Every Monday, we zoom in on a specific project that offers unique and attractive opportunities to earn yield. We also tell you exactly how we’re using the project to put money to work in the Machines & Money Portfolio, and show how you can do the same.

You can find our most recent portfolio report here.

Make sure to read to the end to see the action(s) we took based on today’s content!

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You can think of Turtle as a central hub where anyone can go to access hundreds of DeFi yield opportunities via vaults. 

Turtle’s rare combination of quality and selection make it a unique and valuable platform in DeFi for retail users, professional money managers, DeFi projects, and distribution platforms alike. 

Now, let’s dive into Turtle’s three core functions:

Don’t let the quantity (920 currently active opportunities!) suggest that the platform simply integrates anything it can find. Each vault is carefully vetted, and the risks and terms of each one are made transparent for investors to read.

For example, money managers in DeFi must be highly informed on the various risks inherent in any vault or onchain product due to the industry’s current lack of regulations. Additionally, recent incidents in DeFi have understandably made money managers more cautious on where they allocate capital. 

This is where the Turtle Diligence Council (TDC) comes in. The council consists of specialized DeFi auditors who evaluate technical risk, smart contract exposure, operational risk, and curator assessment for every opportunity in the catalog.

These institutional-grade risk assessments (such as this 19-page document on Altura’s vault) are applied to every featured vault you see on Turtle’s platform. They even go beyond technical risks, analyzing other critical information concerning counterparty specifications, yield agreements, incentive availability, insurance coverage, and more.

This provides immense value to all Turtle users, from individual investors to institutional money managers. Rather than spend hours scrutinizing each vault from the bottom up themselves, the TDC’s analysis provides a thorough documentation on the vault’s specifications and risks.

By bringing all of these products to one place, Turtle is also solving major distribution challenges faced by front-end products like wallets, exchanges, and neobanks.

Currently, products such as stablecoins and crypto cards are accelerating the migration of individuals and businesses into DeFi.

According to BVNK, a leading provider of onchain payment infrastructure, stablecoin volume is up thousands of percent in recent years, and new demand is being led by embedded digital dollar wallets:

Additionally, over $8.4B in volume has been generated by crypto cards. This trend is accelerating, as over 40% of that total was generated in 2026.

The point here is that there’s a massive inflow of users into stablecoins and blockchain-based payments – and wallets, exchanges, and neobanks can benefit from directing this inflow into onchain yield opportunities.

That’s where Turtle comes in. With access to Turtle’s ~1,000 vault opportunities across 25 blockchains, its distribution partners can perform the following actions: 

Turtle’s third use case is coordinating the exchange of liquidity (for projects) and incentives (for depositors).

While old-school liquidity farming and its unsustainable 4-digit APYs have been largely phased out of DeFi, demand for intelligently incentivized vaults remains. 

Turtle has established its reputation as a platform that offers professionally curated DeFi yield sources. So, when vaults for any given project are listed on Turtle, it represents a vote of confidence from one of DeFi’s most thorough risk assessors. 

In return for the “premium” of being listed on Turtle, projects will often offer additional incentives to anyone who deposits via Turtle.

For example, YO’s yoBTC vault currently offers a yield of 5.5% APR on BTC deposits:

However, boosted yield is available on this vault if you deposit via Turtle. Specifically, Turtle depositors receive an additional 1.6% APR from YO, as well as up to 8.91% in Turtle Shells, which represent future claims on TURTLE tokens. 

Turtle currently works with a network of 300K+ members to structure these incentive deals, essentially monetizing measurable liquidity distribution. All parties benefit from this unique feature; projects receive liquidity and credibility, and depositors receive exclusive incentives, which draws greater attention to Turtle.

For years, the sharpest stablecoin yield lived inside institutional trading desks. Altura takes those strategies on-chain and opens them to everyone.

Deposit across five chains and you mint AVLT, a vault share that climbs in value as the vault earns. Behind it runs a multi-strategy engine: market making, basis and funding-rate arbitrage, and tokenized physical gold. None of it bets on price direction, so the vault earns from real activity, not from the market going up — so far, the vault has generated an average base APY of 20%.

And you don't take our word for it. Reserves are live and fully on-chain: more than $27M backing the vault at 102% collateralization, with every dollar traceable and six audits across three firms, along with insurance coverage.

Deposit on the Altura app, verify the data yourself, and follow us @alturax.

Ultimately, Turtle is building infrastructure that benefits the entire “stack” of onchain participants.

Users receive access to DeFi’s highest-quality vaults, approved by the TDC’s thorough vetting process, as well as exclusive incentives for depositing via Turtle’s platform.

Projects receive much-needed liquidity to help sustain operations and the credibility associated with being listed on Turtle.

Front-end apps gain access to hundreds of curated vaults, allowing them to bring yield opportunities to the growing onchain population.

As its infrastructure and network drive real money into DeFi yield opportunities, Turtle earns a share of the revenue, and distributes the rest to partners in the form of recurring revenue share based on attributed TVL. This deal-making process has historically been performed in the background, but Turtle is opening up these additional incentives to everyone.

Turtle’s Q1 report highlights impressive growth across several metrics, including:

The vast influence of Turtle’s coordination layer across LPs and DeFi projects was also on full display; Turtle directed over $52M from 354 LP wallets to their campaign with Lighter, as well as $10M (with an additional $3M waiting list) to Decibel – two of the most anticipated perps DEX launches of the quarter.

While Q2 numbers haven’t been made public yet, Turtle’s operational strength at the end of Q1 looks promising, as 26 new LP deals entered the pipeline in March alone. 

To gain exposure to Turtle’s boosted reward vaults, as well as an attractive 18%+ yield, we’re adding a position in the platform’s CREDI vault to the Machines & Money Portfolio. 

CREDI specializes in bringing yield from transaction receivables onchain. Here’s how it works:

Deposits into the vault are routed to a vault on Enzyme – a reputable Ethereum-based app founded in 2017 offering tokenization, onchain options, and specialized asset management vaults. 

LPs act as passive depositors into Enzyme. When funds are deposited into the Enzyme vault, the depositor (LP) receives a receipt token (in this case, CDX) representing their proportional share of the vault’s assets.

The Enzyme protocol mints CDX against USDC 1:1 and stakes it to earn yield from receivables interest income – so CREDI is backed by LP’s proportional claim on USDC plus accrued yield

Deposited USDC is used to finance pre-approved card transaction receivables within VISA’s Ramp Provider ecosystem. When settlement proceeds are paid, they flow into the Enzyme vault.

CREDI borrows USDC from an Enzyme vault (Enzyme is an OG Ethereum project) which acts as a custodial layer external to CREDI. Borrowed USDC is transferred to CREDI’s admin wallet, which is protected by a 3-of-4 Gnosis Safe multisig, then deployed against pre-approved card transaction receivables.

Funds are received according to 2-5 day settlement cycles – their short-term nature is advantageous because it allows liquidity to be available for fast withdrawal times. To further maximize capital efficiency, Enzyme reserves a portion of the vault to meet near-term redemption requests.

Withdrawals undergo a mandatory 7-day cooldown period, after which the LP will have access to their redeemed capital.

Currently, the vault pays a base yield of 15%, which increases along with the holding period. Every month, the yield increases by 0.33%, until it reaches its maximum of 18% at the 12-month mark. Additionally, depositors receive Turtle Shells – which are redeemable for TURTLE tokens once Season 2 of Turtle’s rewards campaign is over – for a boosted 0.76-8.32% APR.

Like many of our yield positions, the yield earned by this vault is not dependent on onchain activity like staking or funding rate arbitrage; it’s yield generated from battle-tested payment infrastructure economics.

You can find more information, including detailed capital flow information, potential risks, and stress scenarios, in the CREDI Deal Memo.

Depositing into the vault was extremely easy – first, we navigated to the CREDI USDC Vault page on Turtle and entered our deposit amount. 

Here, you can see the deposit amount, itemized APR list, projected monthly interest rate, and total estimated monthly income that the position will generate:

After clicking on “deposit,” we approved and signed the transaction, and instantly received 1,500 CDX tokens (representing the CREDI receipt) in return. Once the transaction was processed, the CDX position was visible in our account on the Portfolio page (AVLT is listed here as well because we hold the token; we haven’t deposited our position into Turtle):