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DeFindex is yield infrastructure. A partner, a wallet or a fintech, integrates it once and can then offer their users a balance that earns, without building or auditing any DeFi integration themselves. Five layers do the work, and it is worth being precise about which does what. Only one of them holds the money.

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Where the yield comes from

The bottom layer is the one DeFindex does not own. Yield is generated by external protocols, and their risk is their own: see the audits of the underlying protocols alongside ours. A vault does not know how Blend, or a lending market, or an AMM works. A strategy does. Each strategy wraps one yield source and exposes the same six methods to any vault: take assets, return assets, report what the position is worth. That separation is the point. Adding a new yield source means writing and auditing one strategy, not changing the vault every partner is already using. The strategies live in production today are listed on Contract Deployments; the interface they implement is the strategy trait.

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Vaults, and how a partner monetizes

A vault is created through the factory, which fixes at creation time which assets it accepts and which strategies it may use. No vault function adds or swaps a strategy into a live vault. The one path that can change them is a contract upgrade: a vault deployed as upgradable lets its Manager replace the vault’s code entirely, and a vault deployed with upgradability disabled cannot be changed at all. Users deposit and receive dfTokens, shares in the vault. Nothing is minted when yield is reinvested, so the price per share is the number that moves, and it is what the APY is computed from. See Understanding APY. The partner sets the fee, and it is charged only on yield:
  • Maximum 90% of generated yield. Typical range is 30% to 50%.
  • No yield means no fee. User principal is never charged.
  • The APY a user sees is already net of all fees.
See Partner Fees for the full model and Understanding APY for how the number is calculated.

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Idle funds

Deposited capital does not have to be invested immediately. Funds sitting in the vault and not allocated to any strategy are idle funds. They are not stranded, and they are not outside the protocol: they are held by the vault contract itself, and a user can withdraw them like any other balance. Idle funds exist on purpose:
  • Security. They are where rescue puts capital. If an underlying protocol becomes risky, funds come out of it and back to the vault, where only users can withdraw.
  • Operations. They let a rebalance happen across several transactions rather than one.
  • Cost. Small deposits can be pooled and invested together instead of paying a strategy round trip each.
A deposit can be invested on arrival or left idle, and moving between the two is a rebalance.

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What protects the funds

The guarantees are enforced in the contract, not by policy:
  • Whitelisted strategies only. A vault can only ever invest into the strategies fixed at its creation.
  • Funds never leave the vault’s ecosystem. Rebalancing moves capital between the vault and its own strategies. No role can send assets to an arbitrary address.
  • Rescue. The Vault Manager or Emergency Manager can unwind a strategy back to the vault, where only users can withdraw.
  • Strategy pausing. A strategy can be closed to new investment while withdrawals stay open.
  • Withdrawals are always open. No role can freeze a user’s deposits or withdrawals.
  • Fees only on yield. Principal is never charged.
  • First-deposit protection. Vaults lock a minimum of dead shares on the first deposit, against share-inflation attacks.
Every one of these is verifiable in defindex-io/stellar-contracts. The audit reports and the audited scope are on Risks and Audits.