Vault manual

How a 4626 vault holds coins, runs strategies, and sets a strategy aside if it cannot pay the vault back.

This manual is for two people: someone who holds a vault's shares, and the creator who operates that vault. It explains what the vault does with deposits, how strategies are added and removed, and what happens if a strategy cannot pay the vault back.

Launching a new vault is a separate path. Start with Launch a vault if you have not deployed yet.

What you hold

A vault has three tokens. Mixing them up is the usual way to misread a balance.

Token	What it is
Creator coin	The coin you deposit. It stays the vault's asset.
Vault share	The vault's internal accounting claim. You usually do not hold this directly.
ShareOFT	The token you buy, hold, and trade. One ShareOFT represents 1,000 vault shares.

Depositing creator coins through the wrapper mints ShareOFT. Withdrawing burns ShareOFT and returns creator coins. Coins and shares.

Buying ShareOFT on a market is not the same as depositing into the vault. A market buy pays the trade fee and can enter the lottery. A wrap, a deposit, and a bridge transfer do not. Buy and hold shares.

What the vault does with deposits

The vault keeps some creator coins idle and can send the rest to strategies.

• A vault can list 5 strategies. Idle cash is not one of those 5.
• Each listed strategy has a weight in basis points. The weights plus the idle reserve add up to 100%.
• A strategy must hold the same asset as the vault, and it must be active, before the vault will list it.

New vaults launch with this allocation:

Slot	Launch weight	What it does today
Strategy 1	80%	The v4 creator/USDC pool
Strategy 2	10%	Lends creator coins on the Morpho market for that pool
Idle	10%	Stays in the vault for withdrawals

Strategy 1 and Strategy 2 are stable names. The vault can later run a different implementation in either slot without renaming the slot. Strategy 2 only lends. It does not borrow. A withdrawal can wait while borrowers are using the supplied coins. The weights are the launch template, not a promise of yield.

The coins do not move into the pool during the deploy transaction. The treasury Safe configures the pool first. Until that happens, the coins stay in the vault even though Strategy 1 is already registered.

This earn mix is separate from how new ShareOFT is split at activation (vesting, auction, Solana, and so on). How launch shares are split.

Adding or removing a strategy

Only the vault's management address can change the strategy list.

Before anyone holds shares, an add happens in the same transaction.

After shares exist, an add or a swap is scheduled. It cannot run until riskConfigDelay has passed. That delay starts at 1 day and cannot be set shorter. Only one change can be waiting at a time.

A removal is immediate, and it is strict. The vault withdraws the strategy's full reported position and unlists the strategy only when that position is empty. If the strategy cannot return everything it reports, the removal reverts and the strategy stays listed.

The owner or emergency admin can force-remove a strategy that cannot pay in full. They have to name the loss they accept. That loss stays inside the vault. It is not the impairment path below.

A swap removes one strategy and adds another. After shares exist, that swap waits out the same delay as an add.

If a strategy cannot pay the vault back

The vault can set one strategy aside. The owner or the impairment guardian starts that by tripping impairment on the strategy.

While that epoch is open:

• Deposits and withdrawals pause.
• The rest of the vault keeps its value. The set-aside strategy is no longer counted in the normal share price, and the vault stops sending it new funds.
• People who held shares at the trip get a claim on anything later recovered from that strategy. Later depositors do not share that recovery.

Management proposes who those holders were. Anyone can challenge that list during the challenge window. After the window, the loss is finalized and holders mint a claim. Recovered funds pay those claims. The claim itself cannot be transferred.

If the trip was a false alarm, the authorized caller can clear it and the vault returns to normal. If a trip sits unresolved for too long, anyone can clear it, so a paused vault cannot stay paused forever.

A normal removal is for a strategy that can return its funds. Impairment is for a strategy that cannot.

The claim is minted to the account in the snapshot. For the usual 4626 path, that account is the ShareOFT holder, not the wrapper contract that locks the vault shares. The exact mint and claim steps are in Impairment disclosures. Every state and transition is in the Impairment state machine.

While deposits are paused

If the vault page says deposits and withdrawals are paused, the strategy list should name which strategy was set aside. Wait for the epoch to clear, or mint your claim if you held shares at the trip. Do not expect a deposit or a withdrawal to succeed during the pause.

What this manual does not promise

Share price can rise or fall. Strategies can lose money. A pause can delay withdrawals. Nothing here is a guarantee of principal or yield.