Mellow review

Someone signs their name to the risk

Each Mellow vault has a curator who publishes a mandate and selects its operators and service exposure, with allocations visible on-chain. It is the most honest structure in the category: instead of a protocol-wide average nobody chose, there is a named party whose decisions you can read before depositing and judge afterwards.

Which is also the demand it makes

You now have to evaluate curators, not just protocols — a second diligence job most depositors are not equipped to do and did not expect. The structure is better; the burden is higher, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Scale

Individual vaults are small, which affects exit at size, and yield is disclosed per vault with the incentive component separated from base rewards — again, more transparency than the pooled alternatives offer.

Who it suits

Institutions and sophisticated depositors who want an explicit mandate rather than a default, and who will actually read it.

How to evaluate a curator

Read the mandate, check whether the allocations on-chain match it, and look at what the curator does elsewhere. A mandate is only worth what its author's track record makes it worth, which is the same question institutional allocators ask of any manager.

Where it fits

As the structure a treasury would choose if it had to justify a restaking allocation to a committee — explicit, named and documented rather than pooled and averaged.