How to open a market

OverviewCopy Anchor Link

Opening a market is one signed transaction. No approval, no relationship with the protocol. The account that sends it gets no rights over the market afterwards.

A market trades once it has a price and a loss budget. From the site, both arrive with the listing: the backing is in the listing transaction, and the mark keeper prices the market on its next pass.

StepsCopy Anchor Link

1. Find the token. Search by ticker, name or mint. The site reads every USDC or USDT pool the token has on Raydium CLMM and Meteora DLMM and picks the most liquid. An asset with a Pyth feed can use the feed instead. The market takes its ticker and name from the token's own metadata. A token with none is listed under the first characters of its mint as "Unnamed token" (on devnet, a token with no name and no logo is then hidden; see Devnet).
2. Review the limits. Open interest per side defaults to what the pool's depth supports, at most $50,000 and at least $1,000. Leverage starts at 2x and rises with sustained depth up to 5x (see Margining). Both can be lowered under Advanced. The leverage set there is a ceiling depth cannot lift.
3. Post the backing. At least $100, in USDC, USDT or SOL, in the same transaction. The program will list an unbacked market; the site will not.
4. Tick the box confirming the backing takes the market's losses first, up to what it holds. The site will not sign until it is ticked.
5. Sign, and pay the rent of the accounts the listing creates.

What the site lists withCopy Anchor Link

The program enforces the bounds, so a transaction built by hand gets nothing the site would not give it.

Listing a token againCopy Anchor Link

A token can be listed more than once. Each listing of the same pool or feed is a new generation of its market, at an address of its own.

1. The first listing is generation 1, the next generation 2. The number only goes up, and no address is ever reused.
2. The program counts them in a MarketGenerations account per pool and feed. A listing names the generation after the newest; two listings racing for the same number, the second fails.
3. Anyone can list the next generation. A market listed with a bad price source or settings nobody wants holds its own address and nothing else.
4. Only a market's lister can create its price observation, so nobody can choose its observation settings between the listing and the lister's next transaction.
5. Markets listed before generations existed are generation 0 at their old address. They keep trading.

The site shows, per token, the newest generation that has backing, or the newest if none does. An unbacked relisting does not replace a backed market until someone backs it. The site refuses to list over a market it shows as live (backed, not paused, and observing the pool with the site's own settings) and lists the next generation otherwise.

When trading opensCopy Anchor Link

At once. The mark keeper reads every market every 25 seconds, and its first push makes a new market tradeable. No warm-up. See Price sources.

UnitsCopy Anchor Link

A token worth less than a cent is quoted per thousand, per million or per billion, the smallest unit worth a cent again. BONK at $0.0000038 trades as $3.81 per 1M. A token worth a cent or more trades one token at a time.

What opening a market earnsCopy Anchor Link

Nothing until it is traded. Then, as the market's deployer:

None of it is paid on your own trades on the market. Liquidations earn no points for anyone. See Referrals and points.

The deployer gets no authority over the market's parameters and no claim on its backing. What the lister posts as backing earns what any backing earns, on the same terms as anybody else's (see How to underwrite a market).

Every reward is paid on trading that happened, and out of the protocol's cut. A market nobody trades earns its opener nothing, and rent makes listing at volume expensive. That is why no approval is needed.