Price sources

Every market has one reference mark. The mark breaks the last tie in the auction, sets the band orders clear inside, prices the pool's quote, values positions, and drives liquidation through the risk price. It never sets a clearing price on its own.

A market takes its mark from one of two sources, fixed at listing:

1. a Pyth feed, or
2. an observed pool on Raydium CLMM or Meteora DLMM.

Key figuresCopy Anchor Link

Prices only move forwardCopy Anchor Link

Every instruction that writes a market records the publish time and price it used. Three rules follow:

1. A price older than the newest the market has acted on is refused. A price stays valid for a while after it is published, and without this the sender could pick the most favorable one in that window, for example a liquidator picking the one that liquidates.
2. A second, different price under a publish time already used is refused. The same price may be used again.
3. A Pyth price published more than 5 seconds ahead of the chain's clock is refused. One price from the future would hold the market to that time and refuse every honest price after it. The 5 seconds cover the cluster clock trailing wall time.

Valuing the pool for a deposit or claim only reads a market, so it records nothing, but it still refuses a price older than the newest the market has used. Custody tokens are held to the future rule and their maximum age, not to the ordering rule: they are only ever read.

The risk priceCopy Anchor Link

Liquidation does not read the oracle directly. Each market keeps a risk price that follows the oracle at a capped speed:

step  = 40 bps × min(slots since last step, 3)
risk' = risk moved toward oracle by at most step × risk

That is 1% a second at 400 ms slots, and at most 1.2% per accepted price. A market nobody holds a position in follows the oracle at once, since a jump there liquidates nobody.

Every instruction that accepts a price steps the risk price: clearing a batch, firing a trigger, liquidating, and the permissionless step_risk_price crank. The venue's keeper calls the crank for any market with a position past its margin.

Where the two differ, money is priced at the worse of the two for whoever moves it:

A spike that comes back moves the risk price one step at most, and a liquidation needs the risk price itself to cross the position's margin.

Every market's maintenance margin must cover one full step plus its liquidation fee: at least 120 bps above the fee. See Margining.

Pyth feedsCopy Anchor Link

A Pyth market reads the feed on every instruction. The update must be fully verified, match the market's feed id, be no older than the market's maximum age, and carry a confidence no wider than the market's ceiling.

The confidence widens the pool's quote:

spread = min(base_spread + confidence × conf_mult, max_spread)

Past the ceiling the market stops quoting. The ceiling is per market. A tokenized asset's basis against its underlying is structural, and one global threshold would either halt some markets for good or be too loose to catch a real decoupling elsewhere.

Observed poolsCopy Anchor Link

A market with no Pyth feed reads a spot pool:

Rules fixed at listing:

1. The pool's quote side must be USDC or USDT (Circle's devnet USDC on devnet builds), or the token the pool settles in. A pool quoted in a token the lister minted is refused.
2. The kind of pool is recorded, and the pool is checked on every reading, so the market cannot be repointed at a pool someone just created.
3. A DLMM pair's token decimals are checked against its mints once.
4. Only the market's lister creates the observation. Its fold weight, clamp and unit are fixed from then on. A market observed with settings nobody wants can be listed again as the next generation (see How to open a market).

Depth sets confidenceCopy Anchor Link

confidence_bps = 50 × 10,000 / depth_usd

A site listing halts at 5,000 bps, a pool under about $100 deep. Unmeasured depth reads as no depth and halts.

Depth also sets leverage (see Margining) and caps the loss budget (see Loss budget). Depth is read on chain in the same transaction as every push or reading, never taken from the keeper.

The mark keeperCopy Anchor Link

The venue's mark keeper prices observed markets:

1. Every 25 seconds it reads each pool off chain and pushes the median of its last 5 reads. One block of someone moving the pool moves nothing.
2. A mark that would move less than 5 bps is left alone while it stays under 55 seconds old and well inside the market's maximum age. A quiet market is pushed about every 50 seconds; a moving one every pass.
3. A move over 10% from the mark on chain is held for one pass, then walked toward the new price 10% a pass. A crash crosses each liquidation price on the way down instead of jumping past it.
4. A market is tradeable from the keeper's first push, seconds after listing.

On devnet, a test copy of a real token is marked at the real token's price from Jupiter, and its devnet pool is read only for depth.

push_mark takes the price as given; the program bounds it only by staleness and the confidence its depth allows. What this trusts is the keeper key. The pool authority names it with set_mark_keeper; setting the empty key stops every push. A keeper that stops leaves its marks to go stale, and a stale mark halts its market. The pool's spot is recorded beside every pushed mark, so any gap is on chain.

Without a keeperCopy Anchor Link

The permissionless observe crank folds pool readings into a moving average:

folded = mark × (1 - α) + spot × α        α ≤ 10%
mark'  = folded, clamped to mark ± 1%

1. Only the first reading in any second moves the mark, so many cranks in one transaction move it once.
2. Doubling a mark takes about 70 readings, over 70 seconds at least.
3. The mark trades only once 30 readings span 15 minutes.
4. A Raydium pool with history can start seasoned at its own 15 minute average, if its spot sits within 3% of that average.

Once a keeper has priced a market, observe updates its depth and leaves its price alone.

UnitsCopy Anchor Link

A mark is kept to six decimals of a dollar, which reads a token worth a fraction of a cent as nothing. Such a market is quoted per thousand, million or billion tokens, fixed at listing. Bonk at 0.0000038 USD is quoted as 3.81 USD per 1M.