Creating a strategy
Configure an auto-rebalancing USDC position on Earn.
A strategy is one auto-rebalancing position with its own chains, settings, and balance. One wallet can own many.
- New strategy asks one setting at a time and shows how many vaults still qualify.
- Coverage comes first and is fixed for life. Networks come last, after the vault filters.
- You approve USDC and your vaults before you sign, then deposit at the end.
- An unfunded strategy is deleted about an hour after you last worked on it.
The walkthrough
Standard or covered
A covered strategy adds OpenCover loss cover for a 1.05% per year premium charged inside the vault. It invests on Base only and cannot use Increase or Reduce. See Covered strategies.
Where's your USDC
Pick the chain you fund from. Chains where you hold too little are greyed out. Funding and investing are separate: you can fund from one chain and never invest there.
How much
Enter an amount, or click Max. You approve that amount now, before anything else. Nothing moves yet. The approval can be larger than this amount when you have another strategy on the same chain that you created but never funded.
Vault size
Two levels. Minimum vault size (TVL) is the size a vault must have before the strategy enters it. Auto-exit vault size is the smaller size at which the strategy leaves a vault it holds. A bigger vault means your deposit is a smaller slice of it.
The wizard suggests a Minimum vault size of 100 times your amount per vault, with a floor of 1,000,000 USDC. It suggests less only when too few vaults would qualify. The suggested Auto-exit vault size is a tenth of the minimum.
Liquidity
Vaults lend your USDC out, so not all of it is withdrawable at any moment. Two levels again. Minimum liquidity to enter is the depth a vault needs before the strategy enters it. Minimum withdrawable liquidity is the floor below which the strategy leaves a vault it holds. The wizard labels this control Auto-exit liquidity. See Withdrawable liquidity.
The suggested Auto-exit liquidity is 10 times your amount per vault, at least 100,000 USDC. The suggested Minimum liquidity to enter is five times that.
Rebalancing
How much better another vault must be, and how long that has to hold, before your money moves. The defaults are a 3% Rebalance gap for a vault on the same network, a 5% Cross-network gap for a vault on another network, and a 1-hour confirmation window, the time the gap must hold. The window goes up to 6 hours. The step warns when a gap is so small that fees eat the gain, or so large that your money will likely never move.
Last details
How many vaults to spread across (default 3). The APY smoothing window, how long Earn averages a vault's rate before it trusts it (default 6 hours). And a name.
Networks
Choose the networks the strategy invests across. A network is listed only when your amount meets its minimum. A covered strategy skips this step.
| Networks | Minimum strategy size |
|---|---|
| Optimism, Unichain, Monad | 250 USDC |
| Base, Polygon, Arbitrum | 500 USDC |
| Ethereum | 5,000 USDC |
A card at the bottom shows how many vaults still qualify. Open Customize vaults to see them and uncheck any you never want the strategy to touch.
Approve, create, deposit
Approve. Each vault needs a one-time permission. You must approve at least one more vault than the strategy will hold. See Approvals and signatures.
Create. Sign to save the strategy. This is an off-chain signature, not a deposit, and it costs nothing.
Deposit. Confirm the deposit and the strategy takes over. Cross-chain portions land after Circle's attestation. See Cross-chain bridging for timing.
What you can change later
Open the strategy and use the Manage tab. You can edit the name, the Rebalance gap, the Cross-network gap, the confirmation window, the APY smoothing window, the four vault levels above, and hidden vaults. You can also pause and resume.
Capital is not fixed. Use Increase or Reduce on the strategy page to add capital or take some out. See Increase and Reduce.
The chain set and the vault count are fixed once the strategy is funded. The deposit splits your capital across that many vaults, and Auto-Pilot swaps one vault for one vault.
Hiding a vault the strategy holds queues a forced exit on the next check. Earn refuses the hide if it would leave fewer eligible vaults than the strategy needs. See Forced exits.
Clone copies a strategy's settings into a new draft named "Copy of" plus the original name, so you do not re-enter every setting to run a second one. It sits in the Manage tab and on the leaderboard, and anyone viewing a strategy can use it. You choose the amount and the funding network.