Upshift on Stellar: earnUSDC and earnXLM Vaults Explained

The short version

You deposit USDC or XLM and get vault shares. A curator moves the money into Stellar protocols such as Blend and Aquarius within limits the admin sets. Shares are priced on-chain. Withdrawals are instant up to the cash the vault keeps on hand. The contracts were audited by Halborn and can be upgraded.

Upshift on Stellar by the numbers (October 2026)

Measure	Value	Source
Stellar TVL, both vaults	$28.9M	DefiLlama, 20 Oct 2026
earnUSDC	$25.3M, 10.0% APY (30-day)	DefiLlama yields
earnXLM	$3.65M, 5.0% APY	DefiLlama yields
Curators	Gami Labs and Stake Capital	Upshift launch, June 2026
First venues	Blend, Aquarius, SushiSwap, Templar	Lumenloop, 3 Jun 2026
Audit	Halborn, March-April 2026	Contracts repository
Licence	Business Source License 1.1	Contracts repository

DefiLlama lists Upshift and Gami Labs separately with the same $28.9M on Stellar. It is one set of vaults seen from two sides, the platform and the curator, so do not add them together. For the wider picture, see Stellar DeFi TVL in 2026.

How an Upshift vault works

Each Upshift vault on Stellar is a Soroban contract, AugustVault, built on OpenZeppelin's Stellar token library and following the ERC-4626 vault pattern. It accepts one asset, issues its own share token, and prices each share as the vault's total assets divided by the number of shares.

Total assets have three parts: the cash the vault holds, the positions reported by strategy contracts, and funds sent to curator wallets. Strategy contracts report their own balances on-chain. Curator wallets are MPC wallets run through Fordefi; the vault tracks what was sent to them rather than reading their balances directly, so part of the share price depends on the curator's reporting.

The curator can only use whitelisted strategies and wallets, at most ten, and the amount it can move is rate-limited per call and per time window (24 hours by default). The admin is a multisig. Upshift says it includes all parties to the vault, but its documentation does not give the signing threshold.

earnUSDC

earnUSDC spreads USDC across Stellar's deepest yield sources, chosen by the curators. It was the larger vault by far, at $25.3M with a 10.0% 30-day APY on 20 October 2026.

For comparison, supplying USDC directly to Blend's Fixed pool paid 5.79% on the same day. The gap is what the curator adds through allocation across venues, plus any incentive campaign running at the time. A campaign announced around September 2026 advertised about 10% on USDC and about 5% on XLM, so part of today's rate may be incentives that end. RedStone added an on-chain price feed for earnUSDC in September 2026, which lets other protocols price the vault share, for example as collateral.

earnXLM

earnXLM combines an XLM strategy with a carry trade into earnUSDC: part of the position earns USDC yield while the vault stays denominated in XLM. It held $3.65M with a 5.0% APY on 20 October 2026.

A carry leg adds a risk that a plain XLM lending position does not have: if XLM moves sharply against USDC, the vault has to manage the difference. Read the vault's current strategy description before depositing.

Withdrawals

Redemptions are instant, with no lock-up, but only up to the vault's local balance. If your share is bigger than the cash on hand, you wait for the curator to bring funds back from the strategies. The admin can pause deposits and withdrawals; during a pause the curator can still return capital but cannot deploy more.

Risks

• Curator discretion. You are trusting Gami Labs and Stake Capital to allocate well. Neither had a long public record on Stellar at launch.
• Off-chain custody leg. Funds sent to curator MPC wallets are tracked by accounting, not read from a contract.
• Upgradeable contracts. The vault code can be replaced by its upgrade authority; the audit covers a specific revision.
• Underlying protocols. Blend, Aquarius, Sushi and Templar each carry their own risk. See Blend's 2026 incidents.
• Incentive dependence. Part of the rate may come from a campaign rather than from borrowers and traders.

How to choose

• You want USDC yield with a professional allocator: earnUSDC is the largest option on Stellar.
• You want the simplest exposure: supply USDC to Blend yourself; see USDC yield on Stellar.
• You want yield inside your wallet: look for an app built on DeFindex.
• You hold AQUA rather than USDC: see the best yield optimizers on Stellar.