> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://the-heist-1.gitbook.io/the-heist-docs/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://the-heist-1.gitbook.io/the-heist-docs/yield-vaults/overview.md).

# Overview

Everything described so far works completely fine without any of this — Genesis, the price target, the Floor, the Hideout, and the protocol's own liquidity are the whole core system. Yield Vaults are an **optional extra layer on top**: a family of vaults that automate a few common strategies for people who'd rather not manage the details by hand.

## The same fee rules apply to every single one

* **Never a deposit fee.**
* **Never a withdrawal fee** — except a short window (roughly 24–72 hours) that exists purely to stop someone from depositing and immediately withdrawing just to skim a cut of fees that were already building up for people who'd been in longer.
* **Performance fees only ever apply to real, actual gains — never to what you put in.** A vault can never take a cut of your original deposit, only a cut of the profit it genuinely produces.
* **Fee rates are locked in when the vault launches**, within a pre-approved range, and can **never be raised afterward.** Whatever the rate is at launch, it stays.

## Where a vault's fee revenue goes

Every vault's performance fee gets converted to WETH and split three ways:

```mermaid
flowchart TD
    A[Vault earns a\nperformance fee] --> B[Shared fee router]
    B -->|30%, fixed| C[Buys MERRY\non the open market]
    B -->|remaining 70%,\nsplit automatically| D{How well-funded\nis the Floor right now?}
    D -->|Thin| E[Weighted toward the Floor]
    D -->|Fully backing target| F[Weighted toward the Treasury]
```

30% of every vault's fee always buys MERRY on the open market. What ultimately happens to that MERRY — burned, held in reserve, or redistributed to Hideout stakers — is a deliberately undecided governance question for now; today it simply accumulates at the fee router rather than going to any of those destinations automatically. The other 70% splits between the Treasury and the Floor on a sliding scale tied to how well [the Floor](/the-heist-docs/how-it-works/the-floor.md) is currently funded: when the Floor is thin — and confidence in it matters most — more goes there; as it fills up, more shifts to the Treasury. This is recalculated automatically every time, based on a number that can't be gamed by short-term trading swings.

## The vaults themselves

| Vault                       | What it does                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |
| --------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Peg Defense Vault**       | Pools WETH and, whenever LOOT trades below [the Floor](/the-heist-docs/how-it-works/the-floor.md)'s payout rate, automatically buys LOOT and cashes it in — a risk-free move that also nudges the price back toward target. Only takes a fee on the actual profit.                                                                                                                                                           |
| **LP Growth Vault**         | Pools liquidity share tokens and automatically reinvests their farming rewards back into more liquidity. This doesn't happen on every single deposit or withdrawal — it only fires once the pending reward is worth enough to justify the cost, or after a maximum waiting period, so ordinary deposits and withdrawals stay cheap and predictable.                                                                          |
| **Hideout Compound Vaults** | Pool staked MERRY and automatically reinvest both LOOT batches and WETH payouts from [the Hideout](/the-heist-docs/how-it-works/the-hideout.md). Deployed twice — a "Heat Maximizer" and a "Hideout Auto-Compound" — sharing the exact same mechanism today; the option for one to lean harder into the loyalty bonus than the other is built into the contract but not yet switched on, so for now both behave identically. |
| **Printer Strategy Vault**  | The deposit/withdrawal groundwork for a future automated strategy tied to [the Printer](/the-heist-docs/how-it-works/the-peg-and-the-printer.md). Its automated piece switches on once there's a suitable on-chain tool to automate against — deposits are safe and fully withdrawable in the meantime.                                                                                                                      |

## Why automate any of this

Every strategy above is something a sufficiently attentive person could already do by hand: watch for a below-floor price and act on it, watch pending rewards and reinvest them, watch payouts build up and restake them. These vaults exist purely to make the smart move the default one, without requiring anyone to watch the chain around the clock — while keeping the exact same fee discipline (no fee on your principal, no rates that can creep up later) as the rest of the protocol.

Next: [Security](/the-heist-docs/security.md) — the engineering practices and trust guarantees behind every part of the protocol described in these docs.


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