Vaults
Vaults are permissionless ERC-4626 tokenized vaults that accept deposits of a single collateral asset and issue transferable vault shares representing a proportional claim on the underlying assets. They act as the primary capital pools within Symbiotic, allowing curators to deploy deposited capital across different yield-generating strategies while maintaining a unified accounting layer for deposits, withdrawals, rewards, and fees.
Each vault is managed independently by a curator, who defines its investment strategy, supported applications and adapters, fee structure, and access controls. This enables multiple vaults with different risk profiles and objectives to coexist while sharing the same underlying Symbiotic infrastructure.
Vault Lifecycle
A vault's capital can exist in two states:
- Idle capital, which remains directly available within the vault.
- Allocated capital, which has been delegated to one or more adapters.
The Universal Delegator continuously manages these allocations according to the curator's strategy. Capital can move between adapters over time as strategies evolve, new yield opportunities become available, or liquidity is required to satisfy withdrawals.
This separation allows vaults to remain liquid while maximizing capital efficiency across multiple strategies.
Vault Parameters
During deployment, curators configure the vault's immutable parameters, including the collateral asset, name, symbol, and delegator configuration. They also configure operational parameters such as management and performance fees, deposit limits, depositor whitelists, and role permissions, many of which can be updated throughout the vault's lifetime.
Curators define the vault's strategy by deciding how capital is allocated across different adapters. These adapters can either provide economic security to applications through App Adapters or deploy idle capital into external yield sources, such as DeFi protocols or RWA redemption strategies. The vault continuously tracks the value of both idle assets and allocated capital, allowing deposits and withdrawals while accurately accounting for accrued rewards and fees.
Reward System
Depositors receive ERC-4626 vault shares proportional to their contribution. As the vault earns rewards from applications and external strategies, the value of each share increases over time.
Withdrawals
When users redeem their shares, the vault first utilizes any idle collateral it holds. If additional liquidity is required, it requests capital back from the Universal Delegator, which deallocates funds from the underlying adapters according to their respective withdrawal mechanisms. This enables the vault to provide liquidity while preserving the security guarantees and accounting rules of the applications consuming its collateral.