Perpetual Futures are now live

Synthetix has launched Perpetual Futures Beta. Anyone with access to the internet can leverage Synthetix’s infrastructure to access up to 10x leverage on an evergrowing list of Synthetic assets.

Kwenta, a fully decentralized and composable protocol with an easy-to-use trading UI, is the first partner to integrate Synthetix’s perps. Synthetix perps markets are accessible through a dedicated Kwenta UI.

Benefits of Perpetual Futures

The current design of Synth exchanging does not easily provide traders with a mechanism for leveraged trading or for shorting assets with leverage.

Synthetix's perpetual futures enable a much expanded and capital-efficient trading experience by allowing both leveraged longs and shorts on a large selection of assets.

For SNX stakers, futures provide an additional revenue stream due to exchange and funding rate fees and reduce the need to hedge the additional debt due to inherent self-hedging and controlled exposure through market size limits.

Another useful property of Synthetix’s perps markets is that support for new assets can be expanded more readily for futures than for spot assets. This is because perpetual markets don’t share some of the limitations and risks of spot synths, allowing for more assets to be safely added.  This means that the Synthetix protocol may soon offer a broader range of perpetual futures pairs than many competitors.

Perpetual Futures Beta

The initial Futures Beta Launch features ETH, LINK, and BTC trading. For the first few weeks, trading will have open interest caps of $20M sUSD for BTC and ETH, and $2M for LINK, to optimize futures market parameters under real-world conditions.

You can start trading right now on Kwenta! Head on over.

The current futures market design is experimental and may need to be upgraded in subsequent releases. Changes to core contracts will require users to close positions in the old markets and migrate to the upgraded markets.

There also may be relatively frequent market parameter updates made by the Spartan Council during the initial period to optimize for best trader UX and protocol and debt-pool safety. These parameter updates will not require any user action.

The Future of Futures

Once real-world trading data is accumulated, optimizations will be made quickly, open interest caps will be increased substantially to support more trading volume.

Significant upgrades to Synthetic Futures will require a migration to new contracts, which is outside the scope of initial funding rate optimizations.  Please await future announcements regarding the initial launch and subsequent optimizations.

Any Questions?

Read SIP-80 for further details on Synthetic Futures

If you've got any comments or questions about the release, please join the conversation in Discord.