Fees and risks
What DLTX charges, what the protocols charge, and the ways a delta-neutral strategy can lose money.
DLTX's fees
| Fee | Amount | When |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 30% of the funding a strategy collects, in USDC | Zero for a period whose net result is negative. |
| Hyperliquid builder fee | 0.01% of the orders DLTX places at open and close; 0.10% on rebalancing | On the orders DLTX places for your strategy. |
| Subscription | None | — |
| Withdrawal | None | A fee can only ever be taken from a withdrawal you sign, up to the maximum you signed. |
What the protocols charge
These are not DLTX's fees. They are what the markets and networks your strategy uses charge, and they come out of the strategy:
- Aave. Interest on the USDC the long contract borrows, at Aave's variable rate. (The WETH it supplies earns Aave's supply rate.) Repaying with collateral pays Aave's flash-loan premium.
- Hyperliquid. Trading fees on the short's orders, and funding, which the short usually receives and sometimes pays.
- Uniswap. The long contract swaps in one pool, WETH/USDC at a 0.05% fee, plus the price impact of the trade. Every swap is refused if it is priced worse than Aave's oracle by more than the price bound.
- Circle. A fee for moving USDC between chains. Converting a deposit to Arbitrum is refused above 0.1%. A fast transfer between the two halves of a strategy is capped at 0.5%; Circle's own fee for it was about 0.014% in October 2026, and its standard transfer, slower, cost nothing.
- Gas. Network fees for the transactions on Arbitrum, HyperEVM and the deposit chains. The short contract buys a little HYPE for itself to move its USDC on Hyperliquid.
The risks of the strategy
Delta-neutral does not mean risk-free. It means the price of the asset is not the risk. These are the ways the strategy itself loses money, however its money is held.
| Risk | What happens | What DLTX does | What remains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funding turns negative | The short pays funding instead of receiving it, while the long still pays to borrow. The carry goes negative. | Watches net carry continuously and flags a position the moment it crosses zero. | A market can turn faster than a position unwinds, and unwinding costs money too. |
| The short is liquidated | The price rises past the short's margin. The hedge closes at a loss and the position is no longer neutral. | Keeps a minimum distance to liquidation, set when the strategy is built, and acts when the distance narrows. | A gap or a wick can cross the distance between two readings. Nothing outside the exchange can prevent that. |
| The long is liquidated | The price falls far enough that Aave liquidates part of the collateral, with a penalty. | Keeps the long's distance to liquidation inside a band, and repays debt when it narrows, with the long's own collateral in one transaction if needed. | The same as above: a fast enough move can outrun any response. |
| Borrowing gets expensive | Demand for USDC on Aave rises, and borrowing costs more than funding pays. | Counts borrowing costs against carry continuously, not at close. | Rates can move faster than a rebalance. |
| Slippage on the way out | Closing both legs in a stressed market moves the price against you. | Sizes positions against the depth of their markets, and bounds every price by an oracle. | Depth when the position was built is not depth during a crash. |
| A protocol fails | Aave, Hyperliquid or Circle stops working, or works against its specification. USDC itself can be frozen by Circle. | Uses a small set of established protocols, each pinned in the contracts' code. | This cannot be engineered away from outside the protocol. It can only be sized around. |
Leverage does not multiply these the way it would for a directional bet, because a price move is not a loss. What leverage amplifies is narrower and still real: the cost of negative funding, the cost of trading, and the cost of any period in which DLTX cannot rebalance.
The risks of the contracts
Next · not live These apply once the strategy contracts and deposit contracts are deployed.
| Risk | What happens | What limits it | What remains |
|---|---|---|---|
| The bridge between the halves is slow or stuck | USDC in flight between Arbitrum and Hyperliquid does not arrive, so margin cannot move from the leg that gained to the leg that lost. | Each leg keeps a local reserve sized for a slow transfer, and can protect itself without the bridge: repay on Aave, reduce the short. A strategy whose reserves cannot cover that is refused at creation. | A bridge halted longer than the reserves were sized for leaves DLTX able to shrink the position, not to re-margin it. |
| A DLTX key is stolen | The thief can call what the key can call. | Every destination is fixed in the contracts, and every action is bounded: the health floor, the price bound, the daily loss budget, the order bound. You can revoke the key. | Inside the bounds, a thief can still trade badly: pay the maximum slippage and the daily budget until stopped. Never a withdrawal, but a bad position still costs money. |
| DLTX stops | No one manages the position. | The escape hatch: after 7 days without a check-in, anyone can unwind your strategy to your withdrawal address. | A leveraged position left alone for 7 days can be liquidated first; the hatch returns what is left. |
| A bug in the contracts | The contracts do something their specification does not. | Tests against the live protocols, and an external audit before any user's money. | An audit is evidence, not proof. |
For every failure mode DLTX has written down, including those of later products, see whitepaper section 12.