George Town, Cayman Islands, July 28, 2026, Chainwire

Zest Protocol on July 28 announced Stacks Vaults, a new vault layer built on top of its lending markets. The product is designed to let users deposit a single asset into an automated strategy that manages yield on their behalf. The first Stacks Vault will be built around stBTC, the liquid staking Bitcoin token recently introduced by Stacking DAO.

According to Zest Protocol, Stacks Vaults represents the protocol’s evolution from a lending market into yield infrastructure. Until now, earning optimized yield on Stacks required users to actively manage positions across markets. With Stacks Vaults, a holder deposits once, selects a strategy, and the vault handles the mechanics in the background, which lowers the amount of manual management needed to access strategies already present in the ecosystem.

The first vault will be an stBTC looping vault. A holder will deposit stBTC, and the vault will use it as collateral to borrow sBTC, stake the borrowed Bitcoin into stBTC, and repeat the process to compound yield on top of the base Bitcoin Staking rewards. The holder maintains a single position while Zest Protocol manages the strategy automatically.

“Lending markets were the foundation. Vaults are what gets built on top,” said Tycho Onnasch, Founder, Zest Protocol. “With Stacks Vaults, a holder deposits a single asset and the strategy runs itself. The stBTC looping vault is the first, and it won’t be the last. Every yield source on Stacks becomes a strategy we can automate.”

The announcement also comes as Bitcoin Staking, stBTC, and Stacks Vaults are positioned as part of the same broader infrastructure. Bitcoin Staking creates the base yield, stBTC carries that yield into the ecosystem as a liquid asset, and Stacks Vaults will be the first infrastructure built to put it to work. Zest Protocol said additional vaults with different assets and strategies are expected to follow, each built on the same automated foundation.

Zest Protocol said it is the leading Bitcoin lending protocol on Stacks, with $70 million deployed across its platform and more than two years of experience serving the Bitcoin-native finance ecosystem. The ZEST token went live in May 2026 in what the company described as one of the most successful token launches of the year. Zest Protocol said it has spent years building the lending infrastructure that Bitcoin-native finance now runs on, and that Stacks Vaults is the next layer in that stack.

Stacks Vaults and the stBTC looping vault will launch alongside stBTC before Stacks Bitcoin Staking goes live. Holders will be able to deposit sBTC or stBTC directly into the vault, while Zest Protocol automatically manages the looping strategy and continuously monitors the position. More details will be available at zestprotocol.com.

About Zest Protocol

Zest Protocol is a lending protocol built for Bitcoin, giving BTC holders ways to borrow, lend, and earn yield without leaving Bitcoin-native infrastructure. Learn more at zestprotocol.com.

About Stacks

Stacks is growing Bitcoin by turning idle Bitcoin into productive capital. The network enables self-custodial Bitcoin yield and a growing ecosystem of Bitcoin-native financial applications that settle on Bitcoin. Learn more at stacks.co.

Shannon Voight
Stacks Labs
[email protected]