SIP2.23: Add Gearbox USDC Pool ARK to Lazy Summer USDC Higher-Risk Vault
Tags: ark-onboarding, sip2, usdc, mainnet Submission Date: 1 August 2025 Author: @desnakeee.eth (on behalf of Invariant Group)
Summary
Proposal to onboard the InvariantGearbox USDC lending pool—collateralized with Falcon Finance yield-bearing assets (sUSDf, PT sUSDf, Convex‑staked USDf/USDC)—into Summer.fi’s USDC Mainnet Higher-Risk vault as a new ARK strategy.
Invariant Group is a DeFi-native liquid fund focused on curated exposure to structured credit, leveraged markets and liquidity provisioning. With a background in active governance, protocol engagement, and strategic capital deployment, Invariant brings an agile, research-driven approach to capital allocation. The fund leverages deep onchain participation and hands-on protocol experience to contribute meaningfully to the growth and resilience of DeFi primitives like Gearbox.
Motivation
Adding unique yield exposure: In addition to widely used yield sources Gearbox collateralizes unique tokens like Convex-staked positions.
Diversifying protocol exposure: Gearbox is not yet present in Higher-risk vault.
Thanks for the proposal and welcome @desnakeee.eth! I am in support of adding this strategy into USDC HR on mainnet, as we do not have Gearbox strategy present in this Fleet. Morpho, Silo, and Sky is integrated and in use, earning between 6-9%.
The proposed Gearbox Invariant USDC strategy is earning 5% with additional incentives. One question that I keep raising for all new strategies proposed is: Is there a withdrawal queue?
This is very important to understand, in the light of recent liquidity crunch on some of the strategies - leading to longer withdrawals (lower instant liquidity) from Lazy Summer Protocol vaults.
There is no withdrawal queue mechanism in Gearbox, since it’s a simple supply-side lending pool. As long as there’s unborrowed liquidity, users can withdraw at any time.
Moreover, Gearbox includes a safeguard to support buffer for immediate withdrawals: borrowing is disabled once utilization reaches a certain threshold. In this particular pool, no new borrowing is allowed when utilization is 90% or higher.
However, like in any lending market, there may be situations where withdrawals become temporarily unavailable. For example, if utilization is exactly 90% and a large lender withdraws their full position, this could push utilization to 100%, leaving no liquidity for others to withdraw.
In such cases, the interest rate sharply increases, forcing borrowers to repay their debt and restore available liquidity. Until that happens, withdrawals will remain blocked.
The strategy seems a bit complex but this looks like a solid addition. Diversifying higher-risk vaults with a trusted protocol like Gearbox, makes sense.
Would be happy to explain more about it.
For example 55% of the vault is currently allocated to Gauntlet frontier vault which is allocated to AA_FalconXUSDC of Pareto.credit and yUSD of Yield.fi which are much more complex collaterals in my perception.
And collaterals in Gearbox have exposure to Pendle, Convex and Curve which are solid defi protocols and Falcon which is the riskiest part of it.
All the other aspects are very similar, as Gearbox is simply a lending protocol under the hood, much like Morpho.
We have used our quantitative risk model to compute initial parameters for the Invariant Gearbox USDC Ark in the Higher Risk Fleet Mainnet USDC. Following assessment and internal reviews, we propose the following initial parameters:
Ark
Symbol/Vault
maxCap
Max. %TVL
maxInflow
maxOutflow
gearbox
inv-USDC
9,500,000
40.0%
4,000,000
8,000,000
This Fleet has a cooldown period of 10 minutes, which affects all Arks. These parameters may change as the markets evolve.