Liquidity Management evaluated across published return versus holding, rebalancing policy and trigger authority, fee stack read on chain, and manager audit and exploit record.
CH
#1 of 8 · published ranking
Charm Alpha Vaults
79ChainChoice Score
4199
Why it leads
Best in the pool on return versus hold disclosure (9/10; next 7/10)
Cost
Not priced· No published rate on this basis
No provider can pay for a position in this table. The code that computes this order cannot read which links earn us a commission, and every build proves it. Every score below rebuilds from the published criteria.Ranking 2026.08 · 4 criteria · 8 products · same inputs, same order
Personal comparison
What liquidity management cost you
Your inputs update the cost column. The independent ranking stays fixed.
The manager's cut of the swap fees your position earns — not a trade fee, and not a charge on the deposit. Expected yield is your assumption, not ours.
RankProviderBest fitScoreYour cost
1
CHCharm Alpha VaultsConcentrated-liquidity vaults using a b...Top ranked
Published return versus holding — 9/10Trade-off: The vault Charm uses as the worked example of its versus-hold chart is dead, and the...
Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure
Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.
2 more assessed and ranked below — none of them hidden for commercial reasons.
Ranking blindCommercial terms excludedDated primary sourcesCrypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.
Ranked on 4 published criteria weighted 40/20/20/20, which set goal alignment — 30 of the 86 points. The rest: regional access 20, evidence depth 18, ease of use 10, institutional trust 8. Profile match is shown in breakdowns but carries no weight.
Audit
Infrastructure
Methodology
2026.09.15
published 2026-09-16
Providers tracked
980+
across 119 categories
Last verified
2026-08-11
newest dated pricing or sentiment read
Named on the roster
2 people
managing directors · 6 automated processes
Decision guide
What matters most before choosing in this category
A concentrated-liquidity manager has exactly one job you cannot do more cheaply yourself: beat holding the two tokens. Almost none of them will tell you whether they did. Gamma is the clearest case, because it built that number and then switched it off — its averageReturns feed still carries the four av_imp_vs_hodl fields for 91 vaults across seven periods, and all 2,548 of those slots are null, while the two endpoints that once served the figure now answer "This endpoint is no longer valid." What you are shown instead is a fee APR, fees divided by TVL, a quantity that cannot go negative however much the position lost. That gap matters because every performance fee here is levied on gross swap fees rather than on your net result: Charm at 1% protocol plus up to 20% manager, Kodiak at a published 10% and a deployed 99%, ICHI at 10%, Beefy at 9.5%, Steer at 15% — so in any period where impermanent loss exceeded fee income, the manager was paid in full and the depositor finished behind holding. Start with the two managers who let you check: Kamino publishes an hourly series you can rebuild the comparison from, and Charm is the only one that reports the net number those fees are not charged on.
What matters most before choosing in this category
A concentrated-liquidity manager has exactly one job you cannot do more cheaply yourself: beat holding the two tokens. Almost none of them will tell you whether they did. Gamma is the clearest case, because it built that number and then switched it off — its averageReturns feed still carries the four av_imp_vs_hodl fields for 91 vaults across seven periods, and all 2,548 of those slots are null, while the two endpoints that once served the figure now answer "This endpoint is no longer valid." What you are shown instead is a fee APR, fees divided by TVL, a quantity that cannot go negative however much the position lost. That gap matters because every performance fee here is levied on gross swap fees rather than on your net result: Charm at 1% protocol plus up to 20% manager, Kodiak at a published 10% and a deployed 99%, ICHI at 10%, Beefy at 9.5%, Steer at 15% — so in any period where impermanent loss exceeded fee income, the manager was paid in full and the depositor finished behind holding. Start with the two managers who let you check: Kamino publishes an hourly series you can rebuild the comparison from, and Charm is the only one that reports the net number those fees are not charged on.
Does this manager publish a return net of impermanent loss, or only a fee APR that cannot go negative?
Who is allowed to move the range, on what trigger — and does the last-rebalance timestamp on live vaults match the published cadence?
Does the fee the deployed contract charges match the fee the documentation publishes?
Current editor lead
Expert review and scoring weights
CH
Charm Alpha VaultsData checked Aug 2026
Concentrated-liquidity vaults using a base plus limit order layout, with a per-vault performance chart measured against holding the two assets.
Concentrated-liquidity vaults using a base plus limit order layout, with a per-vault performance chart measured against holding the two assets. Strongest on published return versus holding (9/10): The only provider in this set that publishes a versus-hold series per vault, and the draft understated it. Re-fetched 2026-08-11 (HTTP 200); every quote below is character-exact. The performance page documents that "There is a performance chart for every vault" measuring "The performance versus holding the assets"… Weakest on fee stack read on chain (4/10): Corrected during verification: the draft scored this 9, called it "the lowest headline rate in the category", and stated that the on-chain value was "inside the stated band". Both claims fail. The published band is "There is a flat performance fee of 2% to 5% swap fees." The draft read protocolFee() = 10000 and called… Published price: "There is a flat performance fee of 2% to 5% swap fees." and "There are no exit fees, AUM fees, or any other fees." Re-fetched 2026-08-11 from learn.charm.fi (HTTP 200); both strings are character-exact.
Best forPublished return versus holding — 9/10
Main tradeoffThe vault Charm uses as the worked example of its versus-hold chart is dead, and the docs still link to it. Reading 0x7adee9c6772df5e9b48a1d2580403af33a4a20e3 on Ethereum at block 25731477 on 2026-08-11 returned totalSupply() = 0, maxTotalSupply() = 0 and lastTimestamp() = 1688701571, i.e. 7 July 2023, so the documentation's headline claim of being 8.24% "better than holding the assets from 17th February to 25th June" is illustrated with a WETH/USDT vault that has held nothing for over three years and whose deposit cap is now zero. It is also a previous-generation V1 AlphaVault, not the AlphaProVault the technical reference describes. Charm's live disclosure is still the best in the category by a distance, but the reader must go find a funded current-generation vault to see it, and DefiLlama puts Charm Finance V2 at $1,790,218 of TVL on 2026-08-11.
Verify before signup"There is a flat performance fee of 2% to 5% swap fees." and "There are no exit fees, AUM fees, or any other fees." Re-fetched 2026-08-11 from learn.charm.fi (HTTP 200); both strings are character-exact. The same page adds that a third-party vault creator may layer its own charge: "Community Vault managers may charge additional fees for the Community Vaults." Verification note: the quoted band describes Charm's own cut only, and the deployed contracts do not match it in either direction. The AlphaProVaultFactory returns protocolFee() = 10000 on a 1e6 scale, i.e. 1%, below the stated 2% floor, while the separate per-vault managerFee reaches the contract maximum of 200000 units, i.e. 20%, on 21 of the 137 live vaults sampled on Ethereum and Base. A depositor in one of those pays about 21% of swap fees, not 2-5%.
Methodology
How this category is reviewed
Reviewed on published return versus holding, rebalancing policy and trigger authority, fee stack read on chain, and manager audit and exploit record.
The order on this page is the published ranking for this category. Every criterion, weight and source behind it is on the methodology page.
Frequently asked
Questions people ask before choosing liquidity management
Can I find out what a managed position returned against simply holding the two tokens?
For six of the eight, no. Gamma did not merely fail to publish the number, it built it and switched it off: the averageReturns feed still ships av_imp_vs_hodl_usd, av_imp_vs_hodl_deposited, av_imp_vs_hodl_token0 and av_imp_vs_hodl_token1 for 91 hypervisors across 7 periods, and all 2,548 of those slots are null, while the dedicated daily and weekly endpoints that once served it now return ["This endpoint is no longer valid."]. Kamino is the one manager publishing enough to check, and checking it is unflattering: its hourly series returns 24,577 records back to 2023-10-09 with share price and both token prices, and reconstructing the comparison for the 90 days to 2026-08-11 gives a vault return of -16.679% against -12.843% for holding the opening inventory — depositors finished 3.836 percentage points behind. Over that same period the same feed advertised totalApy 5.50% and apy30d 5.93%, and its profitAndLoss field read 0. Charm publishes the best versus-hold disclosure in the category and illustrates it with a vault that has been empty for three years: the worked example claims 8.24% "better than holding the assets from 17th February to 25th June" and links to a vault that returned totalSupply() = 0 and lastTimestamp() = 7 July 2023 when read on 2026-08-11.
Do the published rebalancing cadences match what the contracts actually do?
Not on the two largest published policies. Beefy states that "the range is reassessed and reset every 6 hours" via a privileged moveTicks() call; on a sample of 120 active Base strategies at block 49829563 the median range had not moved in 358.2 hours. 119 of the 120 were older than six hours, 113 older than a day, 25 older than a month, and one had not moved its range since 2026-01-16, 4,959 hours earlier. Median harvest age on the same 120 was 12.3 hours and 119 of 120 had harvested within a day — fees were being collected, and the 9.5% performance fee charged, while the tick boundaries sat still, on a design whose central claim is that impermanent loss stays unrealised only while the position remains in range. Charm documents permissionless rebalancing — "Anyone can call rebalance, unless the vault manager calls" setRebalanceDelegate — and then gates it on most of its live book: 62 of 78 live Ethereum vaults, 79%, and 25 of 59 sampled live Base vaults return a non-zero rebalanceDelegate, which by Charm's own definition leaves only that delegate and the manager able to rebalance. The exception is the rule.
Does the fee I am quoted match the fee the contract charges?
On three of the eight it does not, and the gaps run in both directions. Kodiak publishes a manager fee of 10% and operates 26 funded Islands that take 99% or more: enumerating all 464 Islands from the published factory at Berachain block 24717314 found 165 live, of which 128 carry managerFeeBPS() = 1000, 11 carry 500, 24 carry 9900 and 2 carry 9999 — and Kodiak's own reference defines the arithmetic, "Fee = (Total Fees Earned * managerFeeBPS) / 10000", making those last tiers 99% and 99.99% of LP fees earned. This is not a fringe: 22 of the 24 Islands at 9900 name the factory's own owner and treasury as manager, among them stablecoin pairs of exactly the shape a conservative depositor would choose. Gamma's docs say "Gamma charges between 14-20% of earned fees per vault" while the hypervisor holding $394,795 of the $879,807 on its mainnet feed returned fee() = 2 at block 25731532, which under the contract's own payout arithmetic is 50% of collected swap fees — one byte, changeable by the owner alone, with no timelock and no interface surfacing it. Charm's headline is 2-5% and the chain says a depositor can be paying 21%: 1% protocol fee identically on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum, stacked under a per-vault manager fee capped at 20%, with 21 of 137 live vaults sampled sitting at exactly that maximum.
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
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