Perps Engine

The problem

Perpetual futures are the most-used derivative onchain and among the least composable. A typical venue owns its order book, its oracle, its funding mechanism, its margin engine and its insurance fund as a single indivisible system. That makes the venue legible but makes anything built on top of it fragile: an integrator inherits every design decision at once, including the ones it disagrees with.

It also concentrates failure. When a liquidation cascade goes wrong, it is rarely clear whether the fault sat in the price feed, the margin parameters or the settlement path, because the three are not separable.

Deterministic settlement

Perps Engine separates the matching layer from the settlement layer, and makes the settlement layer deterministic: given the same sequence of inputs, any observer reconstructs the same position state, the same funding accrual and the same liquidation set. No step depends on the order in which an off-chain component happened to observe the world.

This is less exciting than a throughput number and considerably more useful. It means a liquidation can be audited after the fact, a risk model can be backtested against real chain state, and an integrator can simulate their exposure without trusting us.

Isolated risk

Margin is scoped per market by default, with cross-margin as an explicit opt-in rather than a property of the venue. Insurance capital is likewise tranched per market, so a failure in a thin long-tail listing cannot socialise losses across the book. The cost is capital efficiency; we think it is the right trade for infrastructure other people are meant to build on.

Built to be built on

The engine exposes its margin system as a primitive. A structured-product issuer can use it to hedge, Onchain Stocks can margin equity positions against it, and an autonomous agent can take positions through it without a bespoke integration. That composability is the point — it is why this is an engine and not an exchange.