Pooled liquid staking has a structural weakness: every depositor shares exposure to every operator in the set. If one is slashed badly, everyone absorbs part of it. StakeWise v3 replaces the pool with vaults — each with its own operator, its own fee and its own risk.
How vaults work
An operator creates a vault, sets a fee, and stakers choose which vault to deposit into. Losses stay inside the vault that caused them. Stakers can mint osETH against their position to obtain a liquid, transferable claim while keeping the underlying delegation choice. Solo stakers can run their own vault, which makes the operator set genuinely open.
The trade-off
Choice requires judgement. A depositor must actually evaluate operators rather than trusting a curated set, and most users will not. Liquidity fragments across vaults, and osETH's secondary depth is far below stETH's, so exiting a large position quickly is expensive or slow.
Record
Audited, operating since 2021 across two protocol versions without an exploit, with clear documentation of the vault mechanics.
Who should use it
Stakers who want to control operator selection and contain risk, and solo operators wanting to offer staking to others. Anyone whose priority is liquidity and integration should use stETH.