Stake and gas
The locked seed floor, adding and withdrawing stake, and the Core HYPE gas model
Two of your own balances sit alongside investor capital: the shares you seeded the vault with, and the HYPE that pays for trading on HyperCore.
The seed floor
At creation you commit a seed deposit, and the resulting shares are recorded as the vault's stake floor — a fixed share count locked for the life of the vault. You cannot withdraw, transfer, or queue your way below it, and neither the queue nor the instant path will let you breach it. It is the skin-in-the-game investors can point to: you can't leave before they can.
The floor does not migrate on a manager hand-over. The incoming manager must already hold at least the floor in shares before they can accept; once they're in, your remaining shares become freely withdrawable.
Stake above the floor
Anything you hold above the floor is ordinary vault equity. Add to it with a normal USDC deposit. To take it out, you queue a withdrawal like any investor — the request enqueues and settles on the next processing run, priced at the same protected min(snapshot, current) rule. There is no privileged exit; your excess stake waits in the same FIFO line.
Core HYPE gas
HyperCore charges gas in HYPE, and the vault keeps a small HYPE balance on Core to pay it. That gas covers both placing trades and bridging USDC back to the EVM reserve. By design HYPE stays on Core — there is no Core→EVM path for it — so it's a running cost, not a recoverable balance (any surplus above the gas reserve is counted in NAV and swept to the protocol owner only when the vault closes).
If Core HYPE runs dry the consequence is specific: bridging home stalls, because the bridge leg itself needs gas. Trades and withdrawals aren't frozen, but you can't move funds back to pay the queue until you top up. Top up by sending HYPE from your manager wallet to the vault's Core gas balance — a payable transaction from the cockpit.
One caveat: HYPE sent to the vault's EVM address (rather than its Core gas) is a mistake. It isn't counted in NAV and isn't usable as gas; only the protocol owner can return it. Don't send HYPE to the vault's EVM address.
In the cockpit: Manage → Capital — Your stake holds the floor and stake levers, HYPE & gas shows the Core balance and the top-up.