DEFI FUNDAMENTALS

How Concentrated Are DeFi Vaults? Who Actually Owns the TVL?

TVL tells you how much capital is deposited in a vault. It does not tell you how that capital is distributed across holders. Two vaults with identical TVL can have completely different ownership structures — and very different exposure to a single holder walking away.

The Short Version

• TVL tells you how much capital is deposited in a vault. It does not tell you how that capital is distributed across holders.
• Current holder data shows large differences between apparently similar USDC vaults.
• Steakhouse USDC on Base has more than 84,800 holders, with its largest holder accounting for only 3.24% of supply.
• Steakhouse Prime USDC on Base has around 6,500 holders, but its largest holder owns 21.14% and its top five collectively hold almost 59%.
• Steakhouse USDC on Ethereum has around 1,300 holders, with one address holding 42.51%.
• At the extreme, Ethena x Steakhouse USDC has 53 holders and one address represents 99.65% of supply.
• Concentration is not automatically a flaw, but it changes what TVL means and how quickly the capital base can move.

Holder data referenced in this article was checked in September 2026. Holder counts and wallet shares can change quickly and may differ between data providers depending on how contracts, wrappers and addresses are classified.

$100 Million Can Mean Two Very Different Things

Imagine two vaults with exactly $100 million in TVL. The first has tens of thousands of holders and no single wallet owns more than a few percent of the supply. The second gets most of its capital from three addresses.

Both vault pages show the same headline number: $100M TVL. But economically, they do not have the same capital base.

If one major depositor exits the second vault, its TVL can change materially in a single transaction. Depending on how the capital is deployed, that withdrawal may also affect liquidity requirements, allocations and the amount of capital available to the underlying strategies. Producing the same effect in the first vault would require a much broader set of holders to move at once.

One Curator, One Asset, Very Different Holder Bases

Steakhouse's USDC vaults provide a useful comparison because they share the same curator and underlying asset while showing very different ownership structures.

The Base version of Steakhouse USDC is the largest of the three and also the least concentrated. Its biggest holder accounts for only 3.24% of supply, while the five largest holders together represent roughly 11.4%.

The Ethereum version looks very different. One address alone controls 42.51% of the supply, while the top five collectively account for roughly 58.9%. It's also worth noting that pigi's current risk rating on this vault is F, a separate signal from concentration but one that adds another dimension to the analysis.

Steakhouse Prime USDC on Base reaches almost the same top-five concentration through a different distribution. Its largest holder owns 21.14%, the second around 16.69%, and the third approximately 9.65%.

All three are USDC vaults managed by the same curator. Yet an allocator looking only at protocol, asset and TVL would miss a significant difference in how their capital bases are structured.

Holder Count Is Not Enough

The natural response is to look at the number of holders instead. That helps, but it still does not tell the whole story.

Steakhouse Prime USDC has approximately 6,500 holders, which initially sounds well distributed. The balance distribution tells a different story. The top holder owns 21.14%, the top two own nearly 38%, the top five almost 59%, and the top ten roughly 75%.

This is a useful example of why holder count and concentration should be treated as separate metrics. A vault can have thousands of addresses while most of the economic ownership still sits with a relatively small group of holders.

When One Address Is Almost the Entire Vault

The extreme cases make the distinction particularly clear.

Ethena x Steakhouse USDC on Base currently has approximately $30.66 million supplied across 53 holders. One address represents 99.65% of the supply, meaning that practically the entire vault is represented by a single holder at the contract level.

That does not mean there are literally only a handful of economic users behind the capital. The address could belong to another protocol, a treasury, a wrapper, an aggregator, an institutional custodian or a smart contract representing many underlying users.

This is an important limitation of onchain holder analysis: addresses are not the same thing as people.

The concentration still matters, however. Whatever sits behind that address, one onchain position represents almost the entire vault. If that position moves, headline TVL moves with it.

TVL alone cannot tell you that.

Large Vaults Are Not Necessarily More Concentrated

There is an intuitive assumption that the biggest DeFi vaults must also be the most whale-dominated. Current data provides a useful counterexample.

Steakhouse High Yield USDC Edition on Base currently has roughly $378 million supplied and more than 34,000 holders. Its largest holder accounts for only 1.32% of supply. The top five together represent roughly 6.3%, while the top ten account for only about 10.2%.

Compare that with Steakhouse Prime USDC, which has approximately $21.8 million supplied but 21.14% of the vault in its largest holder and nearly 59% in its top five.

The larger vault has more than seventeen times as much supplied capital, yet its holder structure is far less concentrated.

That is exactly why TVL and concentration need to be measured independently. Large TVL does not guarantee broad distribution, and smaller TVL does not necessarily imply concentration.

Concentration Is Not Automatically Bad

Holder concentration should not be turned into a simplistic rule where a higher percentage automatically means a worse vault.

A vault designed for a small number of institutional depositors may naturally be concentrated. A treasury could deliberately represent most of the capital. A wrapper contract might aggregate thousands of users behind one address. A recently launched vault could also begin with one anchor depositor before ownership broadens.

None of those situations automatically makes the vault unsafe.

A better way to think about concentration is as a characteristic of the capital base. It tells you something about how dependent the current size of the vault is on a relatively small number of positions and how quickly that capital could move if one of those positions changes.

That becomes particularly relevant when concentration is considered alongside liquidity.

What Happens When the Whale Leaves

Suppose a $50 million vault has one holder controlling 40% of the supply. That holder represents a $20 million position. If the position is withdrawn, the effect is not limited to a lower TVL number on a dashboard.

The vault may need to unwind underlying positions, draw on available liquidity or rebalance its remaining capital. The effect depends on where the money is deployed and how easily the underlying strategy can accommodate the withdrawal.

Morpho's Steakhouse High Yield USDC vault on Arbitrum illustrates why deposits and liquidity should be considered separately. As of the latest pigi snapshot, the vault had approximately $2.13 million deposited across 756 holders, carrying an F risk rating on pigi.

Its capital base is highly concentrated: the largest holder accounts for roughly 40% of supply, the top two for about 61% and the top five for about 85%. At the same time, only around $250,000 — roughly 11% of deposits — was immediately withdrawable from the underlying Morpho markets. The largest position alone, worth more than $900,000, was several times larger than the liquidity available to pay it out.

This does not mean a large withdrawal is imminent. It means the size of a potential holder exit and the liquidity available to absorb it are two separate variables worth understanding. If that top holder tried to leave at once, most of the exit would have to wait for borrowers to repay or for utilization to fall.

A $20,000 withdrawal and a $20 million withdrawal are not the same event simply because they come from the same vault.

This is also why looking at a vault's strategy over time matters. The wrapper may remain the same while the underlying exposure changes. We cover that in more detail in "Same DeFi Vault, Different Strategy: What Happens After You Deposit?"

A Wallet Is Not Always a Person

Onchain holder analysis also needs to be handled carefully because blockchain addresses do not map neatly to individual investors.

One address may represent a protocol, aggregator, vault, multisig, custodian, DAO treasury or smart contract holding capital on behalf of many users. The opposite can also happen: one economic actor may control many different addresses.

For this reason, it is usually more accurate to talk about holders or addresses rather than investors unless the economic owner is known.

This also means concentration becomes more useful when combined with address labeling and dependency analysis. A top holder that represents another vault creates a different type of dependency from an unlabeled externally owned account. The percentage tells you where to look; it does not automatically tell you what conclusion to draw.

Concentration Is a Moving Metric

Holder structure can also change without anything happening to the protocol or vault strategy itself.

Steakhouse Prime USDC's current largest holder represents approximately 21.14% of supply. Available holder data shows that the wallet's share increased by roughly 6.1 percentage points over the previous 30 days. Several other large holders also increased their share over the same period.

Nothing had to break for the vault's ownership structure to become materially different. Deposits and withdrawals were enough.

This makes concentration useful as a time series rather than only a point-in-time statistic. A vault can gradually become more concentrated, broaden its holder base, receive a large institutional deposit or lose a major position while the protocol, curator and strategy remain unchanged.

For an LP already holding the vault, those changes can matter.

TVL Needs Context

TVL remains one of the most useful basic metrics in DeFi. It tells us about scale, helps indicate adoption and provides context on how much capital is already deployed into a strategy.

The problem starts when TVL is asked to answer questions it cannot answer.

It does not tell you whether the capital belongs to 50 addresses or 50,000. It does not tell you whether one holder owns 40% of the vault. It does not show whether concentration is increasing or decreasing, whether one wrapper represents most of the deposits, or how much capital could move if a major holder exits.

Those questions require holder-level data.

That is why pigi tracks holder counts, holder lists, activity and top-holder TVL concentration alongside performance and risk metrics. The goal is not to replace TVL. It is to understand what the TVL is actually made of.

Takeaways

• TVL measures capital, not distribution.
• Two similarly sized vaults can have completely different holder structures.
• Holder count alone can hide concentration because thousands of addresses can coexist with a handful of economically dominant positions.
• A concentrated vault is not automatically a bad vault.
• Concentration matters because a small number of holders may be capable of changing TVL and liquidity requirements quickly.
• Onchain addresses are not necessarily individual investors, so labels and dependencies matter.
• Holder concentration is worth monitoring over time rather than treating it as a one-off statistic.

Big TVL is useful. But you still want to know who can make it disappear. Explore DeFi vault analytics on pigi.finance.