Batch Processing of Harvests vs Individual Vault Harvests

Optimal for multi-vault protocols: Executes harvests for dozens of vaults in a single transaction. This reduces the average gas cost per vault by 60-80%. Essential for protocols like Yearn or Beefy managing hundreds of strategies.

Superior for isolated, high-value strategies: Each harvest is a separate transaction. Provides granular control and immediate profit realization. Critical for large, single-asset vaults (e.g., a $50M USDC strategy) where timing is paramount.

Introduces systemic risk: A failed transaction in the batch can delay all harvests. Requires sophisticated off-chain monitoring and scheduling (via Chainlink Automation, Gelato). Not ideal for time-sensitive, volatile strategies.

Prohibitively expensive for large portfolios: Gas costs scale linearly with the number of vaults. At 500 gwei, harvesting 50 vaults individually can cost over 2 ETH. Makes small or frequent harvests economically non-viable.

Specific advantage: Consolidates multiple vault harvests into a single transaction. This can reduce gas costs by 60-80% for protocols managing dozens of vaults (e.g., Yearn Finance, Harvest Finance). This matters for high-frequency strategies or protocols operating on high-fee networks like Ethereum mainnet, where gas is the primary operational cost.

Specific advantage: Each vault harvests independently when its specific profit threshold is met. This prevents capital from being idle in underperforming vaults while waiting for a batch. This matters for high-yield, volatile strategies (e.g., leveraged farming on Aave, concentrated liquidity on Uniswap V3) where timing is critical to maximize APY.

Specific advantage: Contains smart contract risk to a single vault per transaction. A failed harvest or exploit in one strategy does not block or jeopardize funds in others. This matters for security-conscious protocols and for vaults using unaudited or experimental strategies, as it limits blast radius and maintains system resilience.

Massive gas savings: Aggregates multiple vault harvests (e.g., Yearn, Beefy) into a single transaction. On Ethereum, this can reduce keeper costs from ~$100 per vault to ~$5 per vault in the batch. This matters for protocols managing 50+ vaults where operational overhead is the primary constraint.

Precision timing: Each vault harvests independently at its optimal moment (e.g., when rewards accrue to a threshold or a fee period ends). This avoids leaving yield "on the table" for high-APY strategies on Aave, Compound, or Curve. This matters for vaults where a 6-hour delay can mean 5-15% lower annual returns.

Containment of failures: A bug or exploit in one harvest transaction (e.g., a complex Convex stake) does not affect other vaults in the protocol. This limits smart contract and execution risk. This matters for protocols with heterogeneous, unaudited, or experimental strategies where failure probability is non-zero.

Fixed schedule bottleneck: All vaults harvest at the same time, forcing sub-optimal timing for many. Fast-compounding strategies on Pendle or Balancer suffer. This matters for protocols where yield compounding frequency directly correlates with TVL retention.

Linear gas scaling: Each vault requires its own on-chain transaction, leading to O(n) operational costs. On L2s like Arbitrum or Optimism, this still adds up significantly at scale. This matters for protocols with thin profit margins or those deploying on hundreds of vaults.