unwind 101 for non-crypto audiences

What a perpetual future isCopy Anchor Link

A perpetual future gives you an asset's price moves without owning the asset, and without an expiry date.

1. Open a long at 100. The price goes to 110. You gain as if you held it.
2. Open a short at 100. The price goes to 90. You gain the same way.
3. You post collateral (margin), not the full price. With 3x leverage, $100 of margin carries a $300 position, and a 10% move is a 30% gain or loss.

The position never expires, so something has to keep the buyers and sellers roughly balanced. That is funding: a small payment from the larger side to the smaller one.

What makes unwind differentCopy Anchor Link

Orders are batched. Most venues match each order the instant it arrives, which makes being a few milliseconds early worth money. unwind collects orders for 1 second, then settles everyone buying at one price and everyone selling at one price. Being first inside the second gets you nothing.

Anyone can open a market. On most venues a market exists because the venue chose to list it. On unwind, anyone can open a market on any token whose price can be read on the Solana blockchain. Nobody approves it.

Where the price comes fromCopy Anchor Link

Not from unwind, and not from a formula. Makers post the prices they will buy and sell at. Takers come to trade against them. Each second runs two auctions:

1. Takers buying against makers selling.
2. Takers selling against makers buying.

In each, the price is the one at which the most volume trades. Too low and more people want to buy than sell; too high and the reverse. A shared pool of money fills the takers no maker met, up to a limit per market. See The auction.

What can go wrongCopy Anchor Link

1. You can lose your whole margin. When a position's margin falls below a set threshold, anyone can close it. That is liquidation, and the margin is gone.
2. Winners can be paid less than their paper profit. Each market has a cap on what it can lose. When winners are owed more than that, each is paid the same share.
3. The software is unaudited. No audit firm has reviewed it. Code that holds money can have bugs.
4. It runs on devnet. Today everything is test money with no value.

The full list is on Risks.