Investors
How Hyperliquid vaults work
The investor's view — how a non-custodial Hyperliquid vault holds funds, prices shares, and pays withdrawals.
A vault is an on-chain contract on HyperEVM that holds USDC and trades it on Hyperliquid. You deposit USDC and receive vault shares; the share price is the vault's NAV per share, computed live on-chain from what the vault actually holds.
NAV — the number everything hangs on
NAV is recomputed from Hyperliquid's own precompiles on every read. It counts five things, and only five things:
| Leg | What it is |
|---|---|
| EVM USDC | the vault's liquid reserve on HyperEVM |
| Core spot USDC | trading balance on Hyperliquid |
| Perp equity | positions and margin, across the native dex and curated HIP-3 dexes |
| Held spot tokens | vault-enabled tokens, valued at min(market, cost) |
| HYPE above the gas reserve | Core HYPE beyond the small gas buffer (the buffer itself is deliberately excluded) |
Anything the vault cannot prove it holds is counted as zero. The conservative direction is deliberate: NAV can understate, never overstate.
Shares
- Deposits mint shares at the current NAV per share (priced against the high side of the two-point read, so existing holders are never diluted).
- Withdrawals burn shares at NAV per share — instantly up to the vault's instant-withdrawal cap, and through a bounded queue above it.