How the Altcopy Index works

If the leaderboard is the honest map of Hyperliquid's vaults, the Altcopy Index is the route I'd draw on it. It's the home view of the board, and it answers a simple question: of everything on Hyperliquid right now, which handful would a sane person actually hold?

The whole point is that I don't answer that by taste. The Index is mechanical — a rules-based basket that rebuilds itself from the data every single snapshot. I can't quietly slip my favorite vault in, and I can't keep a fading one out of loyalty. The rule decides. Here's the rule, in full.

The membership rule

A vault joins the Index when it passes two gates:

1. It has to be investable. That's the three-part filter from the first post, plus a floor: open, accepting deposits, actively trading (not dormant), no caution flags, and at least $50k of real capital. No mirages, no frozen vaults, nothing you can't get into.
2. It has to score above 80 on at least one investor profile. The board scores every vault from 0 to 100 against three lenses — Income, Balanced, and Aggressive (the subject of the next post). A vault gets into the Index if its best score across those three clears 80.

That second gate is deliberate. I call it best-of-every-style. I'm not building a single-flavor index — I want the steadiest income vault, the best risk-adjusted balanced vault, y the sharpest convexity bet, side by side. A fund of funds is supposed to diversify across strategies, not concentrate in one. So a vault earns its place by being excellent at something, and the badge on the board tells you which something.

Two more rules keep the basket sane. It's capped at 20 names, and it's equal-weighted — every member gets the same slice. The scores are bunched tightly enough at the top that pretending I can rank the 4th-best vault above the 5th with any precision would be false confidence. Equal weight is the honest default.

The whale rule

There's one more constraint, and it's the most important one nobody thinks about: the Index never holds more than 40% of any single vault's capital.

Why cap it? Because if you become half of a small vault, you become its problem. When you want out, the manager has to unwind half the book to pay you — and in illiquid altcoin positions, you end up selling against yourself for a worse price. Your own size also degrades the very strategy you were chasing; an edge that works on $100k often doesn't on $1M. Below roughly 10% of a vault you're just another passenger. At 40% you're a large, visible holder — which is as far as I'm willing to push it. (If "how big is too big" sounds abstract, Liquidez is the lens to read it through.)

This cap has an honest side effect worth stating out loud: today, the investable field on Hyperliquid is thin. There's one genuinely large open vault and a scattering of small ones. So a capacity-aware Index can stay nicely diversified while it's small, but as real money grows it gets pushed toward the few vaults big enough to hold it. The Index doesn't hide that — it's a feature of an immature market, and the basket will diversify on its own as the field deepens.

How to use it today: a recommendation you follow by hand

Here's the part to be completely clear about. Today, the Altcopy Index is a recommendation, not a product you can buy. There is no token, no deposit button. What the leaderboard gives you is the live composition — the member vaults, their weights, and why each one qualified — and you implement it manually: you open Hyperliquid, and you allocate to those vaults yourself, in those proportions, on your own keys.

That's a feature, not a limitation. Your money never touches mine. You can follow the whole basket, or take half of it, or skip the names you don't like. And because the Index re-derives every snapshot, you can check back in and rebalance when the composition shifts. It's copy trading stripped down to its honest core: I do the homework in the open, you keep the custody and the final call. (If the difference between that and old-school copy trading isn't obvious, this post draws the line.)

Where this is going: a vault of vaults

Doing it by hand is fine for a handful of names. It gets tedious when the basket rotates. So the direction I'm building toward is a vault of vaults — a single vault that automatically follows the Index: it allocates across the member vaults, respects the 40% cap, and rotates as vaults enter and leave the basket, so you could deposit once and track the whole thing without lifting a finger.

I'm not there yet, and I won't pretend otherwise. That vault is being built and tested carefully — real custody of other people's money is not something to rush, and an independent audit is non-negotiable before it ever holds a real dollar. Until then, the Index lives where it should: out in the open on the leaderboard, as a recommendation you can inspect line by line and follow at your own pace.

Or don't take the whole thing

One last option, because the Index is a default, not a cage. If best-of-every-style isn't your style, you don't have to take the basket at all. The board's profile selectors let you build your own pick by hand: switch to Income if you want shallow drawdowns, to Aggressive if you want convexity, and assemble a shortlist that matches you instead of the average. That's the whole subject of the next post — reading the board through your own eyes.

Either way, it starts in the same place: the live leaderboard, where today's Index is waiting.

This is the second post in a series on how the leaderboard works. Next: what we measure on a vault, and what it actually means.