ERC-4626: The Vault Standard Reshaping DeFi Capital Allocation

ERC-4626 standardized tokenized vaults on Ethereum, turning isolated yield containers into interoperable, composable building blocks for DeFi. By creating a common accounting and access interface, the standard reduces integration complexity for dashboards, risk tools and market makers, improves secondary liquidity for vault share tokens and enables lending markets to accept shares as collateral. It also permits meta-vaults to aggregate and rebalance across multiple strategies behind a single user deposit. Market impact is broadly positive for DeFi capital efficiency and liquidity, though the standard guarantees interaction consistency — not the quality or risk profile of underlying vault strategies — so investor due diligence remains essential.