Approvals and signatures
What Earn's approvals authorize, and how to revoke them.
The two kinds of allowance
Earn asks for a USDC allowance sized to the deposit you are about to make, not an unlimited one. If you have other strategies on the same chain that you created but never funded, the same allowance covers their deposits too. Because the allowance is finite, an Increase later asks for a new USDC approval whenever the remaining allowance is below the amount you add.
Each vault share approval is unlimited. Vault shares are minted to your wallet at deposit time, so Earn needs an allowance on each share token to move you out of that vault later: when a better vault wins the score, when a vault is force-exited (see Forced exits), and when you Reduce or close. The same allowance also collects the rebalance fee. See Fees and gas.
You must approve at least one more vault than the strategy holds, so Auto-Pilot always has a spare to move into. You can approve more later. When a better vault is blocked only by a missing approval, the strategy page shows an Approval needed badge with an Approve on Vaults link. You can also get an alert for it. See Notifications.
Revoking
Revoke from the Vaults page inside Earn, which supports bulk approve and revoke, or from revoke.cash. The Vaults page blocks revoking a vault that an active strategy still holds, until that strategy closes. revoke.cash has no such block.
- Revoking the USDC allowance stops Earn from pulling your next deposit. Funds already inside vaults are not affected.
- Revoking a vault share allowance blocks rebalances into and out of that vault. Closing still works: the close flow prompts you to re-approve any missing allowance first.
- If you revoke a vault approval while a cross-chain deposit to that vault is in flight, the deposit cannot land. The USDC is not lost. After 30 minutes you can claim it to your wallet. See If a bridge stalls.
Signatures
Creating a strategy, editing its settings, pausing and resuming, hiding a vault, and deleting an unfunded strategy each ask for a signature, not a transaction: you sign a message in your wallet and pay no gas. Closing a funded strategy skips the message and goes straight to one transaction per chain. Each signature covers one request only, and a signed message cannot move tokens. It expires after 5 minutes on a regular wallet and after 24 hours on a Safe. See Safe multi-sig.