Overview

The Yield Engine is the part of the Zirodelta Financial Engine that earns. It runs a delta-neutral, market-neutral strategy that captures funding payments on Hyperliquid, and the income it produces is what funds the rewards you are paid in wzdUSD for holding ZDLT. It never holds your funds.

What it does

A delta-neutral trade has two legs, opened at the same size at the same time:

1. A short perpetual futures position

2. A long spot position in the same asset

If price moves up, the short perp loses and the spot gains. If price moves down, the reverse. The two legs cancel, so there is no bet on price direction. What is left is the funding payment: every hour, in a positive-funding market, the long side pays the short side. That funding, captured market-neutrally, is the source of the yield.

The Yield Engine opens both legs at the right sizes, monitors them, rebalances as they drift, and closes them cleanly. There is no order book for you to watch.

Proving phase

The Yield Engine is real, but it is not open to user funds yet. It is being proven on the founder's own roughly $10k on a public address, so the track record is built in the open before anyone else is at risk. It opens to users only after an independent security audit and a legal review.

The yield is variable and can be low or even zero. Delta-neutral removes the price bet, not every risk: funding can turn negative, and fees can eat into the return.

Non-custodial by construction

You never hand your funds to a person. You deposit USDC into the vault and hold wzdUSD, your market-priced share of the pool, in your own wallet. The Yield Engine then runs one delta-neutral position for the whole pool, not a separate one per user.

The key that can move funds out of the pool's Hyperliquid account is held off-server. To run the strategy, the server signs with a trade-only key whose authority is capped by Hyperliquid itself: it can place, cancel, and close the pool's orders, and the protocol rejects any withdraw or transfer signed by it. So the worst a full server compromise can do is trade the pool badly, never move a dollar off it, and never touch your own wallet. See Custody.

One engine of several

Zirodelta builds programmable personal balance sheets. The platform behind that is the Zirodelta Financial Engine: the Yield Engine (this page) plus the Credit, Conversion, Settlement, and Treasury Engines, the Referral Graph, and Fiat Rails, rolling out in stages. The Yield Engine is the one being proven in public first, and Zidee is the wallet that puts it in your hands.

Read next

• Custody: the trust boundary, and exactly what the Yield Engine can and cannot do with the pool.

• Delta-Neutral Explained: the mechanics, the real risks, and what "no liquidation from price" actually means.

• wzdUSD: the dollar the Yield Engine's income is paid out in.