Market Specs
Perpetual Markets Specs
Contract Tier
Contract tiers are used to categorically label and rank the risk of perpetual markets. There are six unique tiers:
- A
- B
- C
- Speculative
- Highly Speculative
- Isolated
These ranked tiers are used for:
- priority access to collateral in liquidations
- max limits for insurance
- determining acceptable range of oracle price divergence
- sanitization rules for twap / funding rate updates
Fundamentally, a market in Contract Tier B is in a ‘safer’ tranche vs Contract Tier C, Speculative, and Isolated.
Each market’s current Contract Tier assignment can change over time as risk parameters are reviewed; the authoritative value for a given market is shown in-app and on-chain. As an example, at the time of writing, SOL-PERP, BTC-PERP, and ETH-PERP are Contract Tier B, and HYPE-PERP is Contract Tier C.
For the full per-tier numeric limits — insurance caps, oracle confidence bands, TWAP-sanitization bounds, and PnL-settlement divergence thresholds — see the Contract Tiers reference.
| Tier | Description |
|---|---|
| Speculative | Speculative tier has no access to external insurance funds (only the perpetual market’s fee pool) |
| Highly Speculative | Same restrictions as Speculative, but sits a tranche below. |
| Isolated | Isolated tier requires the user account refrain / disable cross margin trading (on both perpetual and spot markets). Users with ‘Margin Trading’ enabled, a non-USDT borrow, or another perpetual position will NOT be allowed to enter an Isolated Tier market. If the account has liabilities beyond the perpetual market’s quote asset and the isolated perpetual market, it is forced to enter Reduce Only mode. |
Oracle Source
The oracle provider which provides a price, confidence band, and timeliness information for the market.
| Source | Description |
|---|---|
| Pyth | Read more |
| Pyth Lazer | Pyth’s low-latency push oracle service. Read more |
| Switchboard | Deprecated. Legacy Switchboard oracle sources are no longer supported; markets configured with a deprecated Switchboard source will fail to load a price. Read more |
| Prelaunch | ”Prelaunch” is a custom internal oracle source for prelaunch markets (markets without external oracle). For prelaunch markets, given there is no spot reference price, that oracle sources uses the mark twap as the oracle price. The oracle is also configured with a custom maximum price to prevent price manipulation. This self-referential and leads to funding payments that encourage price stability (those holding positions in trend will pay those holding against trend) and ultimately relies upon market participants anticipating a valid oracle in the future. Every Prelaunch oracle has an initial price AND max price. The oracle value cannot exceed the max price. |
Max Open Interest
A maximum amount of open interest that can exist within the perpetual market. Additional orders/fills that would breach this open interest limit are blocked.
IMF Factor
A margin fraction factor. Used to increase liability weight and decrease asset weight for large positions
Spot Markets Specs
Asset Tier
Asset tiers are used to categorically label and rank the risk of a spot markets. There are five unique tiers:
- Collateral: full privilege
- Protected: collateral, but no borrow
- Cross: not collateral, allow multi-borrow
- Isolated: not collateral, only single borrow
- Unlisted: no privilege
Scale Initial Asset Weight Start
The notional value of total user deposits needed to begin scaling down the initial asset weight
Max Token Deposits
A maximum amount of tokens that can be added to collateral vault.
IMF Factor
A margin fraction factor. Used to increase liability weight and decrease asset weight for large positions
Order Step/Tick Size
Spot markets retain order_step_size and order_tick_size fields, but spot order placement is disabled on Velocity — there is no spot order book. These fields are therefore unused for spot; deposits, borrows, and swaps are not subject to them. (On perpetual markets, order sizes must be a multiple of the step size and prices a multiple of the tick size.)