Waseem Salim has over a decade of experience building in the fintech space. Prior to becoming CEO of Valdora, Waseem played a pivotal role at the Algorand Foundation, where he scaled from driving regional community growth in the UK to spearheading global ecosystem initiatives. Today, he leverages his expertise in Digital Assets to spearhead Valdora and their Vaults into a multi-asset onchain wealth tool.
1. What’s your 30-second elevator pitch for Valdora, and what core problem are you solving?
Valdora is a liquid staking and onchain vault infrastructure that turns yield-bearing assets into liquid and composable assets. Considering we are a nascent company, we have achieved close to 40M TVL and working with credible originators for real world financial strategies. Essentially, you deposit stablecoins into a vault, and your capital gets routed into a real world yield strategy, for example private credit or a Quant strategy. In return you receive a liquid vault token that represents your position and appreciates as the strategy earns. And that token never gets locked; you can trade it, hold it, or use it elsewhere in DeFi while it keeps working.
The problem Valdora is solving is that most onchain yield today is circular, unfortunately crypto activity feeding on itself, with no connection to the real economy. Meanwhile the yield that is connected to the real economy from institutional-grade strategies, has been almost impossible for everyday users to access onchain. Valdora is changing that by being the bridge for real yield, made liquid.
2. You spent years building programs at the Algorand Foundation before becoming CEO at Valdora. How did that community experience shape your approach to building onchain wealth products?
Community work teaches you that trust is earned in public, one interaction at a time. It’s not something that can be engineered with just a marketing budget. You have to be present for the community. Going from regional community building in the UK to global ecosystem initiatives at Algorand meant constantly translating between what a protocol could technically do and what would actually convince someone to use it, and eventually retain the user. That’s the same job at Valdora, just with capital instead of code.
I have a low tolerance for hype that isn’t backed by substance. At Valdora, you see the convergence of some of Web3’s most sustainable narratives like Stablecoins, Tokenisation and real world yield working in harmony. Ecosystems that last are built on real utility and transparency, not just on speculation of numbers. The cherry on the cake is that users can achieve upto double digit yield with accessbilty and composability.
3. In plain English, what is a “Composable Vault,” and why should an everyday investor care about it?
To give a brief understanding of composabilty is that your captial keeps working for the strategy and stays usable everywhere else. In simple terms, the user deposits stablecoins, and instead of a static balance, you get a token back, a bit like a receipt, except this receipt is alive. Its value goes up as the underlying strategy earns, and unlike a normal receipt, you can use it as collateral somewhere else at any time.
For an everyday investor, that matters because it removes the trade-off DeFi has always forced on you. Either you can earn yield, or keep your capital flexible. With a composable vault, you don’t have to choose.
4. How do Valdora’s vaults actually generate yield, and where does that real economic value come from?
Each vault routes capital to a strategy partner working in the real economy. Our Stablecoin Yield vault sources private credit through abhi across the MENAP region. Our Quant Strategies vault runs systematic FX, commodity, and macro trading with Suisse Quant Group. We also run opportunistic credit and short-duration income strategies, with commodities and tokenized equities.
None of that yield comes from token emissions or lending crypto to other crypto traders. It comes from credit spreads, trading strategies, and real assets. It’s the same sources institutional capital has always relied on. We’re just making the access point onchain, transparent, and liquid.
5. People compare modern crypto vaults to high-yield bank savings accounts. Is that a fair comparison, or are there fundamental differences users need to understand?
On the surface, yes! Both show you a percentage and both aim to grow your deposit. Underneath, they’re different products. A savings account’s yield comes from a bank’s net interest margin and typically carries deposit insurance. A vault’s yield comes from the specific strategy it’s routing into, and that strategy carries its own risk, for example credit risk, market risk or counterparty risk.
What you get in exchange is transparency a savings account can’t offer. The beauty is that the NAV is tracked onchain, so you can verify what your position is worth in real time instead of waiting on a monthly statement. But I’d never want someone to walk away thinking “same thing, better rate.” It’s a different risk profile, and understanding that is the price of entry.
6. When traditional finance offers high yields, it usually requires locking capital away for years. How do you allow investors to capture yields while keeping funds liquid?
The unlock is separating the strategy’s timeline from the user’s timeline. The underlying strategy. Let’s say a private credit book, would genuinely run on a multi-month or multi-year horizon. But the vault token you hold is a separate, tradable claim on that position, and it doesn’t have to wait for the strategy to mature for you to exit.
Structured secondary markets will give that token a real market to trade in. So instead of asking the strategy to unwind early to give you cash, you sell or use the token itself. That’s the whole point of building composability into the architecture rather than bolting on a lockup with a penalty for leaving early.
7. With so many DeFi protocols getting exploited over the years, how does Valdora approach risk management to ensure user capital stays safe?
We split risk into two categories and manage them differently. Smart contract risk, for examples bugs, exploits, access-control failures would be addressed through independent audits. Ours was done by Oak Security, and every new vault or chain deployment gets its own audit before launch, no exceptions. Strategy risk is the possibility of a credit book underperforms or a quant strategy loses money is a completely different thing an audit doesn’t have a correlation with. The strategy risk we manage that with our curators ZigMarkets with due diligence, close monitoring of NAV reporting, and diversification across vaults and strategy categories rather than concentrating capital in place.
The other piece is honesty about what we’re not promising. We don’t imply guaranteed yield, fixed returns, or risk-free exposure, and we’re explicit about redemption terms and risk profile for every vault. Anyone doing real due diligence should be able to see both the audit and the strategy partner behind their deposit.
8. Looking ahead 3 to 5 years, do you see onchain vaults replacing traditional brokerage and savings accounts for the average investor?
Replacing is the wrong word for it but taking share, yes! Particularly among people who are already holding stablecoins and want that capital doing something rather than sitting idle. The trust, custody, and regulatory infrastructure around traditional brokerages took decades to build, and onchain infrastructure has to earn that same trust before it becomes a default rather than an alternative.
What I do think changes is the ceiling on what “onchain finance” means to people. Right now it’s mostly associated with trading and speculation. In years to come, I expect it to mean access to the same TradFi yield bearing assets but onchain.
9. Anything else you would like to share with us?
Just that we’re early, and we know it. The category of bringing real, institutional-grade yield onchain while keeping it liquid is still being defined, and very few teams have a live, audited product doing it today. Our job now is to keep expanding the range of strategies and vaults, keep expanding to more chains, and ensuring Valdora keeps on progressing with the vision of making the future of finance composable.
