The LJT staking vault, and where its yield comes from
Vault yield is the house edge flowing back to holders. That also means it can be negative in a bad week.
Any staking product that will not tell you where the yield comes from is telling you something. So: the LJT vault distributes the game's margin to depositors. That is the whole mechanism, and the rest of this post is about what follows from it.
The vault is the counterparty
When you place a prediction, something has to be on the other side of it. That something is the vault. Winning rounds are paid out of it, losing rounds flow into it, and over enough rounds the difference is the house edge.
Depositing LJT into the vault means taking that position. You are not lending to a borrower and you are not being paid from new deposits — you are the counterparty to the game, and your return is whatever the game's margin actually produces over the period you are in it.
What that implies
The yield is variable and can be negative. The edge is a statement about a large number of rounds. Over a short window with few rounds and a lucky player, the vault can pay out more than it takes in, and depositors carry that. Anyone quoting a fixed APR on a mechanism like this is quoting a hope, not a rate.
It scales with volume, not with deposits. More rounds played means more margin flowing in. More capital deposited means the same margin split more ways. Depositing during quiet weeks does not create yield; it dilutes it.
Deposit size affects capacity. A vault has to be able to pay the largest possible win. That constraint is why maximum bet sizes exist and why they relate to vault depth rather than being an arbitrary product decision.
Why it is on-chain
The distribution is executed by the contract, not by us. That matters for a specific reason: it means the share reaching depositors is not a number we publish and could quietly revise. It is a number you can read, and a number that would require a visible transaction to change.
The exact parameters — the split, any lockup, and the current vault balance — are readable in the deployed contract on BaseScan, linked from the sidebar of every post here. We would rather point you at the source than restate figures in a blog post that will drift out of date the first time anything changes.
The uncomfortable part
Holding a token whose yield derives from a game's margin means your return is correlated with people losing money on that game. That is what the mechanism is. It is not hidden in the contract and it should not be hidden in the marketing either.
If that trade is not one you want, the vault is not for you, and that is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to reach. What we can promise is that the mechanism is legible: no part of it depends on trusting a number we told you.