One thing to keep in mind is that xBull Farming is all about “strategies” which a bot will follow based on certain parameters, a vault is nothing more than an “spot” for you so our bots replicate our strategy with that account. This means that: We define a strategy and if you want to copy the strategy you get a vault where our bot will update it so it mimics our strategy.
Vaults are represented by random stellar accounts which are generated when a depositor wants to follow an strategy, this stellar account gets two separated signers: The depositor’s signer and one of our cold wallet backup signers, if at some point the depositor lose its keys we can help in recovering the deposit once the depositor proves us it’s the legitime owner.
Why are vaults important?
There are multiple reasons why it’s good to use vaults, but lets comment the most important ones:
- Security: The most important is security, there have been a lot cases on both centralized and decentralized projects where because of bugs in the system people have found ways to drain the system and run aways with all of the deposits. This can not happen when using separated vaults for each user because if someone finds a way to abuse the system… they will only be able to abuse their own vault and will not affect deposits from others.
- Simplicity: At first sigh we could think that using different vaults for every depositor will make everything more complex, but the reality is the opposite. When using pooled contracts for everybody’s deposits just like in others blockchains is actually riskier and more complex, in our case there is no need to calculate how much amount belongs to who because each depositor interacts only with its own vault and nothing more.
- Transparency: One plus of having separated vaults for everybody is that it’s really easy to check the deposit in the vault and check the history of rewards it has received plus when it was the last time it compounded the deposit
Why do vaults need 50 XLM?
This is actually for two reasons: Prevent abuse of our service and have enough “gas” to run the strategy. Every time our bot needs to compound the balance on hand it will require XLMs to pay for networks fees, at the same time 50 XLMs is enough to avoid users with bad intentions.
This 50 XLM are returned to the depositor (minus the amount used during the lifecycle of the vault) once the vault has been cancelled (withdraw of the deposit).