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The depositor-facing vault product is still being built. This page describes the design and the mechanics already implemented, and both may change before it opens. Treat the specifics here as provisional rather than as terms you can rely on.
Vaults are the way depositors participate in trading strategies on Intention without actively managing positions. There are two kinds:
  • Protocol Vault (Liquidity Provider Vault) — the protocol-owned vault that provides base liquidity and absorbs liquidations. 100% of profits go to depositors.
  • User-Created Vaults — community-run strategy vaults where a vault leader makes trading decisions on behalf of depositors in exchange for a 10% performance fee.

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Quick comparison

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Protocol Vault

The Protocol Vault is the protocol’s official liquidity backbone. It runs a combination of market-making and taker strategies against a fair-price signal derived from multiple external venues, and it is the counterparty of last resort during liquidations. Its positions, resting orders, and trade history are all on-chain and continuously auditable.

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What it does

  1. Market making. Quotes both sides of the book around the fair price, earning spread.
  2. Taker strategy. When the local book diverges from fair price, the vault hits the mispriced side to collect the spread.
Two further income sources — taking over liquidated positions at the bankruptcy price, and receiving a share of platform trading fees — are described in the protocol design but are not routed today. Liquidations do not settle to the vault, and no fee flows to it. Vault income is currently the two strategies above.

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Deposits and withdrawals

Users deposit USDC and receive shares proportional to their deposit. Shares are auto-compounding — no claim transactions required.
  • Lockup. 4 days from each most-recent deposit.
  • Withdraw limits. At most 20% of vault TVL may be withdrawn in any rolling 24 hours. That allowance is shared across every depositor and served first-come-first-served — it is not 20% of your own balance. Once the day’s allowance is used, further withdrawals are rejected rather than queued, and you retry later.
  • Sharded collection. Because the vault is sharded across addresses, withdrawals are collected deterministically from shards with the highest withdrawable balance, maintaining the liquidity ratio on each.

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User-Created Vaults

Any trader who has met minimum activity requirements can create a vault and start managing community capital. The leader trades from the vault’s balance using Intention’s normal trading interface. All trades are on-chain and visible to depositors.

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Leader economics and creation

  • 10% profit share, charged per depositor. The fee is assessed on your own gain, measured against your own weighted-average entry NAV, and taken when you withdraw or when a distribution occurs — not as a split of the vault’s aggregate profit. If your shares are worth no more than you paid for them, the fee is zero, however well the vault did for anyone else.
  • Skin in the game. Leaders must hold at least 5% of vault value. Below 5%, new deposits from others are blocked until they top up.
  • Floor. Leaders cannot withdraw if doing so would leave under 100 USDC in the vault.
Creating a vault requires 100,000 USDC of parent-account trading volume, a non-refundable 100 USDC creation fee, and a 100 USDC minimum initial deposit. Name and strategy description are permanent.

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Depositor experience

Depositors browse vaults, review the leader’s history, and deposit USDC. The system computes their share and starts a 1-day lockup. On withdrawal, if margin permits, the vault pays out without touching open positions; otherwise it scales positions down proportionally. The leader can close the vault once all positions are flat; after closure, depositors claim their share.

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Safety and transparency

All vault types expose live data via API: TVL, PnL, drawdown, positions, and resting orders. Any user can audit the full history on-chain. A vault can be paused. An administrator can suspend any vault, including a user-created one. While it is paused, deposits and withdrawals are both refused and the withdrawal queue stops advancing — a request already in it does not progress until the vault is resumed. That is a real trust assumption and worth weighing before depositing, in the same way the bridge’s locking control is. The justification is the same: a vault that cannot be halted is a vault whose losses cannot be stopped. The cost is that the halt also stops depositors leaving. The risk system monitors vault margin in real time and alerts operators before any vault approaches liquidation.
Vault performance is not guaranteed. User-Created Vaults in particular depend entirely on the leader’s skill and discipline — a poorly run vault can lose principal like any trading strategy. Review historical performance, position concentration, and the leader’s skin in the game before depositing.