Vaults didn’t become the standard in DeFi by accident.
They became the standard because DeFi needed them—and because ERC-4626 finally gave vaults a shared foundation.

Today, when users think about earning yield in DeFi, they don’t think about manually farming, rebalancing liquidity, or tracking dozens of reward tokens. They think about vaults. Simple deposits. Clear ownership. Automated strategies.

But this wasn’t always the case.

Before ERC-4626, vaults were powerful but chaotic. After ERC-4626, vaults became infrastructure. And platforms like Concrete exist today precisely because that transformation happened.

This is why ERC-4626 didn’t just improve DeFi—it changed it forever.

The World Before ERC-4626: When Every Vault Was an Experiment

In early DeFi, vaults emerged organically as protocols tried to simplify yield generation. Each team buil their own version of a vault, solving the same problems in different ways.

The result?

  • Every protocol had custom vault logic

  • Deposits and withdrawals behaved differently everywhere

  • Share accounting varied wildly

  • Integrations were brittle and often broke

  • User experience was inconsistent

  • More bespoke code meant more bugs, more audits, and more risk

From a user’s perspective, interacting with vaults felt unpredictable. From a developer’s perspective, integrating vaults was painful. From an auditor’s perspective, every vault was a new surface area for risk.

ERC-4626 Explained Simply: A Standard for Tokenized Vaults

ERC-4626 is a standard for tokenized vaults that makes earning yield through vaults consistent, safer, and easier to integrate across DeFi.

At its core, ERC-4626 defines:

  • How users deposit assets into a vault

  • How they withdraw assets

  • How vault shares are minted and burned

  • How those shares represent ownership and yield

In other words, ERC-4626 standardizes the relationship between:

  • Assets in

  • Shares issued

  • Yield generated

  • Assets out

This may sound technical, but the impact is simple:
Vaults now behave in predictable, composable ways—no matter who builds them.

Why ERC-4626 Was a Turning Point for Vaults

ERC-4626 didn’t invent vaults.
It professionalized them.

Once vaults shared a common interface:

  • Developers could build vaults faster and safer

  • Wallets and aggregators could integrate vaults once and support many

  • Users could trust consistent behavior

  • Protocols could stack vaults together like Lego bricks

Most importantly, vaults stopped being isolated products and became core infrastructure.

This is what enabled the Vault Era of DeFi:

  • Yield abstraction

  • Strategy automation

  • Capital efficiency at scale

  • Managed DeFi experiences

ERC-4626 turned vaults from “advanced tools” into “default entry points” for yield.

ERC-4626 as the Foundation of Concrete Vaults

Concrete is a direct product of this shift.

Concrete vaults are built on ERC-4626 from the ground up, using the standard as the backbone for managed, institutional-grade DeFi.

Because Concrete vaults follow the ERC-4626 vault standard, they provide:

  • A consistent and intuitive deposit/withdraw experience

  • Transparent, on-chain accounting of vault shares

  • Easier auditing and monitoring

  • Native interoperability across DeFi protocols

  • Safer strategy upgrades and transitions

Instead of reinventing vault mechanics, Concrete focuses on what matters:

  • Strategy design

  • Risk management

  • Execution quality

  • User simplicity

ERC-4626 handles the plumbing. Concrete builds the system on top.

One-Click DeFi: Made Possible by ERC-4626

Concrete’s product philosophy is clear:
Abstract complexity without sacrificing transparency.

ERC-4626 makes this possible by enabling:

  • Standardized vault behavior

  • Clean separation between strategy logic and user interaction

  • A single deposit instead of many fragmented positions

  • Automated compounding and rebalancing

Instead of:

  • Managing LP tokens

  • Claiming rewards

  • Reinvesting manually

  • Monitoring multiple protocols

Users interact with one vault.

This is one-click DeFi—not because complexity disappears, but because it’s handled by standardized, auditable infrastructure.

ERC-4626 is what allows Concrete to offer managed DeFi instead of manual farming.

Why ERC-4626 Makes Concrete Institutional-Grade

Institutions don’t just care about yield.
They care about structure, predictability, and risk control.

ERC-4626 speaks their language.

For institutions, ERC-4626 provides:

  • Predictable vault interfaces

  • Clear accounting and reporting

  • Easier risk assessment

  • Lower operational complexity

  • Familiar, fund-like mechanics on-chain

When combined with Concrete’s strategy design and risk framework, ERC-4626 enables vaults that behave more like on-chain funds than experimental DeFi products.

This is institutional DeFi—not by copying TradFi, but by using standards to reduce uncertainty.

Why ERC-4626 Changed DeFi Forever

ERC-4626 didn’t just make vaults better.

It made them:

  • Trustworthy

  • Composable

  • Scalable

  • Professional

It enabled:

  • Tokenized vaults as first-class primitives

  • Managed DeFi at scale

  • Institutional participation without sacrificing decentralization

  • Platforms like Concrete to exist at all

DeFi didn’t need more complexity.
It needed standards.

ERC-4626 delivered that—and Concrete builds on it every day.

🔗 Learn more about Concrete vaults and one-click managed DeFi at https://concrete.xyz.