The edge wasn’t luck.

It was disciplined automation: notional-weighted slippage held well below contemporaneous quoted spreads, preserving carry and basis capture while the Concrete router rebuilt hedges across multiple venues in real time.

This wasn’t a discretionary trade; it was mature execution infrastructure doing its job.

What ctYieldUSDC demonstrated under stress is the same execution logic that powers every Concrete strategy: battle-tested failovers, automated margin and trade routing, and quant-driven risk supervision built to operate through market chaos.

1. The Event in Brief

A marketwide shock on October 10 -11 triggered roughly $19 billion in single-day liquidations.

Hyperliquid escalated to full Auto-Deleveraging (ADL) – a venue-solvency mechanism that can reduce profitable positions when bankrupt losses and insurance capacity are insufficient.

(See: CoinDesk Market Spotlight: The $19 Billion Liquidation That Shook Crypto)

2. Why a Winning Short Can Be Force-Closed

Auto-Deleveraging protects the venue, not the trader.

When counterparties default, the venue trims profitable shorts ranked by unrealized PnL and leverage to fill losses. Even when a hedge is correct in direction, ADL can forcibly close it.

(See: Bitget ADL overview)

3. The Strategy: ctYieldUSDC

ctYieldUSDC is a delta-neutral yield strategy deployed through Concrete’s Earn Vaults. It combines institutional execution standards with battle-tested strategies:

-- Delta neutrality first. Active hedges remove crypto directional beta.

-- Diversified yield engines. Funding arbitrage, lending spreads, structured premia, and market-making income, each capacity-managed and risk-rated.

-- Automated, multi-venue hedging router. Deterministic fallbacks, pre-funded margins, and hard thresholds for under-hedged windows.

4. What Happened During the Cascade

When Hyperliquid’s ADL clipped our short, the vault was briefly under-hedged.

Recovery was instant: the Concrete hedging router detected the imbalance, staged passive quotes, escalated execution only when delta thresholds tripped, and rebalanced across two venues using pre-funded margin.

Longest gap closed in 29 minutes

Other ADL spikes cleared significantly faster

Notional-weighted slippage stayed inside the contemporaneous spread

The per-minute % unhedged trace from 20:30–04:00 UTC confirms the vault’s autonomous response across failure events – a real-time demonstration of the system’s resilience.

This is what the vault architecture was built for: delta-neutral positions that survive and thrive through venue-level solvency stress.

5. How the System Handled It

Failover & Telemetry - Continuous monitoring of top-of-book depth, spread z-scores, ADL indicators, and latency risk ensured early detection.

Pre-Funded Margin - Concrete maintains margin buffers across venues, enabling immediate rerouting without human approval or transfers.

Cost–Reward Balancing - Each routing decision weighed waiting (passive order, lower cost, longer hedge gap) vs. crossing now (higher explicit cost, lower tail risk).

Staged Execution - Orders escalated from passive to aggressive based on delta and time thresholds. Re-routes occurred automatically when liquidity conditions changed.

Outcome - deterministic escalation + venue failover = longest rebuild 29 min; realized slippage stayed inside the tape.

6. Execution Quality: The Numbers

All slippage measured versus the simultaneous quoted spread on SOL–USDC perps:

During stress, venue-level quoted curves widen (peaking ≈ 170–200 bps), while the 10-minute notional-weighted execution line remains contained within those moving curves. Across the window, we printed ≈ 0.51 × spread, notional-weighted slippage, with ≈ 60 % of notional inside the half-spread and a slightly price-improving median.

Time-stamped fills per venue illustrate the passive-first stance, threshold-based aggression, and re-routing during ADL windows (shaded), matching the inflections in Figure 1 and explaining why the execution line in Figure 2 stays disciplined relative to the tape.

7. Why It Matters Beyond This Strategy

What unfolded in ctYieldUSDC wasn’t unique logic – it was the same automation layer that runs across all Concrete strategies.

The Earn V2 architecture introduces role-based automation and independent accounting systems, ensuring every vault, whether focused on restaking, stablecoin carry, or market-neutral yield, operates with identical execution discipline.

Each vault inherits:

-- Automated accounting and real-time position reconciliation, enabling accurate share pricing and composability.

-- Quantitative telemetry and supervision built from Concrete’s Quantitative Framework, continuously assessing volatility, correlation, and risk exposure.

-- Modular strategy management, allowing allocators to access institutional-grade systems through a single deposit.

The result: performance consistency across all strategies. The automation that rebuilt a hedge in 29 minutes on October 10 is the same logic that processes allocations, rebalances liquidity, and enforces risk thresholds every day across the Concrete ecosystem.

8. Allocator Takeaway

-- Exclusive access: ctYieldUSDC runs solely within Concrete, ensuring consistent infrastructure, risk monitoring, and audited reporting.

-- Proof of design: The Oct 10–11 event validated the system’s failover and slippage logic in live market stress.

-- Automation as alpha: Deterministic execution replaced human reaction – vault systems rebalanced faster than manual traders could click.

-- Operational maturity as yield: Under the worst liquidity of the quarter, the strategy rebuilt exposure and printed inside the spread.

This is the foundation every Concrete vault is built on – execution-grade automation turned into allocatable yield.

‍