Selecting a strategy

A vault by itself doesn't trade. You need to attach a strategy: the bundle that tells the agent what to look for, how to size, what tools it may call, and how to manage risk. This page walks through doing that.

The three paths

You can attach a strategy in one of three ways:

1. Subscribe to a marketplace strategy. You ride the author's bundle: when they update it, you get the update on the next tick.
2. Fork a marketplace strategy. You get your own copy of the bundle that you can edit. Author updates don't affect you unless you pull them in.
3. Write your own from a blank bundle. Covered in Building your own.

Subscribing is the easiest start. Forking is the right move once you have an opinion. Writing from scratch is for when you have a real edge you want to encode.

Browsing the marketplace

The marketplace lives at /marketplace and inside the dashboard. Each card shows:

• The strategy name and author handle. Authors are anonymous-by-default; only their handle and a verification badge are shown.
• A short description. What the strategy is doing, in one sentence.
• 30-day P&L and max drawdown of the published version, computed across all subscribers' actual fills (not a backtest).
• A "verified" badge if Engine has reviewed the strategy for malicious patterns (sanctions evasion, market manipulation, wash trading). Verified is a safety check, not an endorsement. Engine doesn't recommend any specific strategy.

Click a card to inspect the public strategy bundle and recent decision history in production. Secret values for tools and data sources are never shown.

Forking vs. subscribing

	Subscribe	Fork
Ownership	Author owns the bundle	You own a copy
Updates	Auto-applied on next tick	Manual pull, optional
Edits	Can't edit	Can edit anything
Author payout	A share of your performance fees	None
Best for	Trying a strategy as designed	Tuning to your risk preference

Both options dry-run the same way and deploy the same way. The difference is who owns the bundle.

Dry-run before going live

Once you've picked a strategy, don't go live yet. Click Dry run in the strategy detail panel. The agent will:

1. Load the strategy.
2. Read the live market and the strategy's universe.
3. Generate decisions exactly as it would in production, but submit no orders.
4. Stream the decisions to the same decision log you'd see in production.

Let it run for at least one full trading session (several hours, ideally a full day if the strategy is meant to trade slowly). Watch what it decides. If it's taking trades you wouldn't take, the strategy and you aren't on the same page yet. Fork and adjust before going live.

Dry-run uses your real NAV for sizing math, so positions sizes shown are realistic.

Going live

When you're ready, toggle Live. Three things happen:

1. The agent submits an EIP-712 signing-scope grant to Hyperliquid (you'll approve in your wallet) authorizing trade-only actions on your vault.
2. The strategy switches from dry-run to active. The next decision the agent generates will be executed.
3. Live trading begins. The decision log keeps streaming, this time with real fills.

You can revert at any time. Toggling Live off pauses new orders. To fully end the agent's authority, click Revoke in settings.

Switching strategies

A vault runs one strategy at a time. To switch:

1. Pause the active strategy.
2. Decide what to do with open positions: close them manually at Hyperliquid, or leave them open for the new strategy to inherit (it will treat them as already-existing positions in its risk math, but won't necessarily trade them; most strategies only manage the positions they themselves opened).
3. Attach the new strategy and dry-run before going live.

We don't recommend switching strategies frequently. Strategies need at least a few weeks of live runtime before their performance numbers mean anything.

Where to next

Once a strategy is live, Monitoring your agent covers what to watch and how.