A Dutch crypto fund manager brings institutional strategies onchain through non-custodial vault infrastructure Institutional crypto asset managers are moving their strategies into onchain vaults: Bitwise launched on Morpho in January and vault managers like Sentora and Clearstar curate hundreds of millions on Upshift. Now Coinmerce Capital, one of the Netherlands' first crypto investment funds, has launched their first DeFi vault. The USDC multi-strategy vault is live on HyperEVM, co-curated with Clearstar, and built on Upshift's non-custodial vault infrastructure.

Who is Coinmerce Capital

Founded in 2018, Coinmerce Capital was among the first Dutch crypto investment funds. The firm manages significant AUM across directional and market neutral strategies. Their flagship fund has outperformed Bitcoin since inception and the CCI 30 index, serving approximately 200 institutional investors, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals. Until now, accessing Coinmerce Capital's strategies required a €100,000 minimum investment. Through Upshift's vault infrastructure, those strategies are permissionless for the first time. Any user can deposit USDC with no minimum.

How the vault works

Coinmerce Capital and Clearstar jointly curate the vault, designing and executing a multi-strategy approach that includes:

• Leveraged lending across HyperEVM protocols
• HYPE basis trading and staking arbitrage
• Cross-chain yield optimization via bridging to other EVM chains

Coinmerce Capital and Clearstar act as curators, not custodians. Depositors' capital stays in Upshift's non-custodial vault contracts, never in omnibus accounts. Strategy execution happens through Upshift's subaccount infrastructure, with an onchain policy engine enforcing risk limits at the protocol, chain, and token level. Depositors can verify exactly where their capital is deployed at any time.

Why HyperEVM

Coinmerce Capital chose HyperEVM as its first vault chain based on a simple thesis: growing onchain activity, strong builder momentum around HIP-3 (perps for every asset) and HIP-4 (prediction markets), and relatively few institutional USDC yield products compared to the capital entering the ecosystem. As HyperEVM's DeFi layer expands, USDC deposited in the vault can be deployed across new protocols and strategies as they launch, giving depositors exposure to the ecosystem's growth.

The Coinmerce Group

The vault comes from one division of a larger crypto-native group. Coinmerce Group operates:

• Coinmerce and Blox: Two regulated Dutch crypto brokerages with 600,000 combined active clients
• Quantify: A crypto market maker
• Coinmerce Capital: The asset management arm now entering DeFi

The group is expanding brokerage operations across Germany, Spain, France, and Belgium. Their move into DeFi vault infrastructure signals a broader direction: crypto-native financial groups are integrating onchain yield into their product stacks.

What's next

Coinmerce Capital plans to launch additional vaults on Upshift, expanding their DeFi presence beyond this initial deployment. For users looking for institutional-grade USDC yield on HyperEVM, the vault is live now. Deposit into the vault Upshift builds non-custodial vault infrastructure enabling exchanges, asset managers, and institutions to launch yield products across 30 chains. $550M TVL across 40 vaults. Backed by Dragonfly.