Yield Donating Strategy (YDS)
Purpose: Landing page and navigation hub for all YDS documentation, directing developers to appropriate starting points based on their goals.
Audience: All Solidity developers interested in Yield Donating Strategies, from those building their first YDS to experienced strategy authors.
Level: Beginner
Source of truth: The Octant v2 developer documentation structure and YDS section architecture.
Use this page when: You're new to YDS and need to find the right learning path; you want a quick reference to all YDS-related docs; you need guidance on whether to start with Hello World or dive into Introduction.
Do not use this page for: Implementation details of specific hooks; architectural explanations; lifecycle walkthroughs (see individual topic pages instead).
Yield Donating Strategies (YDS) are ERC-4626 vaults that deploy a single asset into an external yield source and route all realized profit to a configured on-chain address, the donation address. When burning is enabled, donation-address shares act as a first-loss buffer, but this is not a blanket principal guarantee. If losses exceed that buffer, or burning is disabled, price per share falls for holders.
Start here if you want to build
There are three YDS build paths in these docs. Use Hello World for your first working strategy, the Aave guide when you want a fuller starter-template integration, and Writing a YDS Strategy when you want the core-repo reference pattern behind the examples.
| I want to... | Start here | Then read... |
|---|---|---|
| build my first YDS quickly | Hello World Strategy | Introduction, Writing a YDS Strategy |
| understand the model before coding | Introduction | Architecture, Mental Model & Lifecycle |
| build an Aave-style starter-template strategy | How to Create a Yield Donating Strategy | Writing a YDS Strategy |
| compare tutorial code with the core-repo pattern | Writing a YDS Strategy | ERC4626Strategy, BaseStrategy |
| find the right reference page | Reading the Smart-Contract Reference | BaseStrategy, YieldDonatingTokenizedStrategy, BaseHealthCheck |
Pages in this section
- Introduction — what YDS is, the core model, key concepts, and lifecycle overview.
- Architecture — how YDS relates to Yearn V3, the immutable-proxy pattern, and the main design invariants.
- Mental Model & Lifecycle — lifecycle for direct-deposit strategies and multi-strategy vault integration, plus required overrides and optional hooks.
- Writing a YDS Strategy — deep-dive implementation using sDAI and sUSDS as real-world examples.