Earn Under the Hood#

When you deposit into Hightop Earn, your money does not sit in one place. Behind the scenes, AI agents continuously monitor yield opportunities across approved protocols and route your funds toward the best risk-adjusted returns — all within onchain rules they cannot break.

Hightop Earn is powered by two types of vaults: Core Vaults for passive, AI-managed yield, and Amplified Vaults for higher yield through managed leverage. Both are built by the Hightop team, and both use the same onchain control model you see everywhere else in Hightop.

	Core Vaults	Amplified Vaults
Hightop Earn default	Yes — the standard Earn path	Available as an opt-in, starting with BTC and USD
Return profile	Passive AI-managed yield	Core yield plus a second USD-based yield layer through borrowing
Borrowing inside the strategy	No	Yes, via Ripe Protocol
Debt exposure	None	Managed debt with automatic deleveraging
Collateral use	Optional — you can use shares as collateral yourself	Built into the vault strategy
Best for	Users who want passive yield with no complexity	Users who want higher yield and are comfortable with managed leverage

Why Vaults#

The simplest way to earn yield would be for Hightop to optimize each user's wallet individually — monitor rates, move funds, claim rewards, repeat. That works for a few users. At scale, it breaks down. If the same strategy benefits 10,000 users, that is 10,000 separate transactions doing the same work.

Vaults solve this. Users deposit into a shared vault and receive tokens representing their share. The AI agent optimizes the vault once, and everyone benefits. One rebalance, one reward claim, one set of transactions — scaled to any number of depositors.

This is the same architecture that powers Hightop's live Earn experience today.

Core Vaults#

Core Vaults are the default way Hightop users earn yield. You deposit a supported asset — USDC, ETH, or others — and receive vault shares in return. The AI agent handles everything else.

How it works:

You deposit an asset into the vault.
You receive vault shares — tokens that represent your proportional ownership of everything in the vault.
The agent continuously optimizes the vault's positions across approved yield protocols.
As the vault earns, the share price rises. Your fixed number of shares becomes worth more over time.
Withdraw anytime — the vault automatically unwinds positions as needed to return your assets.

There is no reward claiming, no manual compounding, no monitoring required. The vault share price reflects the vault's total performance. If the vault earns 2.5% over three months, your shares are worth 2.5% more when you redeem them.

What the AI Agent Actually Does#

The AI agents managing Core Vaults operate the same way any agent operates in Hightop — with bounded permissions enforced by onchain smart contracts. The agent is not a black box with unrestricted access. It is an agent on the vault, with a specific set of allowed actions and approved destinations.

What the agent can do:

Monitor continuously — watch rates, liquidity, incentives, and conditions across approved protocols like Morpho, Aave, Euler, Moonwell, Fluid, Compound, and others
Route based on risk, not just rate — evaluate depositor count, total deposits, utilization ratios, and available liquidity before moving capital, not just chase the highest APY
Rebalance automatically — move funds to capture better risk-adjusted yields as market conditions change
Harvest and compound rewards — claim protocol incentives and reinvest them back into the vault

What the agent cannot do:

Send payments or transfers — vaults have no payment capabilities. The agent cannot create recurring payments, one-off payments, or trusted transfers.
Deposit into unapproved protocols — the smart contract enforces an approved destination list
Move funds to arbitrary addresses — the vault's onchain rules restrict where capital can go
Exceed its configured boundaries — just like any Hightop agent, the vault's agent operates within limits it cannot widen

This is the same control model described in Why Onchain Enforcement Matters. The vault is a smart contract. The agent operates on that smart contract. The rules are enforced onchain by the vault's smart contracts, not by trust in the agent.

How Yield Gets Back to You#

Vault shares work through a simple mechanism:

The vault holds assets deployed across various yield protocols
As those positions earn yield, the total assets in the vault grow
Share price = total vault assets / total shares outstanding
Your shares represent a fixed proportion of the vault — as the vault grows, your shares are worth more

You do not need to claim anything. The yield is reflected automatically in your share price.

Performance fee: Vaults charge 20% on profits only — never on your principal. If the vault earns $1,000 in yield, $200 goes to the protocol and $800 is reflected in the share price for depositors.

Amplified Vaults#

Core Vault shares are standard tokens — which is what allows Amplified Vaults to use them as collateral and layer borrowing on top.

Amplified Vaults build on Core Vaults to deliver higher yield through managed leverage, with a key safety property: the borrowed funds always stay in dollar-denominated assets. The strategy is automated end to end by an AI agent — same control model, same onchain rules.

Amplified Vaults start with two variants. The live set and any new variants are rendered from vault data in the app.

BTC Amplified — you keep full BTC exposure. Your BTC goes into the BTC Core Vault for base yield, then the vault borrows stablecoins against it and earns a second layer of USD-based yield on top. Your risk is primarily BTC price movement — the leverage amplifies your yield while the borrowed leg stays in dollars.
USD Amplified — you start from dollar exposure. Your USDC goes into the USDC Core Vault, then the vault borrows against it and deploys the borrowed stablecoins into additional yield. Both sides of the position are dollar-denominated, so there is no volatile asset exposure.

How the Strategy Works#

The high-level structure is similar for both variants:

You deposit a base asset into the Amplified Vault.
The vault deposits your asset into the corresponding Core Vault, where it earns AI-optimized yield.
The vault uses those yield-bearing Core Vault shares as collateral on Ripe Protocol (the borrowing infrastructure covered in Borrowing Under the Hood).
The vault borrows a stablecoin against that collateral and deploys the borrowed funds into dollar-denominated yield — either by depositing into a Core Vault or holding a yield-bearing stablecoin, depending on market conditions.
Those additional yield-bearing shares are also added back to Ripe as collateral, further strengthening the overall debt position.

The result: your original asset earns yield, and the borrowed amount earns yield on top of it. The strategy works because the yield earned on the borrowed amount is greater than the cost of the debt. That spread — earn rate minus borrow rate — is the source of the amplified return.

Why Borrowed Funds Stay in Dollars#

This is the safety mechanism that makes Amplified Vaults different from traditional leveraged strategies.

The borrowed funds always stay in dollar-denominated assets. The vault cannot swap borrowed capital into BTC or other volatile assets. That means:

The debt does not amplify price losses. If your BTC collateral drops 40%, the borrowed USD portion still holds its value. Your risk exposure is primarily the price movement of your original deposit.
The position has multiple layers of backing. Because the borrowed USD is also deposited as collateral, you have two layers backing the debt: your original asset plus the borrowed stablecoins. A $100,000 BTC deposit with $70,000 borrowed means $170,000 in total collateral against $70,000 in debt — even after a significant price drop, the position can remain healthy.
No death spiral. Traditional leveraged positions borrow to buy more of the volatile asset, which cascades into liquidation when prices fall. Amplified Vaults avoid this by keeping the borrowed side in dollars.

What the AI Agent Does in Amplified Vaults#

The Amplified Vault agent manages both yield and risk:

Manages collateral — deposits assets into Core Vaults, then into Ripe Protocol
Handles borrowing — borrows against collateral and deploys the borrowed stablecoins into yield
Monitors debt ratios — watches the health of the position continuously
Auto-deleverages — if debt ratios approach configured limits, the agent reduces the position automatically
Handles withdrawals — when you redeem, the agent unwinds the leveraged position cleanly in a single transaction

Like the Core Vault agent, the Amplified Vault agent operates with onchain-enforced boundaries. It can manage collateral and debt within its configured limits, but it cannot exceed them, move funds to unapproved destinations, or take actions outside its permission set.

Approved Protocols Only#

Every vault can only deploy capital to pre-approved destinations — yield protocols, borrowing infrastructure, and stablecoin strategies that have been explicitly approved. This is not a policy decision that could be changed quietly — it is enforced by the vault's smart contract.

The approved destination list is managed through the protocol's onchain control layer. When a new destination is approved, vault strategies can route there. When it is removed, the agent can no longer use it. The approved destination list is onchain, verifiable, and cannot be overridden by the agent.

This means there are no rogue deposits into experimental or unvetted protocols. The agent optimizes within the boundaries. The boundaries are enforced by onchain smart contracts.

If You Want More Control#

The vaults are the default path — deposit and earn, no management required. But they are not the only way to earn yield in Hightop.

If you prefer to manage your own yield strategy, you can configure an agent on your own Hightop wallet with earn permissions restricted to specific protocols and assets. For example:

Allow yield deposits only into Morpho and Aave
Restrict to USDC only
Set spending and activity limits

This gives you the same onchain-enforced boundaries, but with your own agent executing the strategy you choose — rather than the vault's agent. You might do this if the vault's approved protocols include some you do not want exposure to, or if you want a more targeted approach.

The vaults and self-managed yield are not mutually exclusive. You can use both — keep some funds in a Core Vault for passive yield, and manage other funds directly through your own agent.

Vault Safety and Controls#

Beyond the approved destination list, vaults include additional safeguards:

Deposit caps — maximum total assets to prevent concentration risk
Emergency controls — vault operations can be paused through the protocol's control layer in extreme market conditions
Protected claims — even if a vault is paused, your shares still represent your proportional ownership of the vault's assets
Withdrawal safety — Amplified Vaults automatically unwind leverage positions cleanly during redemptions

These controls are enforced onchain by the vault smart contracts.

Earn Vaults are part of the Underscore Protocol, which the Hightop team also built. The full source code is available on GitHub.

Where to Go Next#

Wallet Model explains the smart contract wallet architecture that the vault model builds on.
Borrowing Under the Hood covers the Ripe Protocol infrastructure that powers Amplified Vaults.
Why Onchain Enforcement Matters explains the trust model behind onchain controls.
FAQ covers user-facing questions about Earn, risks, and supported assets.
Technical References for the full map of protocol repos, technical docs, and live params tools.