Vault capital consolidates around major curators, holding $9B in assets

Curated lending vaults have quietly become one of DeFi’s most compelling growth stories, approaching $9 billion in total value locked. What makes the number more interesting is who controls it: just three curators, Steakhouse Financial, Sentora, and Gauntlet, manage roughly 76% of all tracked TVL in the space. The big three and everyone else Steakhouse Financial sits at the top of the leaderboard with $2.03 billion in vault capital. Sentora follows closely at $1.97 billion, with Gauntlet rounding out the trio at $1.46 billion. Together, those three curators account for approximately $5.46 billion, or 75.9% of the sector’s total TVL as of July 2026. Across 55 tracked curators, the top 10 control 89.1% of overall TVL. Only 10 of those 55 curators have crossed the $100 million mark. Growing while everything else shrinks The 51% year-over-year growth in curated vault TVL looks impressive on its own. It looks even more impressive against the backdrop of the broader DeFi lending market, which has contracted by approximately 36% over the same period. July 2026 data pegged the total curated vault TVL at $7.18 billion, with the figure climbing toward $9 billion by mid-August. Ethereum remai...