Vault share token. The token you receive when you deposit. It represents your share of the vault's Net Asset Value.
NAV (Net Asset Value). The total value of the vault's assets minus its liabilities. Your vault share tokens are worth your share of the NAV.
Curator. The professional party that executes the vault's strategy within the Risk Committee's framework: selecting deals, deploying capital, managing the book, and verifying each NAV update.
Risk Committee. The financing vehicle's governance body. It sets the risk framework the vault runs on, covering eligible exposures, advance rates, concentration limits, and collateral rules, and adjusts it as the book grows. The Curator executes within this framework and cannot change it.
DWR (Digital Warehouse Receipt). A tokenized record of physical commodity inventory, showing title, quality, location, and release terms. Issued on the IOTA network through the Salus platform.
Glass Box. Trade Dollar's transparency model. Every asset, trade, and NAV update can be verified on-chain.
Non-credit model. Financing goods rather than lending to borrowers. A financing vehicle holds legal title to the goods on the vault's behalf, so recovery runs through the goods and insurance, not a borrower's solvency. The receivables variant works the same way but is secured by an assigned receivable.
Financing vehicle. The special purpose vehicle that holds legal title to the goods, or the assigned receivable, on the vault's behalf. It is the custodian of the vault's assets, the named loss payee on cargo insurance, and the insured on trade-credit cover.
Custodian. The role the financing vehicle plays: holding legal title to the vault's assets, because a smart contract cannot hold title itself. Distinct from the physical custody and monitoring of the goods, which Salus runs.
LTV (Loan-to-Value). How much the vault advances against the value of the goods. A conservative, lower LTV leaves a buffer against price moves.
Haircut. The other side of the LTV: the gap between what the goods are worth and what the vault advances. A 20% haircut means an 80% LTV.
Margin call. A demand for more collateral or partial repayment, triggered when a deal's effective loan-to-value breaches its thresholds. An uncured margin call becomes an event of default.
Repurchase obligation. A supplier's contractual commitment, used in some deal structures, to buy the inventory back at a pre-agreed price. In the standard flow the vault's return is realized when the pre-contracted end buyer pays for the goods; a repurchase obligation is an additional exit where a structure carries one.
Controlled settlement account. The account where the end buyer's payment lands before the financing is repaid. Proceeds repay the financing first, so repayment does not route through the supplier.
FIFO queue. First-in, first-out. Withdrawal requests are paid in the order they are received.
Liquid buffer. The part of the vault held in stablecoin reserves and short-term on-chain positions, ready to pay withdrawals.
Utilization. The share of vault capital deployed in live deals rather than sitting in the buffer. Higher utilization means more capital earning, and less idle.
Performance fee. The single fee Trade Dollar charges: a share of realized yield, taken when trades settle, split between Trade Dollar and the Curator. If the vault earns nothing, no fee is taken.
Timelock. A built-in delay between announcing a critical change and the change taking effect, so LPs can see it coming and act first.
ERC-4626. The Ethereum standard for tokenized vaults. It defines a common interface for yield-bearing vaults.
ERC-7540. The Ethereum standard for asynchronous vault flows, built as an extension of ERC-4626. Trade Dollar's withdrawal queue uses its request-based redemptions: you request, the request is fulfilled from the queue, and pricing happens at fulfillment.
Stablecoin depeg. A stablecoin trading away from its intended value (its peg). One of the stablecoin risks carried by idle balances; see Risks.
Secondary-market price. What the share token trades for off-vault, where it trades at all. It can sit above or below NAV; the vault itself always prices deposits and withdrawals at NAV.
Loss payee. The party named to receive an insurance payout. For each trade, the financing vehicle that holds title to the goods is the named loss payee, so payouts flow to that vehicle and through it to the vault.
Originator. An established trade finance company that sources deals and brings the trade documents on-chain.
SPV (special purpose vehicle). A company created for a single defined purpose. Trade Dollar's financing vehicle is an SPV: it holds legal title to the goods or receivables on the vault's behalf, and does nothing else.