Before you put anything in
Plain answers, including the ones about what can go wrong.
Your money
In the vault contract, supplied to a Morpho lending vault, until each buy comes due. The stock it buys goes straight to your wallet. The vault never holds it, so nothing that happens to this protocol can strand your shares.
Only you can stop a plan and take back what has not been spent. The keeper can only send a buy that is already due, and the stock from it goes to your wallet. The admin can pause new deposits and switch a route off at once, and can add a route, loosen the price limit or change a price feed only after 48 hours in public. Nobody can move your deposit somewhere else, and the contracts cannot be upgraded.
They are tokens issued on Base that are built to follow the price of the stock. They are not shares registered in your name with a broker, and DCA Vault is not their issuer. What a token entitles you to is set by its issuer's terms, so read those before you buy.
Risk
The lending position can lose value, in which case you get back less than you put in, and the contract pays out what is actually there and never pretends otherwise. A tokenised stock can be paused or blocklisted by its issuer, which makes that buy revert rather than half-complete. And there is no audit yet, which is why the vault launches with a $5,000 cap.
Not by an outside firm yet. The contracts went through four rounds of internal testing, and the reports are public. Until an outside review is done, the vault refuses deposits past $5,000 in total.
The buy waits. If Chainlink's price for the stock is stale, which is normal when the stock market is closed, the vault refuses to trade rather than trade blind. Your waiting money keeps earning, and the buy goes through once the price updates.
Stopping
Yes, and there is no fee or notice period. Whatever has not been invested comes back to your wallet along with the interest it earned. The shares already bought are yours and stay put.
All of the USDC that has not been spent yet, plus the interest it earned that has not been spent. The stock from earlier buys is already in your wallet and stays there. If the lending market is fully lent out at that moment, the stop has to wait until it can pay.
Cost
Nothing at launch. The fee is 0% and it is charged on interest only, never on your deposit, so the worst case is that you keep exactly what you put in, plus whatever the stock did.
You pay gas for the transactions you sign: approving USDC, starting the plan and, if you choose to, stopping it. The keeper sends each scheduled buy and pays that gas itself.
Still unsure about something? Write to hello@dcavault.xyz.