Community vaults

A community vault is a trading account with a share layer on top. The owner (the leader) creates a vault. Other users deposit USDC into it and receive shares. The leader trades the pooled capital through the same matching engine as any other account. Depositors share the vault's PnL, and its drawdowns, pro rata.

There is no separate "vault engine." Positions, margin, funding, and liquidations work exactly as they do for any account. The vault layer only tracks who owns what and moves collateral in and out against shares.

Creating a vault

Creating a vault unlocks once your accounts have traded $100,000 of cumulative volume. The protocol measures the threshold across your whole account family: your trading account and any vaults you already run. The measure only ever goes up, so once you clear the threshold you keep it.

Past that, you earn one vault, plus one more for every $1,000,000 of further volume, up to five. The vaults page shows your progress toward the next one.

The volume requirement does not disable an existing vault. It does not override the leader stake floor. An under-floor vault cannot accept LP deposits or leader withdrawals until the leader restores the floor.

Create a vault from the vaults page in the trading UI. Creating one:

Spins up a new, dedicated master account for the vault. Your existing trading account stays untouched. The process converts or repurposes nothing, and you keep trading your account separately.
Sets the vault's terms: name, description, fees, and lockup. You fix all of them at creation. Afterward you can change them only in the LP-favorable direction (see below). The trading UI sets the leader stake floor at 5%.
Seeds the vault from your trading account. The seed is the vault's first deposit. It mints your leader shares at $1.00. The protocol measures the 5% stake floor against the seed.

Shares and NAV

NAV per share = the vault's total equity divided by total shares outstanding. Total equity includes the master account and all its subaccounts: collateral plus unrealized PnL, marked live.
First deposit mints one share per dollar, so NAV starts at $1.00 and moves only with the vault's performance from there.
Later deposits mint at the current NAV: shares = net_deposit × total_shares / total_equity. Nobody buys in cheap, and the mint dilutes nobody already in.
The chain rejects deposits into an insolvent vault (equity ≤ 0 with shares outstanding).
The leader can set an optional max AUM cap, at vault creation or via a later config update. The chain rejects a deposit that would push vault equity past the cap.

Fees

The leader sets all fees at creation, per vault, and you can see them before you deposit.

Fee	Bounds	When charged
Performance fee	0–10%	At withdrawal, on the profit portion of the shares being redeemed (positive only — no profit, no fee)
Deposit fee	combined ≤ 2% with withdrawal	At deposit, off the top of the amount deposited
Withdrawal fee	combined ≤ 2% with deposit	At withdrawal, on the gross value redeemed

There is no management fee: no ongoing charge on assets. Deposit and withdrawal fees default to zero, and most vaults leave them there. Fees route to the vault's fee recipient (the leader).

Fee changes after creation are LP-favorable only. The leader can lower the vault's fee rates (performance, deposit, and withdrawal) but never raise them, and can only shorten the lockup. The chain rejects a raise outright. The fee is a single vault-level rate, so no depositor can ever pay more than the terms they deposited under.

Leader stake: skin in the game

A new vault starts empty: the leader's seed is the first deposit and mints their shares at $1.00. Until others deposit, the leader owns 100% of the vault.
The leader must hold at least the vault's stake floor of total shares at all times. The minimum is 5%, which the trading UI uses.
Pending leader withdrawals count toward the limit. The chain checks the floor when the leader requests a withdrawal and again before execution.
The floor also gates deposits after pending leader withdrawals. At 5%, a vault fills at 20× the leader's uncommitted stake and reopens after a top-up.

The leader's stake is in the same shares as everyone else's. When the vault draws down, the leader's capital draws down with it, at the same moment and the same rate.

Lockup and withdrawals

Withdrawals are a three-step queue:

Request. The depositor submits a withdrawal for some or all of their shares. The request starts the lockup clock. The protocol does not burn the shares yet, and the request can be cancelled any time before execution.
Wait out the lockup. The leader sets the lockup at creation, up to 1 year, and the app requires at least 1 day. Like fees, the leader can only ever shorten it after creation, never extend it on existing depositors.
Execute. After the lockup elapses, anyone can execute the withdrawal. Execution is permissionless by design, so a leader can never trap depositors by refusing to process exits.

How the payout is raised

Redemption pays from the least disruptive source first:

Free collateral first. The engine sweeps subaccounts and, if needed, cancels the family's resting orders. If the vault family then has enough free margin, the vault pays the withdrawer at NAV and touches no positions.
Then a pro-rata close. The engine raises any shortfall by closing the withdrawer's proportional slice of the vault's open positions against the order book. The withdrawer bears the full cost of that close: both the order-book slippage and the trading fee on it. They receive exactly what their slice fetched, net of fees. The vault holds remaining depositors at NAV, so one person's exit can't dilute everyone else.
Large redemptions chunk. The engine spreads big position closes across blocks with a cooldown so the book can refill. The pending withdrawal stays queued until fully paid.
Insolvent vault. If equity has reached zero or below, shares are worth nothing. Execution burns them and pays $0. Vaults carry no insurance. Nothing steps in to make losses whole.

Risk

A community vault is unhedged by default. You buy a share of a live trading book:

Depositors share losses pro rata, with no cap. A vault's equity can reach zero.
NAV includes unrealized PnL, so the value of your shares moves with the vault's open positions, every block.
Exiting through a thin book costs slippage, and the lockup means you cannot exit instantly.
The leader's strategy is theirs. The chain enforces the share accounting, the stake floor, and the fee bounds, not the quality of the trading.

What the chain does enforce: the leader cannot withdraw vault collateral except through the same share-redemption path as everyone else. The leader cannot drop below the stake floor. The leader cannot raise fees or extend the lockup on money already deposited.

Where to see it

The vaults page in the trading UI lists every vault with its NAV, AUM, fees, lockup, and the leader's stake. Vault accounts are ordinary accounts on chain: positions and flows are public via the same explorer and API endpoints as any account, e.g. /v1/accounts/{id}.