Edge Capital's curator brand for Gearbox lending vaults on Monad — market-neutral strategy, no token, and TVL figures that vary meaningfully depending on which tracker you trust.
UltraYield is the risk-curator brand of crypto hedge fund Edge Capital, founded in early 2020 by Vadim Khramov, whose prior career included macro strategy work at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and a hedge fund — a TradFi background comparable in depth to Steakhouse's founders, and longer-tenured as a firm than any other curator active on Monad. Edge Capital raised $66.78M across two fund vehicles (US and Cayman) in 2020-2022. UltraYield itself doesn't build its own lending or AMM infrastructure — it configures risk parameters and allocation rules for permissionless vaults built on top of underlying protocols, deciding which markets a vault can lend into, exposure caps, and LTV bounds. An "allocator" role then executes within those boundaries, moving liquidity across whitelisted markets to chase yield. UltraYield's vault-curation business specifically dates to its first deployment with Kelp in 2024 — roughly two years of on-chain curator history, comparable in length to Clearstar's or AlphaGrowth's tenure, backed by a much longer off-chain fund history than either.
UltraYield's standout differentiator is a real product innovation none of the other five curators active on Monad have matched: in January 2026, it partnered with Nexus Mutual and Kelp to launch what's described as the first DeFi vault with fully embedded insurance cover, protecting over $30M of positions directly inside the vault structure rather than requiring depositors to separately purchase cover elsewhere. Against K3 Capital and Hyperithm, both of which also blend fund-management and curation, UltraYield's "market-neutral" framing needs a specific caveat: that language describes Edge Capital's broader off-chain fund strategy (hedged positioning via futures, options and repo), not what a depositor is actually exposed to inside its Gearbox Monad vaults, which are straightforward stablecoin lending pools rather than a hedged derivatives book. Against Steakhouse's published, formal risk-methodology documents, UltraYield's public risk framework is thinner — depositor-facing transparency comes mainly through periodic Morpho governance-forum updates disclosing vault composition rather than a standing methodology page.
On Monad, UltraYield curates USDC and, per more recent reporting, a second AUSD-denominated lending pool on Gearbox's permissionless lending markets (Gearbox also runs a separate MON-denominated vault curated by a different manager, Tulip Capital — worth knowing as an explicit point of comparison between two curators active on the same underlying protocol). Rewards have been distributed through Merkl incentive campaigns paying WMON on top of the underlying lending yield, run as discrete, time-boxed periods rather than a permanent boost — depositors should check whether a campaign is actually active before assuming an advertised blended rate reflects what they'll actually earn. Reported AUM for Edge Capital and UltraYield combined varies substantially by source and date, from roughly $400M to $700M — worth treating any single figure as a snapshot rather than a precise, stable number.
Depositors delegate market-selection and risk-parameter decisions entirely to Edge Capital's judgment; a bad market whitelisting or an overly generous LTV can directly cause losses even though UltraYield doesn't custody funds in the strict sense. With no protocol token, there's also no on-chain governance check on the curator itself beyond reputation and its stated performance fee (10% is the confirmed rate on a comparable Ethereum Morpho vault; the Monad-specific rate wasn't independently found). And because Monad-side yield leans on Merkl-distributed WMON incentives on top of Gearbox's base lending rate, a taper in those incentives — or a problem at Gearbox itself — would directly hit realized returns. The embedded-insurance product described above is a real risk mitigant, but it's confirmed for the Kelp-related vault specifically, not verified as extending to UltraYield's Monad Gearbox pools.
It doesn't mean the vault itself is hedged against all risk — that language describes Edge Capital's broader off-chain fund strategy. On Gearbox specifically, UltraYield runs stablecoin lending pools, so a depositor's real risk is borrower default or liquidation-cascade risk from Gearbox's leveraged Credit Account users, not directional exposure to a token price.
Merkl is a third-party incentive layer paying WMON on top of organic lending yield in discrete, time-boxed campaigns, not a permanent rate boost. Depositors should check whether a campaign is currently active before assuming an advertised blended APY reflects sustained real yield.
Yes for at least one product — in January 2026, it partnered with Nexus Mutual and Kelp on a vault with fully embedded insurance cover protecting over $30M in positions, a genuine differentiator versus most curators. Whether that coverage extends to UltraYield's Monad Gearbox vaults specifically wasn't confirmed.
Sources: UltraYield Docs, Curator — Morpho Docs (general curator/allocator role), Nexus Mutual, Edge Capital and Kelp partner on world-first DeFi vault with embedded cover — EIN Presswire, Stealthy crypto hedge fund Edge Capital raises $66.78M — CoinDesk
Last reviewed 2026-07-08. More Monad research.
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