Strategies, curators and how capital is deployed
Level: Intermediate
Roles in plain language
| Actor | Job |
|---|---|
| Depositor | Puts in one asset, holds shares. |
| Curator | Designs/operates the vault: picks strategies, fee terms, hooks. Can be Concrete or a partner (Royco, USDai…). |
| Allocator | Automated role that moves capital between strategies according to off-chain routing decisions. |
| Withdrawal Manager | Automated role that advances withdrawal epochs. |
| Vault Admin / managers | Low-frequency governance roles (Vault, Strategy, Hook Manager). |
| Monitors / pausers | Hypernative watches vault addresses; ZeroShadow holds a pre-delegated pause mandate. |
What a strategy is
A strategy is an adapter bound to one vault and one underlying asset. The vault only asks it three things: what is your current value?, take these assets, give these assets back. Everything venue-specific lives inside the strategy.
Strategy types described in the developer docs:
| Strategy | Idea | Accounting |
|---|---|---|
| Idle | Holds assets without seeking yield (liquidity buffer). | On-chain |
| Lending | Supplies assets to lending markets (audit history includes Morpho integrations). | On-chain (computed from position state) |
| Looping | Flash-loan-driven leveraged loops built from interchangeable lender, flash and swap modules. | On-chain |
| MultisigStrategy | Forwards assets to a multisig (Gnosis Safe) or MPC wallet (Fordefi) for custodied/off-chain execution; value is reported back on-chain by an operator. | Asynchronous (signed value pushed within a validity window) |
| Curve / Pendle | Audited strategy family for LP / yield-token venues. | Varies |
One vault can hold several strategies at once, e.g. a conservative lending strategy + a looping strategy + a custodied multisig strategy. The user still sees one share token with one yield curve.
Why "asynchronous accounting" matters
For custodied positions, the chain cannot see the real value. An operator must push a signed valuation within a configured accountingValidityPeriod. On-chain rails bound how far a value can jump (change threshold, cooldown, validity window). If the push is late, the strategy's value function reverts and the vault halts deposits, withdrawals and epoch processing until an admin unpauses/adjusts or the strategy is toggled inactive. This is a real operational dependency - it is the cost of accessing off-chain venues.