Reading prices

Three ways to get a price for a Continuum market - on-chain TWAP, Hermes HTTP, and the native book’s base price.

A Continuum market exposes prices in three places. They serve different purposes:

Source	Latency	Purpose
Market.user_twap_price	~15s	What mint and redeem use. Authoritative for protocol P&L.
OracleConfig.last_price	~15s	Same source, more metadata (confidence, freshness).
Pyth Hermes (HTTP)	seconds	Off-chain raw spot. For predictive UI updates.
Native book base price (Pool account)	instant	Where the per-side book is pinned. May float during closed hours.

On-chain NAV (the canonical price)

Read Market → derive both NAVs:

import { Program, BN } from "@coral-xyz/anchor";
import { PublicKey } from "@solana/web3.js";

const market = await mintRedeem.account.market.fetch(marketPDA);

const lNav = market.userTwapPrice.gtn(0)
  ? market.userTwapPrice
  : market.initialLPrice;
const sNav = market.initialLPrice.mul(market.initialSPrice).div(lNav);

const lNavUI = lNav.toNumber() / 1e6;
const sNavUI = sNav.toNumber() / 1e6;

This is the most-authoritative price for the protocol - what mint_paired, redeem_paired, keeper_mint_single, keeper_redeem_single all use.

Oracle freshness and confidence

For more granular signal, fetch the oracle:

const oracle = await oracleProgram.account.oracleConfig.fetch(market.oracleAddress);

const stale = Date.now() / 1000 - oracle.lastUpdateTime.toNumber();
const confBps = (oracle.lastConfidence.toNumber() / oracle.lastPrice.toNumber()) * 10_000;

console.log(`stale: ${stale.toFixed(1)}s, confidence: ${confBps.toFixed(0)} bps`);

Use this to:

• Surface a “price is stale” warning in your UI when stale > 30.
• Disable mint at confidence > some threshold (mirrors what the program would do anyway).
• Compute the worst-case quote a user would actually pay (NAV × (1 + state_mult × confidence_bps / 10000)).

Pyth Hermes (off-chain)

For lowest-latency display:

async function fetchHermes(feedId: string): Promise<{ price: number, conf: number }> {
  const res = await fetch(
    `https://hermes.pyth.network/v2/updates/price/latest?ids[]=${feedId}`,
  );
  const data = await res.json();
  const p = data.parsed[0].price;
  return {
    price: Number(p.price) * 10 ** Number(p.expo),
    conf:  Number(p.conf)  * 10 ** Number(p.expo),
  };
}

// QQQ Pyth feed ID (Hermes)
const { price, conf } = await fetchHermes(
  "0x9695e2b96ea7b3859da9ed25b7a46a920a776e2fdae19a7bcfdf2b219230452d",
);
console.log(`QQQ Hermes: ${price.toFixed(2)} ± ${conf.toFixed(2)}`);

Hermes feeds publish session-aware (regular / pre-market / post-market / overnight). The keeper picks the right session feed when pushing observations on-chain. Your client can match by checking the current US/Eastern hour.

Hour ET	Active feed kind
04:00 – 09:30	PreMarket
09:30 – 16:00	Primary
16:00 – 20:00	PostMarket
20:00 – 04:00	Overnight

Book base price (native Pool account)

Each side’s book is a single Pool account (seeds [b"pool", market, side]) in the CLP program. Its base_price_1e6 is where the keeper last pinned the book; bins ladder out from it.

const [poolPda] = PublicKey.findProgramAddressSync(
  [Buffer.from("pool"), marketPDA.toBuffer(), Buffer.from([0])], // 0 = long, 1 = short
  clpProgram.programId,
);
const pool = await clpProgram.account.pool.fetchNullable(poolPda);

// Anchor camelCases `base_price_1e6` as `basePrice1E6` (capital E at the
// digit-to-letter boundary) - `basePrice1e6` reads as undefined.
const basePrice = Number(pool.basePrice1E6) / 1e6;

Compare to NAV → drift:

const driftPct = ((basePrice / lNavUI) - 1) * 100;
console.log(`Book vs NAV: ${driftPct.toFixed(3)}%`);

While the underlying market is open this stays inside the per-market reposition gate (20-40bps). During closed hours the oracle withholds pushes and the book floats - a larger gap then is expected, not an arb: the inner bins around base are deliberately empty (the spread), and the first fresh print re-anchors the book.

Combining for a UX

A typical “live price” UI for a Continuum market:

async function getLivePrice(symbol: string) {
  const market = await mintRedeem.account.market.fetch(marketPDAs[symbol]);
  const oracle = await oracleProgram.account.oracleConfig.fetch(market.oracleAddress);

  const lNav = market.userTwapPrice.gtn(0)
    ? market.userTwapPrice.toNumber() / 1e6
    : market.initialLPrice.toNumber() / 1e6;
  const sNav = (market.initialLPrice.toNumber() / 1e6) *
               (market.initialSPrice.toNumber() / 1e6) / lNav;

  const stale = Date.now() / 1000 - oracle.lastUpdateTime.toNumber();
  const riskState = Object.keys(market.riskState)[0];

  return {
    symbol,
    lNav, sNav,
    stale, riskState,
    canMint: riskState !== "stress" && !oracle.isPaused,
  };
}

Render: lNav as the primary price, riskState as a chip if non-normal, stale as a warning if > 30s. For book traders, also show the book base price and its deviation from NAV.

When to subscribe vs poll

• Subscribe (onAccountChange) when you need < 1 second update. Costs are RPC connections; many wallets and bots can do this concurrently.
• Poll (every 5–15s) for dashboards. Cheaper RPC bill, “good enough” latency.
• Hermes HTTP when you want the rawest spot price independent of what the keeper has pushed. Bypasses on-chain TWAP smoothing.

The reference frontend polls every 15s for the market list and uses onAccountChange for the actively-displayed market detail page.

Decimals matter

Everything in account data is 6 decimals. Don’t mix raw lamports with UI numbers in the same expression:

// WRONG
const wrong = market.userTwapPrice.toNumber() * market.totalLSupply.toNumber();

// CORRECT (UI value)
const ui = (market.userTwapPrice.toNumber() / 1e6) *
           (market.totalLSupply.toNumber() / 1e6);

// CORRECT (BN math, stays in lamports)
const lamports = market.userTwapPrice.mul(market.totalLSupply).div(new BN(1e6));

BN arithmetic doesn’t overflow easily; prefer it over toNumber() for anything you might multiply.

See also

Reading state

Full state-fetch patterns (markets, vaults, positions).

Risk states

What Stress, ProxyMode, Recovery mean and how to surface them.