A shared wallet your group votes with
A Fexr vault holds your group's money in a smart contract. Members deposit from their own wallets, propose what to spend it on, and vote. When a vote passes, the contract pays out — nobody has to be trusted to go and do it. Vaults are free to create and free to run.
Deposit, vote, pay out
Three things happen in a vault. The contract does the third one on its own, which is the part that is normally missing.
Each member signs their own deposit from their own wallet. The money lands in the vault's contract, not in a Fexr account.
A proposal says what the money is for. It passes when it reaches the approval count you set when you created the vault.
The payout follows from the result. Nobody has to remember to go and sign a transfer afterwards.
Three choices, then you're done
The first choice is what the group is for. You pick one of eight types, and the type decides which parts of the vault you actually see. Most vaults use two or three.
The second is how many approvals a decision needs — any number from 1 to 10, set per vault. A four-person savings group and a protocol treasury should not need the same number.
The third is what the money does while it sits there. Ten strategies, picked at creation: a plain shared pool, a savings pool with reward tiers, or a position in an established lending or staking protocol — Aave, Lido, Spark, Compound. Five of the ten can read a live price from the contract; more on that in part 06.
The money itself sits in a smart contract. It holds the funds and releases them on its own terms, and each member signs their own deposit — Fexr never holds the key.
Seven parts of a vault
A multisig is a shared wallet that needs several signatures before money moves. It does that job well and records nothing about why. These are the parts that fill in the rest.
Every movement says what caused it
A multisig records that three of five people signed and money went out. It cannot tell you which proposal that was, whether the proposal passed, or what the payment was for, because it has no idea proposals exist.
A vault's balance is read back from the contract's own events, not typed into a database. Money comes in from member deposits and from what the vault earns; it goes out through payouts and payments for work. Every movement is linked to the proposal or the work order that caused it.
When a vote passes, the money moves
Most groups vote in Discord or Snapshot and hold funds in a multisig. The two do not talk to each other, so after the vote someone still has to go and sign the transfer. Until they do, the vote and the balance disagree.
In a vault, the proposal and the treasury live in the same contract. The payout is part of the vote passing, not a separate errand afterwards.
You set the approval threshold when you create the vault — anywhere from 1 to 10. Start low and raise it as the group grows.
The vault can hire, and the vault can get paid
A vault can bring in agents and pay them from the treasury for research, monitoring and signal generation. Five people together can afford analysis that none of them would buy alone.
Money moves the other way too. When someone queries the vault's signals, the payment lands in the vault's treasury — not in the account of whoever set it up.
The track record belongs to the vault, not the founder
A vault builds up a signal win rate and a count of what it has tracked. Activity is grouped into epochs — fixed time periods, each with its own leaderboard — so recent form is visible on its own. Every treasury movement sits in the vault's transaction history.
A public vault shows that score to anyone deciding whether to join. A private vault keeps it inside, visible only to the owner.
Because the record sits on the vault, it survives people leaving. A history kept in someone's spreadsheet exports does not.
Who gets in, and what they can do
People join by requesting access and being approved, or by using an invite code. Once in, what someone can do comes from a role. Roles are assigned, can be revoked, and are checked at the moment someone tries to act.
Where a vault runs staking, the pools state their slashing conditions up front: exactly what loses you your stake, agreed before anyone stakes. Members also carry a sybil score — a measure of whether one person is running several accounts to swing a vote.
How the vault's token gets priced
Where a vault issues a token, the price comes from the same read a redemption would use: the contract's own exchange rate. Five of the ten strategies do this today.
When that read is not available the price still shows, with its source named. In order of certainty: a cached market price, a lookup by the token's contract address, or treasury value divided by the amount staked, labelled an estimate. A reading that jumps more than 50% from the last one is flagged rather than shown as fact.
An agent that reports on the vault itself
A vault records a lot that nobody reads on purpose: who joined and when, what was proposed and voted down, which claims were disputed, how the treasury moved. An agent reads across nine categories of that — membership, rewards, funnel, financial data and five more — and writes up what it found, on a schedule or on demand.
This is not the trading agent from part 03. That one researches markets and is paid from the treasury; this one looks inward at the vault. Every run is logged, so you can see what it actually read.
Two builds we deploy one at a time
Both are finished and hardened to the same checklist as everything above. They are built on OpenZeppelin's audited contract library, fuzz-tested with thousands of randomised runs to find edge cases, and threat-modelled in a written security doc.
What is different is who runs them. There is no shared public contract to join. Each one is deployed for a single qualifying company, to its own address. Neither can be opened, funded or minted from this page. Eligibility is a real gate: jurisdiction, the entity signing, who holds the keys, and what the funds are for.
- The vault issues its own token instead of only holding other people's
- Its price is read live from the contract — the same mechanism as part 06 above
- Built on ERC-4626, the standard interface for tokenised vaults
- Protected against the first-depositor inflation attack, where whoever gets in first manipulates the share price against everyone after them
- Deployed to the client's own contract on Base, with the parameters fixed at deployment
- An invoice that locks the money on-chain instead of just asking for it
- Released by mutual approval, a timeout, or milestones — chosen when the invoice is created
- Can earn yield while it waits, split between payer, payee and Fexr
- Fexr never signs. Every release is a transaction one of the two parties makes
- Deployed for the company issuing the invoices, not run as a shared service
If you have a use for either, the first step is a scoping call: what you are moving, under which jurisdiction, and who holds the keys at the end of it.
Pooled vaults answered the money question
The DeFi vault pattern is a good one. Hyperliquid's version is among the sharpest: the leader has to keep their own money in the vault and cannot pull it out while depositors are in, performance is public, and the fee only pays on profit. Those are real answers to why a stranger should be trusted with a strategy.
What that design does not cover is everything around the capital — who else decides, who joins, who does the work, who gets paid for it, and what the group still owns when the leader walks away.
- The operator has their own money in it, with a floor they cannot withdraw below
- Performance is public and continuous, not a quarterly letter
- The fee only pays when there are gains to pay it from
- Anybody can start one — no mandate, no minimum size
- A treasury that belongs to the group, not to one strategy
- Votes with a threshold, a tally and a payout attached
- The ability to hire work, and to get paid for output
- Membership, roles and a track record that outlives any one person
What a vault will not do for you
Structure fixes some problems and leaves others exactly where they were.
- Governance only works if people vote. A threshold nobody meets is a decision nobody makes. Start with a low approval count and raise it as the group grows, not the other way round.
- The vault earning is not you earning. Signal revenue and fees go to the treasury. Getting them out to members is a separate decision, and nothing happens until somebody proposes it.
- The record describes the past, not the future. Win rates and epoch standings are computed from what the vault actually did. Where a vault publishes a strategy, its verification is rechecked on a schedule and removed if it stops meeting the bar. None of it predicts the next trade.
- A contract can lose money, and we cannot overrule it. Where the strategy is a real position in a real protocol, it carries that protocol's risk and the market's. The same thing that stops Fexr moving your stake against you stops us moving it for you. If the terms lock the funds, the terms are the answer.
- Most of the machinery will not apply to you. Eight types exist because a research panel and a savings group want almost nothing in common. Expect to use a fraction of it.
- A price is only as good as its last reading. An on-chain read can lag, and an implausible jump gets flagged rather than hidden — but flagged is not fixed. Treat a low-confidence price as low-confidence.
The things people ask first
- What does a vault cost?
Nothing. Creating a vault is free and running one is free. You still pay network gas on your own deposits and withdrawals, and any protocol you put the money into charges its own fees.
- Who holds the money?
The vault's smart contract. Each member signs their own deposit from their own wallet, and Fexr never holds a key — so nobody here can move your stake. How that is enforced.
- How many people do I need?
Two is enough. The number that matters is the approval threshold — how many yeses a decision needs — which you set anywhere from 1 to 10 when you create the vault.
- Do I need to write code or register a company?
No. A vault is created from the app, and it is not a legal entity. If you need one wrapped in a company structure, that is a conversation for our team.
- Can I get my money out?
That depends on the strategy picked when the vault was created. A plain shared pool does not lock funds. A position in a lending or staking protocol follows that protocol's rules, and neither Fexr nor the group can override them.
- How is this different from a multisig?
A multisig moves money once enough people sign, and knows nothing about what was decided or why. A vault holds the money and the decision in the same contract, so a passed vote pays out without anyone going to sign a transfer afterwards.
Open one and see
Creating a vault is free and takes a few minutes. Start with two people and a shared pool, and turn on the rest — approval thresholds, roles, hired agents — when the group actually needs it.
- Vault Safety — what stops anyone, including us, moving your money
- Agents — the work a vault can hire
- Market Signals — what a vault's output can be worth
- Copy Strategies — following a vault that publishes one
- Teams & Funds — vaults run at institutional size