09 · Glossary

Glossary

The basics#

Perp: A perpetual future: leveraged exposure to an asset with no expiry, margined and liquidatable.
Oracle: The listed options market, fitted: its mid fitted by a Kou model with the listed bid/ask spread interpolated around it, giving a bid and an ask surface that cannot cross. Deribit for BTC, Derive for HYPE, the CBOE for SPX. Never called an "index", and nothing trades at it.
Mark: What a position is valued at: the raw front's relevant side (bid for a long, ask for a short), no fitting, clamped into the corridor; the oracle's side where nobody stands. It values, margins and flags liquidation; it clears nothing. An option price is never called a mark.
Intrinsic and extrinsic: Intrinsic is what an option would pay today, fixed by the contract. Extrinsic is the market's price for what it might pay later. Only extrinsic is charged as funding.
Perp option: A perpetual American option on the perp — no fixed expiry date, worth its exercise value at any moment, priced with a decay rather than a term.
Decay: An option's mean life, in months, chosen on a stepper at rungs 3, 6, 12, 24, 55, 120. Its rate per year is 12 divided by its months: a short decay is cheap to buy and dear to hold, a long decay the reverse.
Funding: The cost of the roll: each tick, the leg's extrinsic at the oracle's relevant side (bid for a long, ask for a short) and its own decay, times its rate per year, for the time passed. The long pays and the short receives. Never charged on intrinsic; the size never changes.
Option (single): What the default OPTION ticket opens: one bought or sold call or put, conventional margin, no backing perp. A bought single costs its premium and nothing more; a sold single is tested with everything else the account holds, in one account-level margin test over perps and options. Reads on PORTFOLIO as "Option #n".
Option leg: One leg of a swap: an option at a strike and a decay.
Option pair: What a PROTECT or FARM swap leaves you holding: both option legs, backed by your perp notional of the same direction. Reads on PORTFOLIO as "Option pair #n".
Free notional: Per account, per asset, per direction: perp notional minus the sold-option notional of that same direction — what is not covering written options. You can only close what is free.
Premium-neutral: The two legs of a swap are sized to equal value, in dollars, at their fill prices, so no cash changes hands at open. A close settles its difference in coin.
Ray: A strike fixed in dollars at open and read afterwards as a percentage from the current mark.
Moneyness (k): How far a strike sits from the mark, as a fraction: +0.20 is 20 % above it. The tradable window is |k| ≤ 0.6.
Slippage: What you landed against the executable touch at the moment you asked, in percent. Not a fee. A swap crosses on both legs, so its total is the two compounded: 1 − (1 − s₁)(1 − s₂).
Options P/L and Perp P/L: Two separate columns: option pairs carry P/L per pair and roll into Options P/L of their direction; that column plus the Perp P/L of the same direction is that side's equity. Coin reaches the wallet only when the perp closes.

Accounts#

Account: A margined bucket under one wallet, of one kind — options, protect, farm or earn — holding its own equity and its own positions. Named <kind> n, where n counts every account of that kind the wallet has ever opened; the name is given once and never changes. There is no MAIN.
Account equity: The cash deposited into an account plus that account's own P/L. It is the only equity the venue reads: margin and the leverage cap take this number and nothing else. The wallet's undeposited cash is not part of it and never covers it.
Wallet cash: The undeposited pot — dollars that are in no account yet. It carries no risk meaning of its own. The wallet total is this plus every account's own equity, summed in dollars across assets.
Deposit / Withdraw: The two moves between the pot and an account, on every kind. Nothing enters an account without your press: opening a perp deposits the margin you type, an open that would leave the account short names the amount on its button (ADD $X AND TRANSACT), and a maker deposits through the MARGIN field on TRANSACT → EARN. Withdraw releases equity above what the account must keep behind what it holds, and is refused below that line with both numbers named.
Protect: The PROTECT choice on CREATE PERP, which opens a protect account carrying a perp plus an option pair solved for two typed numbers — a dollar FLOOR and a TARGET ROE (a % return on equity) — to push the liquidation floor to the typed floor, funded by selling the gains above the typed ROE. A protect account holds exactly one perp and one option pair, across every asset, and CLOSE ACCOUNT is its only close verb — the two positions are one structure, so they end together.
Farm: The mirror of PROTECT, built to be paid: same two typed numbers (FLOOR, TARGET ROE), same solver, sign of the funding flipped so the account collects it instead of paying it. Same cardinality and close rule as PROTECT.
De-levered comparison: What PROTECT and FARM are measured against: a perp with the same floor and less leverage, drawn as a dashed line on the PAYOFF tab. The solver chooses each leg's strike and decay; you never type them.
AUTO / CUSTOM / TLP: The ways to post an EARN curve. AUTO quotes the oracle plus the maker's own lean off a deposit and two caps. CUSTOM is the maker's own curve, typed or posted by an agent over the API. TLP is one deposit that runs AUTO on every listed asset, split equally, one EARN account per asset, and nothing shared between accounts.
Inactive account: An account CLOSE ACCOUNT has ended — kept in full, off the dashboard's default view behind SHOW INACTIVE, its name kept for good (names are never reused or renumbered). Nothing else makes an account inactive: a flat book or a curve switched off is still an active account.
Booked shortfall: What an account's deposit could not cover when a fee or a loss was booked. The account's own debt, printed on its card and cleared by your next deposit; never pulled from your wallet.
Legacy account: An account that exists only in the venue's old test history, from before the ledger. Counted in one muted line on PORTFOLIO and left out of the totals.

Making (EARN)#

Curve: A maker's whole two-sided price schedule across strikes and decays — what it posts instead of orders.
Rally cap / crash cap (E+ / E−): A maker's promised size limit per side, counted in perps: the book's loss on a rally (written calls) and on a crash (written puts), each divided by one perp's loss on that side. A promise that paces the lean, not a fill gate.
Leverage refuses, κ leans: The venue's only hard refusal is margin. A cap never refuses a fill: a book at or past its cap has already leaned its curve against the flow, and if that moves it outside the corridor it stops setting the front but stays posted.
Written notional: Superseded display figure the EARN view still prints beside the real requirement: the sum of the most an earn account's call side could owe on a rally (E+) and its put side on a crash (E−). The venue's actual measure of a book against its promise is the LENGTH described under E+ / E− above; the SUM across the two sides is unchanged, only what is summed has moved.
Worldview (Θ): A six-number Kou jump-diffusion belief about the asset: lean, volatility, and each jump type's frequency and size. A curve with no fit yet falls back to ASSET_THETA, frozen from the asset's own price history.
Lean: An AUTO maker's bias with inventory: at each strike and decay its quotes lift by the share of its cap used there times a half-spread. Nothing is lowered; a flat book has no lean.
Spread (g): The half-spread a maker posts either side of its own mid. Its entire revenue.

Pricing and the book#

Front: The best quote on each side at each strike and decay across the makers standing. Every open and close trades at it, pro-rata within a price level. Nothing trades at a synthetic centre.
Corridor: The oracle's bid and ask pushed out to twice their distance from the mid. A quote may be wider than the oracle but may not cross it; a quote outside the corridor stands and is drawn but never sets the front and never fills.
Pro-rata: Within one price level, a fill splits across makers by standing size. No time priority.
Margin: Per sold option: initial = max(15 % − distance out of the money, 10 %) × spot + mark; maintenance = 7.5 % × spot + mark. Summed at the account; makers and takers alike; the covered wing of PROTECT and FARM is exempt. Liquidation closes at the front.

Leaving a position#

Close: One position: a perp row, one option pair, one single option, or one maker line, traded at the front. A taker's close sells at the best bid (or buys at the best ask) and the writer of record pays or receives that price; a maker's close passes its obligation to the makers standing.
Writer of record: The maker whose quote a position was opened against. At a taker's close the position returns to it, which is why open interest falls on every taker close.
Close account: One account: every position in it closes, quoting stops, the account goes inactive with its history and its name intact — a name is never freed, reused or renumbered. On a PROTECT or FARM account this is the only close verb there is.
Close all: Wallet-wide: every position in every account, each traded on the market. Accounts and curves stay live.
Standing curve: A maker that has stopped quoting still stands on the trades that reduce what it already wrote — so whoever wrote your position is still there to take it back.

Testing#

Ledger: The contract on Elysium that holds every account, deposit, position, fee and funding charge. The header chip names its version and the last block read.
Keeper: The service process that pushes the oracle's fits, the roster of makers, the marks and funding into the contracts, and retries liquidation closes. It sets no price and clears no trade.
Testnet phase: A deployment on testnet funds: the Elysium testnet ledger, HyperCore testnet money, every wallet a real testnet wallet. A wallet's own accounts may fill each other here.
Mainnet phase: A deployment on real funds. A wallet is never its own counterparty here: an order never fills against a curve owned by any account of the taker's own wallet.