How it works

A SAM vault turns a deposit into a share token whose value grows as the underlying pool earns. Here is the full lifecycle, end to end.

1. Deposit → shares

You send SUI (or USDC) to the vault. SAM:

1. takes the deposit fee (currently 0),
2. adds the net amount to the vault pool,
3. mints you shares at the current share price.

If you are the very first depositor, you get shares 1:1 with your deposit. Otherwise you get a proportional slice of the pool. See Shares and the exchange rate.

2. Deploy → put the money to work

A deposit lands as idle liquidity. In the same transaction (or on the next rebalance), SAM deploys the surplus across the lending protocols, keeping a small idle buffer back for instant withdrawals. How much goes where is decided by each protocol’s measured yield. See Rebalancing.

3. Earn → the share price rises

Deployed funds accrue interest in the underlying protocols, and some protocols also pay bonus reward tokens (like sSUI, BLUE, DEEP, vSUI). SAM:

• measures each protocol’s realized interest on-chain (no oracle, see How yield is measured), and
• harvests reward tokens and swaps them back into the vault’s coin, compounding them in (see Reward harvesting).

All of this increases total_coin_in without minting new shares, so the price of every share goes up. There may also be an incentive stream vesting in over time, which lifts the price the same way.

4. Rebalance → chase the best yield

Anyone can trigger a rebalance, it is permissionless and the allocation is computed entirely on-chain, so no one decides the split by hand. The rebalancer:

• harvests yield and rewards from every protocol,
• recomputes each protocol’s target allocation from its learned yield (higher yield → more capital, up to a per-protocol cap), and
• moves liquidity toward those targets, refilling the idle buffer if it ran low.

When a protocol starts paying more (for example after a reward harvest lifts its measured yield), the next rebalance routes more of the pool into it. See Rebalancing.

5. Withdraw → redeem any time

You burn samSUI/samUSDC and receive the underlying back at the current share price, minus the withdraw fee (currently 0.01%). SAM serves your redemption from the idle buffer first, then pulls the rest from the protocols. The vault is designed to stay fully redeemable down to the last unit. See Withdrawals.

The pieces of a vault

Piece	What it is
Pool	The single balance of the underlying coin, split into idle + deployed.
total_coin_in	The tracked total value of the pool. Share price = total_coin_in / shares.
Shares	Your samSUI / samUSDC. A claim on a pro-rata slice of the pool.
Idle buffer	A fraction kept liquid (default 5%) so withdrawals are instant.
Adapters	The connectors that deploy into and read yield from Scallop, Suilend, NAVI.
Learned APR	Each protocol’s realized yield, measured on-chain, used to weight allocations.