A traditional fund's mandate is a document its manager promises to follow. Enzyme's is a set of policy contracts the manager cannot exceed — allowed assets, permitted protocols, leverage limits, redemption terms — enforced at execution rather than reviewed after the fact.
Why enforcement changes the product
Style drift and mandate breach are ordinary occurrences in traditional funds, discovered in reporting after the loss. Here they are impossible: an attempt to trade a disallowed asset simply fails. For an investor, that means the risk you assessed at deposit is the risk you are actually running, which is a stronger guarantee than anything the traditional industry provides.
What is not guaranteed
Performance. Managers on Enzyme are individuals and firms with the usual distribution of skill, and many vaults underperform simply holding the underlying assets. Choose the vault as carefully as you would choose a fund — the protocol's rigour says nothing about the strategy's quality.
Costs and practicality
Fees are set per vault by the manager, plus gas costs that make small deposits uneconomic on Ethereum mainnet. Deployments on cheaper chains improve that.
Record
Eight years in production with no protocol-level exploit, and a codebase that has been through multiple major versions and audits.
Who should use it
Investors wanting managed exposure with enforceable constraints and full transparency, and managers wanting to run a strategy without a fund administrator. Not a source of passive yield — it is a fund platform.