Overview
Vaults are the delegation and restaking management layer of Symbiotic. They handle three crucial parts of the Symbiotic economy:
- Accounting: Vaults handle deposits, withdrawals, and slashings of collaterals and, in turn, their underlying assets.
- Delegation Strategies: Vault deployers/owners define delegation and restaking strategies to operators across Symbiotic networks, which networks have to opt into.
- Slashing Processing: Vaults provide a mechanism to preserve networks' economic security guarantees via slashing.
Vaults are configurable and can be deployed in an immutable, pre-configured way, or an owner can be specified as one who is able to update vault parameters. Vaults are expected to be used by operators and curators such as crypto institutions or liquid (re)staking protocols to create differentiated products, e.g.:
- Operator-Specific Vaults: Operators may create vaults with collateral restaked to their infrastructure across any configuration of networks. An operator can create multiple vaults with differing configurations to service their clients without requiring additional node infrastructure.
- Curated Multi-Operator Vaults: Curated configurations of restaked networks and delegation strategies to a diversified set of operators. Curated vaults can additionally set custom slashing limits to cap the collateral amount that can be slashed for specific operators or networks. The terms of these commitments need to be accepted by networks that vaults seek to provide their curation for.
- Immutable Pre-Configured Vaults: Vaults can be deployed with pre-configured rules that cannot be updated to provide extra protection for users that are not comfortable with risks associated with their vault curator being able to add additional restaked networks or change configurations in any other way.
Technical overview
The Vault contract consists of three primary modules:
Accounting Module (Vault)
This module is responsible for handling the financial aspects of the vault, including:
- Processing deposits from users and keeping track of balances
- Managing withdrawal requests and claims
- Implementing epoch-based accounting for slashing
All operations are performed in a single predefined collateral token.
Limits and Delegation Logic Module (Delegator)
Delegator is responsible for handling the vault's funds allocation across networks and operators. It achieves this by:
- Allowing networks to perform a stake gating (a.k.a. how much stake it is ready to get from this vault) without the need to implement it on their side
- Processing of curator's actions on stake distribution
- Providing the data of stake allocations for any points in time
Slashing Logic Module (Slasher)
The slashing module handles penalty enforcement. Its functions include:
- Verifying the validity of slashing requests
- Implementing different slashing logic flows (e.g., instant slashing and veto slashing)
Interaction Between Modules
The Vault module doesn't interact with other modules. However, it is used as a connecting registry for other ones.
The Delegator module utilizes information from the Vault regarding deposited funds. This data is crucial for determining accurate stake limits and ensuring that the slashing process aligns with the current state of the vault.
When a slashing event is triggered, the Slasher module queries the Delegator module to obtain a stake allocation for an operator and a network in question. This information is used to validate that the proposed slashing amount does not exceed the allocated stake. Then, the Slasher interacts with the Vault to proceed with the burning of the slashed funds.
The Vaults don't have reward mechanics themselves. The rewards are distributed externally using separate Rewards extensions.