11 · Glossary

Glossary

The basics#

Perp: A perpetual future: leveraged exposure to an asset with no expiry, margined and liquidatable.
Oracle: The listed options market joined by straight lines: between listed strikes, between listed expiries, down to intrinsic at zero time and out past the longest expiry, always inside the no-arbitrage bounds. Its bid and ask are the mid minus and plus the listed half-spread, so they cannot cross. Deribit for BTC, Derive for HYPE. 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, any fraction (0.25, 2.5, 11.6). 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. The ledger records the rate exactly.
Funding: The cost of the roll: 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; the short receives, less the venue's 10 % share. 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 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. Strikes must sit inside the listed market's strike range at that decay.
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. Money reaches your HyperCore wallet only when the account closes or you withdraw.

Accounts#

Account: A margined bucket under one wallet, of one kind — options, protect 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.
HyperCore wallet: Your own money outside the venue: your HyperCore account at the address you connected. PORTFOLIO prints it on one line. DEPOSIT moves dollars from it into an account; WITHDRAW and CLOSE ACCOUNT send dollars back to it. There is no idle balance between the two.
Deposit / Withdraw: The two moves between your HyperCore wallet and an account, on every kind. Nothing enters an account without your signature: 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. Daily limits queue a withdrawal, never refuse it.
Protect: The PROTECT choice on CREATE PERP, which opens a protect account carrying a perp plus an option pair. You type a dollar FLOOR, a TARGET ROE and how many days the protection should last; the venue solves the strikes and decays to hold that floor and keep as much of your upside as it can, premium-neutral. Works on long and short perps. A protect account holds exactly one perp and one option pair, opens as one atomic request, and CLOSE ACCOUNT is its only close verb.
Comparison line: The one line on the PAYOFF chart a PROTECT structure is measured against: the plain perp, with no options, that liquidates at the same floor. It has less leverage. 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's bid and ask exactly, off a deposit and two caps. CUSTOM brings the maker's own pricing model: a 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.
No recourse: A loss an account cannot cover is never collected from money you add later. The counterparty is paid from the insurance fund, the account's debt is wiped, and a later deposit is fully yours.
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 size limit per wing, in coin: its net calls sold (rally cap) and net puts sold (crash cap), counted across every strike and decay. At the cap that side stops quoting until the exposure comes down.
Quoting range: The decays and strikes makers quote. The listed market calibrates the surface and never shrinks the range: from about one hour up to the longest decay listed in the last 120 days plus a 25 % margin, and within the listed strikes at each decay.
Worldview (Θ): A maker's belief about how the asset moves. A CUSTOM maker may use any model. The venue itself keeps one, a six-number jump-diffusion fitted to the asset's own price history, only as a ruler for size read-outs; it prices nothing that trades.
Spread: A maker's revenue on a fill. For an AUTO maker it is the listed half-spread; for a CUSTOM maker, whatever it posts either side of its own price. Funding received is the other source.

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 is exempt. Liquidation closes at the front.

Fees and safety#

Taker fee: 3 bps of an option's notional, capped at 12.5 % of its premium, paid by the taker on every option open and close. Makers pay none.
Funding cut: The venue's 10 % share of every funding payment, taken from the receiving side.
Host add-on: A fee up to 5 bps of notional that a front end (a host) may add on an open, paid by the taker to the host's wallet. It shares the 12.5 % premium cap with the taker fee.
Liquidation fee: 1.5 % of the notional a liquidation closed, capped at the equity left, for OPTIONS and EARN accounts; PROTECT accounts forfeit all remaining equity. It goes to the insurance fund.
Insurance fund: A ledger account built from liquidation fees. When a closing account cannot pay what it owes, the fund pays the other side first.
Socialised loss: What the insurance fund could not cover, counted on a public counter. Ruled to be shared among the makers who were paid; never charged to a trader.
Atomic open: How PROTECT opens: one signed request carrying the perp and its option legs, filled in one transaction with price limits, or cancelled whole.
Participation: The share of the unprotected perp's return at your target that a PROTECT structure keeps. The ticket headline reads "Keeps 72% of your upside".
Protection lasts: The days a PROTECT structure keeps its floor if the price parks where funding is dearest, 30 by default.
Withdrawal limit: Daily limits on payouts: $25,000 per wallet and a venue-wide total in any rolling 24 hours, with larger requests delayed 30 minutes. A limit queues a withdrawal and never refuses it.
Frozen: The state of an asset whose prices are too old: trading and withdrawals pause and nobody is liquidated until fresh prices return.

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 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 surfaces, the roster of makers and the marks into the contracts, settles funding, tests accounts against their margin, and closes liquidated accounts until they are flat. 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.