Risks

OverviewCopy Anchor Link

You can lose everything you post as margin. You can lose everything you deposit as backing or pool liquidity. This page lists where those losses come from, what the program does about each, and what it does not. Each entry links to the page with the full rule. Where this page and the program disagree, the program is right.

Nothing in these docs is investment advice.

The programCopy Anchor Link

1. Not audited. No audit firm has reviewed the program. 126 Kani harnesses and the unit and integration tests check the arithmetic and the instructions (see Verification). That is not an audit. Account validation, token transfers and whole instructions are tested, not proven.
2. Upgradeable. The program has an upgrade authority. An upgrade can change any rule on these pages.
3. The pool authority has powers. It can pause a market or the pool, retune a market's parameters (held to consistency checks, not to the listing bounds), lower a budget, apply a split or dividend, set a session, and name the mark keeper. It cannot raise a budget.

A bug can lose funds that no rule here protects.

Leverage and liquidationCopy Anchor Link

1. Leverage is per market. A market priced from a spot pool follows the pool's sustained depth: 2x under $10k, 3x to $50k, 4x to $250k, 5x above. It falls on the next reading when the pool thins. A Pyth market the pool authority lists can carry more: SPYx allows 20x. Outside US trading hours, equity markets drop to a lower closed-session cap. See Margining and Sessions.
2. Any account can liquidate. A position whose equity falls under maintenance margin is closed. The trigger is the market's risk price; the close is at the worse of the risk price and the oracle. The liquidation fee comes out of the position. The owner gets back what is left after the fee, which can be nothing.
3. The risk price moves at most 40 bps a slot, and counts at most 3 slots per step: 1.2% per reading after a gap. A spike that comes back within a few slots liquidates nobody. A real move gets there a step at a time, so positions are closed on the way while they still have margin. See Liquidations.

PricesCopy Anchor Link

See Price sources.

KeepersCopy Anchor Link

The venue's server clears batches, pushes keeper marks, runs liquidations and syncs rewards. If it stops:

1. Batches stop clearing. Orders already in a batch wait.
2. Keeper marks go stale and those markets pause rather than fill at an old price.
3. Liquidation, clearing and settlement stay open to any account. Pushing a keeper mark does not: only the named keeper key can.

Where losses goCopy Anchor Link

A market's losses are paid in this order:

1. The backing posted behind it.
2. Pool liquidity, up to the market's loss budget.
3. The insurance fund.

A winner is never paid past the budget. When a market cannot pay every winner, each winning close gets the same share of its profit and the rest is not paid. A profitable position can be paid less than its paper gain. See Loss budget and Profit haircuts.

BackingCopy Anchor Link

1. First loss. Backers take the market's losses before the pool, up to everything they posted. Later gains repay them only up to what was drawn.
2. Exits hold back open losses. A backer can withdraw at any time, less their part of what the market's traders are up now, at the oracle or the risk price, whichever is more. When the price cannot be read, their part of the whole remaining budget is held.
3. Paid in kind. Backing in USDT or SOL is held as posted and paid back in the pot's mix. SOL counts at 80% toward the budget and falls with the SOL price.

See How to underwrite a market.

The poolCopy Anchor Link

1. Every market at once. Pool liquidity takes the losses backers do not, up to each market's budget, across all markets together.
2. Withdrawals wait 150 slots, about a minute. Shares sit in escrow, still exposed, and are paid at what the pool is worth when claimed, not when requested.
3. Paid in kind. A claim pays USDC plus the same share of any tokens the LPs hold from backing they covered.
4. Priced from a checkpoint. Deposits and withdrawals price shares from a pass over every market at most 60 seconds old. A deposit is refused while any market's price is unreadable. A withdrawal counts that market at the most it could cost the LPs.

See The pool.

LiquidityCopy Anchor Link

A batch fills only what crosses. A thin market can leave an order unfilled, or fill it far from the reference price inside the band. The pool fills only what makers leave, and only within the market's budget. See The auction.

PointsCopy Anchor Link

1. Points are not a token and not a promise of one.
2. They can be farmed with many wallets. The program caps trading points at 250,000 per wallet per UTC day and pays nothing on a close held under 10 minutes. It cannot tell one person's wallets apart. Each extra wallet gets its own cap.
3. Seasons and creator scores are kept by the server, not the program. The on-chain total per wallet is all-time.

See Referrals and points.

ListingCopy Anchor Link

Anyone can open a market. A market on unwind is not an endorsement of the asset, its issuer or the account that opened it.

DevnetCopy Anchor Link

Today unwind runs on devnet only. It settles in test USDC against devnet copies of tokens marked at their mainnet prices. Balances carry no value, and parameters, pools and markets can change or be reset. See Devnet.

Assets and jurisdictionsCopy Anchor Link

Tokenized stocks (xStocks) are not available to US persons. unwind is not affiliated with Backed, Jupiter, Pyth, Raydium, Meteora or the issuers of the assets its markets track. You are responsible for the rules where you live.