RockawayX partnered with Tori Finance to launch a $50 million ecosystem vault designed to bring institutional-grade yield strategies to onchain depositors.
Built on Upshift, the vault channels USDC and USDT into Tori’s institutional delta-neutral strategies. We helped structure the product, provide anchor capital, design the incentive model, coordinate the launch, and establish the integrations needed to make the vault useful across the broader DeFi ecosystem.
As a result, the vault reached $44 million in deposits in 24 hours and reached its full $50 million cap within days, demonstrating how quickly a new DeFi product can scale when a partner brings capital, risk management, incentives, distribution, and integrations to the launch.
"Months of structural work and process improvements laid the groundwork for this launch. The result: a vault and an underlying product compelling enough to attract capital from several institutions and funds." - Nassim Alexandre, RockawayX Head of On-Chain Asset Management
"Filling a $50M cap in days, before full launch, is the clearest signal yet that the market wants delta-neutral yield with real backing." - Sam, Founder of Tori
Results Snapshot
- $44 million deposited in the first 24 hours
- $50 million vault cap, fully filled within days
The Model - Anchor liquidity into an audited, market-neutral strategy
RockawayX curated the ecosystem vault on Upshift, directing USDC and USDT deposits into Tori’s audited, market-neutral trading strategies through trUSD and strUSD.
Depositors receive the underlying strategy yield alongside boosted Cores (points earned for contributing to the growth of Tori) incentives. During the pre-deposit period, users earned 30 Cores per dollar deposited per day, while fees were waived.
The product was also designed to address one of the most common concerns around locked yield strategies: duration risk. Instead of requiring users to commit capital for several months, the vault uses a 30-day lock combined with incentives. This gives the strategy time to operate while avoiding a much longer commitment for depositors.
An Operating Partner Across the Full Launch
Before committing to curate the vault, we ran our standard process on the strategies: due diligence on the trading approach, counterparty review, exposure limits, and position-level monitoring requirements.
From that process, we concluded that:
- Tori is one of the better-positioned synthetic-dollar issuers to come out of the post-Ethena generation
- Through its diverse portfolio of strategies, including money market positioning across global jurisdictions, classical arbitrage (cash-and-carry futures spreads, calendar spreads) and other delta-neutral overlays, Tori’s composite return is structurally less correlated to crypto market beta and to any single funding source than what most DeFi yield aggregators offer.
- The technical stack (Sherlock and Nethermind audits, Hypernative real-time monitoring, Accountable proof-of-solvency, and Nexus Mutual pre-deposit smart contract & oracle risk protection) reflects the same standards we look for when underwriting any new issuer. With these elements in place, our team was well positioned to add an operational risk management layer around them, furthering depositor protections.
- Vault depositors would be exposed to eight risks, none of which are unique to this vault, and each of which RockawayX had a mitigation answer to.
-> Read our full investment thesis & risk disclosure
With the launch greenlit, RockawayX’s role extended across the full lifecycle of the vault, from initial design and seed liquidity to risk management, launch execution, and ecosystem distribution.
Design
RockawayX and Tori co-designed the vault structure, incentive program, and lock mechanics, aiming to enable several activities for users, including looping, swaps, and fixed rates.
The design work also included determining how deposits would flow into the underlying strategies, how users would earn Cores incentives, and how the product could manage duration without requiring a hard multi-month lock.
Balance-sheet capital to bootstrap
We seed vaults using capital from our own balance sheet.
This anchor liquidity helps reduce launch risk, signals conviction to the market, and addresses the cold-start problem that can prevent new vaults from gaining momentum. Ultimately, it enables the intended design to be carried out, even during the early stage of the product.
By investing alongside depositors, RockawayX also aligns its own financial outcome with the performance of the product (we win when our users win).
Institutional-grade risk management
We provide independent strategy curation and ongoing risk oversight.
This includes strategy due diligence, counterparty review, exposure limits, and continuous position monitoring. Depositors receive an added layer of institutional discipline, while the protocol benefits from an independent third party evaluating the strategy and its risk profile.
Go-to-market and DeFi integration expertise
RockawayX provides hands-on, consulting-style support across vault design, incentive structuring, launch mechanics, and protocol integrations.
The Tori launch was not treated as a simple capital deployment. We approached it as a complete product rollout, helping coordinate the decisions required to move the vault from design to full capacity within weeks.
Network and relationships
RockawayX maintains relationships across protocols, market makers, asset managers, infrastructure providers, and security firms.
These relationships shorten the time required to establish integrations and partnerships from months of business development work to weeks.
Distribution in DeFi
Launching a vault is only the first step. Long-term growth also depends on establishing integrations across the venues where onchain liquidity is sourced and used.
Our team supports distribution across lending markets, decentralized exchanges, aggregators, and yield platforms, with the goal of turning a standalone vault into a proudct with ecosystem-wide utility.
Why This Model Works
Aligned incentives
RockawayX deploys its own capital alongside depositors and earns with the protocol instead of simply charging the protocol for services.
This structure creates alignment between RockawayX, Tori, and users. All three benefit when the product attracts sustainable capital, manages risk effectively, and generates yield.
Trust from day one
New financial products often ask users to trust a team before the product has established a meaningful operating history.
The Tori vault addresses this through several independent layers:
- Strategy audits from Sherlock & Nethermind
- 24/7 threat monitoring by Hypernative
- Independent risk curation from RockawayX
- Publicly verifiable solvency live from day one via Accountable
Together, these systems replace a simple “trust us” model with independently verifiable information and external oversight.
Composability compounds
The value of the vault extends beyond the yield generated by its underlying strategy.
Each new integration can increase the usefulness of trUSD and strUSD across DeFi. Lending markets can make the assets productive collateral. Stablecoin pools can improve exit liquidity. Yield markets can support fixed-rate products and rewards pricing. Cross-chain deployments can bring the asset into new ecosystems.
As each venue adds a different type of utility, the integrations can reinforce one another and support more durable demand.
What Comes Next
The ecosystem vault is the first stage of a broader strategy.
We are now supporting Tori’s expansion across DeFi, advancing trUSD and strUSD as composable, productive collateral that can be used across lending, trading, yield, and cross-chain markets.
Doing so positions the ecosystem vault at the center of a broader liquidity loop where depositors provide USDC and USDT to the Tori ecosystem vault, and RockawayX, in turn, helps deploy anchor liquidity across Curve, Morpho, Pendle, Monad, and other venues.
Each venue contributes a different function:
- Curve provides exit liquidity and supports the asset’s peg.
- Morpho turns trUSD and strUSD into productive collateral.
- Pendle enables fixed-yield strategies and prices future yield and rewards.
- Monad exports the product into a lower-cost, emerging ecosystem.
The yield generated across these venues can then flow back to the vault and its depositors.
Each integration builds on the previous one. More liquidity makes the assets more useful, greater utility creates more demand, and more demand means greater support for deeper liquidity across additional venues.
The goal is to create a place for deposits that stay after the incentive program winds down.
Build an Ecosystem Vault
RockawayX provides capital, curation, and distribution for protocol-aligned vaults.
Visit our website to get in touch and begin building your own ecosystem vault:
