Funding your vault

Engine trades from a Hyperliquid vault you fund directly. This page walks through getting USDC into the vault, what to know about the network, and how to withdraw.

Step 1: Connect a wallet

When you sign in to Engine, you'll connect a wallet through Privy. You can use:

• An existing self-custodial wallet (MetaMask, Rabby, hardware wallet).
• An email- or social-login flow that Privy provisions a wallet for.

Either works. The wallet is yours; we don't have access to its keys. If you're trading meaningful size, use a hardware wallet.

Step 2: Deposit USDC to Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid runs on its own L1, and accepts USDC bridged from Arbitrum. The standard path:

1. From your wallet on Arbitrum, send USDC to your Hyperliquid deposit address (Engine surfaces this address from Hyperliquid; we don't generate it).
2. Wait for the bridge to credit the deposit. Typically a minute or two.
3. The deposit shows up in your Hyperliquid vault and, in turn, in your Engine dashboard.

If you're starting from another chain or from fiat, you'll bridge or off-ramp to Arbitrum USDC first. Hyperliquid's docs cover the supported on-ramps.

The minimum

Engine has a $500 USDC soft minimum. The agent will accept smaller deposits, but with less than ~$500 in the vault, position sizing rounds to fractions that don't fill cleanly on Hyperliquid, and the strategy's daily-loss caps and conviction sizing won't have enough headroom to do their job. You'll also pay a meaningfully higher percentage in fees on tiny positions. The minimum is a guideline, not a wall.

Step 3: (Optional) Top up

You can deposit more at any time. The agent picks up the new balance on the next tick, and your strategy's risk math automatically scales: 5% NAV is computed from current NAV, not from your initial deposit.

Withdrawing

Withdrawals happen at Hyperliquid, not at Engine. Engine never holds your funds; we never have a "withdraw" button that does anything we couldn't already do via the vault.

To withdraw:

1. Open the dashboard, click Pause to stop the agent from opening new positions while you're moving funds. (Optional, but recommended; the agent will otherwise keep sizing against the older NAV until the next tick.)
2. Go to your Hyperliquid vault and initiate a withdrawal back to your wallet. You can do this through Hyperliquid's UI or directly through any Hyperliquid-aware wallet flow.
3. The withdrawal lands on Arbitrum after Hyperliquid's standard withdrawal window.

Open positions are not closed by a withdrawal request; withdrawals come from your free margin. If you need to close positions to free margin, do that first (manually at Hyperliquid, or by revoking the strategy in Engine if you want the agent to stop sizing and you'll handle the closes yourself).

Common gotchas

• Network and gas. You'll need a small amount of ETH on Arbitrum to pay gas for the deposit transaction. Hyperliquid itself is gas-efficient once you're on the L1, but the bridge step is on Arbitrum.
• Geographic restrictions. Hyperliquid restricts certain perp products to non-U.S. persons, and Engine restricts access from sanctioned jurisdictions. Both restrictions apply at deposit time. If you're in a restricted location, Hyperliquid will block the bridge before Engine ever sees the funds.
• VPN use. Don't try to circumvent geographic restrictions with a VPN. Hyperliquid and Engine both enforce these as a matter of policy and law; using a VPN to evade them violates our Terms and may put your funds at risk if the venue freezes the account.
• Wallet security. Your private keys are the single most important thing in this whole system. We will never ask for them. No support flow we run will ever require your seed phrase. If anyone claiming to be Engine asks, they aren't.

Where to next

Once you have funds in the vault, head to Selecting a strategy to attach a strategy and bring the agent online.