorly governed fund is a bad fund, not a non-fund; these attributes are scored by a separate assessment framework, so the registry can say "this is a vault, and a risky one."
• The failing question is the explanation. Every excluded product's registry entry records the question it fails, and the classification results table illustrates the most common failure patterns.