Mars Perps Mainnet Launch: Unlocking Powerful Leverage on Neutron
December 13, 2024
Mission Briefing: Mars Perps are now live on the Neutron mainnet, bringing cutting-edge (Gen3) leverage trading and unmatched capital efficiency to traders. Here’s what you need to know:
Perps Live on Neutron: BTC/USD and ETH/USD perp markets are now available with up to 10x leverage.
Cross-Collateral & Cross-Margin Trading: Maximize capital efficiency with Mars Credit Accounts, enabling assets across your account to act as collateral.
Oracle-Based Mechanism: Leveraging Slinky - An enshrined price oracle that provides price updates at the beginning of the block, reducing oracle front running risk while allowing great UX
USDC Settlements: Seamless profit and loss (PnL) settlements in USDC through the Red Bank and counterparty vaults.
Key Features of Mars Perps
Cross-Collateral and Cross-Margin Integration
Mars Perps operate within the Mars Credit Accounts, offering:
Cross-Collateral: Use all whitelisted assets in your credit account as collateral, weighted by risk. Available assets include:
Cross-Margin: Open multiple perp positions with shared collateral in your credit account, including unrealized PnL from each position dynamically adjusting margin availability.
This unique integration ensures unparalleled composability and capital efficiency.
Oracle-Based Trading
Mars Perps utilize Neutron's secure, built-in price oracle, Slinky, which produces manipulation-resistant price updates directly within the consensus process. This mitigates vulnerabilities like front-running attacks seen in other protocols.
USDC Settlements
All PnL is settled in USDC, ensuring transparency and simplicity. Profits are paid from the counterparty vault, while losses are deducted from your collateral or borrowed from the Red Bank when necessary.
Funding Rates: Balancing Market Dynamics
Mars Perps use a dynamic funding rate mechanism to maintain balance between long and short positions in the market. This self-regulating system ensures the protocol remains stable while managing risks for the counterparty vault.
Funding rates are periodic payments between long and short traders based on the market's skew (imbalance). If longs dominate, they pay shorts, and vice versa, encouraging traders to balance the market.
Dynamic Adjustments: Mars Perps dynamically adjust funding rates based on:
Market Skew: Larger imbalances lead to higher funding rates to incentivize counter-skew trades.
Skew Scale: Determines how quickly funding rates increase as the imbalance grows.
Trader Benefits:
Encourages healthy market liquidity and minimizes directional risk.
Creates opportunities for arbitrage and sophisticated trading strategies.
This mechanism ensures Mars Perps remain secure, efficient, and fair, supporting a stable trading environment even at high leverage.
Advanced Order Types
Mars Perps offer a robust suite of order types designed to give traders flexibility and control over their strategies. At launch, the following order types will be available:
Market Orders: Execute instantly at the best available price for fast and seamless trades.
Limit Orders: Set specific price targets to buy or sell assets, ensuring trades only execute at your desired price or better.
Stop Orders: Automate risk management by triggering orders when a specified price is reached, protecting gains or limiting losses.
Looking ahead, Mars Protocol will expand its offering with additional advanced order types in Q1 2025, further empowering traders with sophisticated tools to navigate the markets.
Risk Management
Mars Perps go beyond leveraged trading, setting a new standard for secure and efficient trading.
Built-In Risk Management: Features like skew caps, funding rate mechanisms, and automatic deleveraging maintain protocol stability.
Comprehensive Security: Extensively audited to ensure safe deployment.
Future Innovations on Mars
While Perps are live, the journey doesn’t end here. Coming in early Q1, Copy-Trading Vaults will take the Mars experience even further:
Trade across LPs, Spot, Borrow/Lend, and Perps.
Fungible Vault Shares: Enabling tokenization of sophisticated strategies such as the Carry Trade, Leveraged Tokens and more.
Create your own vault strategy and share the PnL with others who follow it.
A more flexible, versatile and capital efficient alternative to competitors.
Licensing Update
As part of the Perps launch, the new Mars contracts have been released under a separate repository with an FSL license. The original GPL-3.0 licensed contracts remain available for use at Mars Protocol Contracts Repository.
This change reflects the evolution of the Mars Protocol codebase and ensures protection of the protocol’s latest features.
Start Trading Perps Now
Visit Mars Perps on Neutron to trade BTC/USD and ETH/USD with up to 10x leverage now. More markets are coming in Q1 2025—stay tuned!
