See what Nick said. Vaults will first come out.
But he didn’t say production vaults will start functioning before Safecoin is available.
Although that’s quite possible, considering the ease of bootstraping and other “nice to have” things that would appear if SAFE without Safecoin was allowed to work for a very short period of time.
Which is exactly what I proposed back in October and for which one of the insightful mods rewarded me by locking the topic (because… something). Those who read that post will see what I said back in October 2015 - I preferred March 2016 without Safecoin to June 2016 with. I think that was too much to bear for the sensitive community so the mods jumped in to help.