EP - 116
Inside DeFi Vaults: Staying in Control of Your Assets
with
Adrian Cachinero & JF Rochet
Co-Founder @ Steakhouse Financial & EVP of Consumer Services @ Ledger
Jun 19, 2026
On this episode of The Ledger Podcast, Ledger EVP of Consumer Services JF Rochet sits down with Adrian, co-founder of Steakhouse Financial, a leading onchain asset manager specializing in institutional-grade DeFi vaults.
The conversation unpacks what DeFi truly is, and how well-designed vaults can give everyday users access to yield strategies while keeping them firmly in control of their assets. Together, they explore the philosophy of non-custodial asset management, the critical importance of clear signing, and why the hardware wallet is more essential than ever in an increasingly agentic world.
“There is something fundamentally unfixable in traditional finance. Crypto has the ability to make it open and transparent.” — Adrian Cachinero
Watch the full episode below:
Key Highlights:
DeFi as the Centre Pompidou: Finance With Its Pipes Showing
Adrian opens by comparing DeFi to Paris’s Centre Pompidou museum—a building famous for wearing all of its internal architecture on the outside. For Adrian, this transparency is DeFi’s defining feature and its most powerful promise.
He walks through the basics using the lens of balance sheets: when you deposit into a bank, you are in fact lending to that bank, which in turn lends or invests those funds elsewhere. DeFi does the same thing, but with each step broken out in a verifiable, composable, and near-instantaneous way—on a public blockchain where users can inspect every layer.
Non-Custodial Vaults: Staying in Control Without Cutting Out the Manager
A core theme of the episode is the distinction between traditional asset management and the non-custodial model that Steakhouse has built. Adrian is careful about terminology: Steakhouse does not take custody of assets, does not exercise discretion over user funds, and does not measure success in AUM.
Instead, they function as a curator, proposing strategies to smart-contract-based vault platforms like Morpho, aggregating liquidity across users, and handling the cognitive overhead of rebalancing so that individual users don’t have to. The vault’s value is in simplification.
But Steakhouse goes a step further in protecting the user: any proposed strategy change is subject to a timelock, a mandatory waiting period of multiple days before it takes effect. This window exists so users can review changes and, if needed, withdraw or veto them entirely.
Using an Aragon DAO, Steakhouse has built a veto mechanism directly into its vault architecture, allowing users to block a proposed strategy update at the smart-contract level, even before it is executed.
“The user ultimately always has recourse over us. That’s really at the core of what a non-custodial vault should represent.” — Adrian Cachinero
Clear Signing and the Hardware Wallet: The Last Line of Defense
The conversation turns naturally to the role of hardware security in this ecosystem. “The value of a hardware wallet is that independent source of truth,” Adrian explains, “against which you can verify that the address that you’re interacting with is the one that you think it is.” For vault users executing complex DeFi transactions, that verification is the only meaningful protection against a compromised browser, a malicious dApp, or a spoofed interface.
JF highlights Clear Signing as essential to making hardware security usable at scale. The large, secure touchscreens on Ledger Stax™ and Ledger Flex™ display transaction details driven directly by the Secure Element, meaning the information a user sees cannot be tampered with by software running on their phone or computer.
“Any wallet that doesn’t have a screen that is different from the phone or the computer is representing a risk.” — JF Rochet
AI Agents and the Future of Consent
The episode closes on a forward-looking note, exploring how the rise of AI agents changes the security calculus. If an AI can autonomously take actions on a user’s behalf, then the question of where consent lives becomes urgent.
Both Adrian and JF converge on the same answer: consent must be anchored in a piece of hardware that is not subject to the same attack surface as a phone or computer. The very transparency of DeF makes it highly legible to AI, but legibility alone is not enough. “Is the AI under control?” remains the operative question, and the hardware wallet is the mechanism that puts the human back in the loop for the decisions that matter.
“The way to control what’s happening with AI cannot be done with software running on a non-secure device,” — JF Rochet
Reading List
Learn more about these topics mentioned in the episode, or explore our library of articles on Ledger Academy: