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Understanding Vaults

What a vault is

An ARKONIX vault is a smart contract that pools deposits and runs a defined strategy. When you deposit the vault's asset (for example USDC), you receive share tokens in return. Shares are your claim on the vault: as the strategy generates returns, the value of each share — the share price, or NAV per share — changes, and so does the value of your position.

Three properties make this different from handing money to a fund:

  • You hold the shares. They are tokens in your wallet, not an entry in someone's database.
  • The vault's holdings are public. Composition, transactions, and share price updates are on-chain and mirrored in the app.
  • No one at ARKONIX can move your money to themselves. Operational keys can rebalance vault holdings between whitelisted strategy venues, but the deposit and withdrawal paths run directly between your wallet and the vault contract.

Pools, share classes, and vaults

Under the hood, vaults are organized in three tiers:

Pool  →  Share Class  →  Vault(s)
  • A pool is the top-level container a partner operates.
  • A share class defines the strategy, fees, and terms. It is the thing whose NAV and returns you see.
  • A vault is a concrete deployment of a share class on a specific chain. One share class can have vaults on several chains — same strategy, same share price, different entry points.

In the Earn app you mostly see share classes ("vaults" colloquially); the chain picker on a vault page switches between its deployments.

The two vault types

Type Deposit Withdrawal
Asynchronous Requested, settles at the next epoch Requested, settles at the next epoch
Sync-deposit Instant — shares mint immediately Requested, settles at the next epoch

Both types settle withdrawals asynchronously — that discipline is what lets strategies hold productive positions without keeping a large idle buffer. The vault detail page always tells you which type you're using, and the deposit panel reflects it.

Share price and NAV

  • The share price starts at $1.00 at launch and moves with strategy performance. It is published on-chain by the operator as part of NAV updates.
  • TVL (total value locked) is the vault's NAV in USD — the market value of everything the share class holds.
  • Your position value = your share balance × current share price, and the app computes it from the on-chain conversion functions, not from cached numbers.

Where the yield comes from

Each vault page describes its strategy and shows its current composition — the assets and protocol positions it holds, with weights. Strategies range from conservative lending allocations to structured yield loops; some are driven by quantitative signals produced by SignalForge (operated by Arkonix Capital Management). The composition donut and the contracts section on each vault page let you verify what the vault holds at any time.

Risk disclosure

Past performance is not indicative of future results. The value of your deposit may decrease. DeFi protocols carry smart contract and liquidity risk. Review each vault's strategy description and the Security & Trust section before depositing.