Skip to main content

​
What is Continuum?

A Solana protocol for 24/7 synthetic exposure to real-world assets. You deposit collateral (cUSDC on devnet) and get matched long and short tokens priced from the asset’s NAV. You can trade either leg on Continuum’s own venues, hold it with no expiry, or redeem both legs together for collateral. → Introduction.

​
Is it like a perp DEX?

No. Perp DEXs use funding rates, margin and liquidations, and Continuum has none of them. Positions are SPL tokens, paid for in full, so there is no leverage and nothing to liquidate. You can transfer the tokens, deposit them elsewhere or redeem them. The short leg does carry a volatility decay instead of funding. It is charged on realized volatility rather than on positioning, and longs never pay it.

​
What’s the difference between long and short tokens?

Both track the same underlying. The long token (L) is priced at the asset price P. The short token (S) is priced at K / P × γ, where K = initial_l_price × initial_s_price and γ is the short leg’s volatility-decay index. So L × S = K × γ: when the asset rises, L rises and S falls. A paired position has little exposure to small moves. To take a direction, you sell one of the legs.

​
Can I lose more than my deposit?

No. Continuum has no leverage and no liquidations, and you pay the full value of both legs when you mint. Redeeming needs a price pushed in the last 300 s. While the keeper is pushing, holders of both legs can redeem against the market’s collateral vault. They get full NAV while the vault is fully collateralized, or a pro-rata share if a large move has left it below 100%. Nobody is wiped out. A redemption larger than the vault’s cash can be queued with a redemption request and paid in parts as cash comes back (see Redeem). If the keeper stopped pushing prices, redeem would revert until pushes resumed. You can still lose part of it: to fees, to the short leg’s volatility decay, to a pro-rata payout in that tail case, or to ordinary directional risk once you sell one leg.

​
Can I just buy long-only?

Yes, in two ways:
  1. Mint, then sell the short leg. On QQQ at its 9 Oct 2026 price, 100 cUSDC mints about 0.0664 QQQL and 0.1637 QQQS after the fee. The QQQS is worth about 49.9 cUSDC at NAV; selling it with a committed order, less the spread, leaves you long QQQ with a cash buffer.
  2. Buy directly. While the market is open, send a committed order, which fills at NAV ± the posted commit spread at a price pushed after you commit. The app uses traders’ orders on the order book instead when they fill all of it now for less. While the market is closed, the long leg’s bin book and traders’ orders form one book, and a buy takes the cheapest offers first from either.
Buying directly is the usual path. Minting first is useful when you also want the short leg. → Trade flow.

​
Why “paired” if I can sell one leg?

The program mints and redeems user positions only in pairs, for solvency. Once minted, the legs are ordinary SPL tokens, and you can do anything with them, including selling one. The pairing rule applies where collateral turns into tokens and back, not to trading.

​
Why no funding rate?

Perps use funding payments between longs and shorts to keep the perp price near the index. Continuum has no such transfer, so nobody pays for being on the crowded side. Holding is not free on both legs, though. The short leg carries a volatility decay (the γ index), which pays for the convexity a long-short pair is exposed to. Unlike a funding rate, it tracks realized volatility rather than positioning. It only moves one way, so it never credits a holder, and it never touches the long leg.

​
How do book prices stay close to NAV?

While a market’s price is live, the books don’t fill: trades go through committed orders, which fill at NAV ± the committed spread. The keeper re-centres each leg’s bin book near NAV whenever its centre drifts past the reposition gate, 20 bps by default. Each book is lean, and an outside trader who lifts a stale bin pays the real slippage of the bin ladder. Turning a cheap leg into cUSDC through the protocol means buying the other leg too and redeeming the pair, which pays the redeem fee. → Peg maintenance. The keeper has no arbitrage loop. Anyone can trade a book that has drifted from NAV; no keeper key is needed. → Arb bot.

​
What if the keeper goes down?

Mint and redeem go straight to the on-chain program, but they need its price push. 300 s after the last push, both revert with TwapNotAvailable until pushes resume. The same happens every time the underlying market closes. What keeps working:
  • The bin books open at their last posted bins, because pool_swap trades once the price is more than 300 s old outside Normal.
  • A committed order that nobody settles can be refunded with cancel_swap once its 180 s TTL has passed. Anyone can send it, and the escrow goes back to the order’s owner.
  • settle_swap is keeper-only, so the owner can’t choose which price fills the order. The keeper settles at the first push it sees after the commit. If a payout can’t reach the owner’s recorded account, the order is held and anyone can send claim.

​
Is my money lent out? What if a lending venue freezes?

On devnet, no. There are no lending venues there, so collateral stays in each market’s vault. On mainnet, mostly yes. The keeper lends a market’s collateral to USDC lending venues (Kamino, Jupiter Lend and Save) and keeps a liquid share in the vault, 3% by default and re-derived each night in the range 1% to 10%. A redeem larger than that reverts with InsufficientLiquidCollateral; the holder queues a redemption request, which the keeper pays as it recalls money from the venues, borrowing from the treasury for the part the venues can’t release in time. Each venue limits withdrawals, and a venue can pause them: MarginFi paused all withdrawals for about 79 hours in April 2026. A large redemption could then wait until the venue reopens. If a venue loss leaves a market below 100% collateral, the keeper’s backstop refills it from the protocol treasury. → Solvency → Lending venues.

​
Can I run my own keeper?

Not today. The keeper’s source and binary are not published, and each market’s keeper_authority is a single pubkey that the market admin sets with update_keeper_authority. You can still run bots that need no keeper key: settling committed orders and trading the books are open to anyone. → Keeper configuration · Arb bot.

​
What chain / network is this on?

Solana devnet. Plans for mainnet are on the Roadmap.

​
What wallets work?

Any Solana wallet that supports the Wallet Standard, such as Phantom, Solflare or Backpack. The app connects through Solana Wallet Adapter.

​
How are L and S tokens priced?

user_twap_price is the spot price the keeper pushes, scaled to 1e6 and adjusted for corporate actions, despite the “TWAP” in its name. If it is 0 or more than 300 s old, mint and redeem revert with TwapNotAvailable; there is no fallback price. Mint and redeem also quote each leg against the user by the oracle confidence band, on every market except QQQ as of 10 Oct 2026. → NAV math.

​
What’s the minimum mint?

10 cUSDC (10_000_000 base units). Below that, BelowMinimum rejects the mint. Redeems have the same minimum, measured as the value of the legs you burn.

​
What fees are there?

10% of each mint and redeem fee is a dev tax. A mint and redeem round trip at an unchanged price costs about twice the charged fee: 54 bps on QQQ.

​
What’s the exposure cap?

Each market’s Clp account stores an oi_cap in cUSDC atoms (0 means uncapped). It limits traders’ net position in the market: what traders hold long minus what they hold short, at NAV, not counting the CLP’s own inventory. The treasury is the other side of that net position, so the cap bounds what a one-sided move can cost it. A trade that pushes the net further past the cap is refused or cut down; a trade that shrinks it always goes through. Because the cap is on the net, every short opens room for one more long. A committed order that doesn’t fit fills in part and the rest comes back to you. A bin-book fill that doesn’t fit reverts. Paired mints are never limited by it, and neither are redemptions, which burn a balanced pair. The keeper re-sizes each cap every night from a one-year simulation and the treasury’s balance, so read the live Clp.oi_cap from the chain. See Solvency → Exposure cap and Trade. The older current_oi field and the update_oi instruction are unused.

​
Can I earn something for holding the short leg?

Possibly, through the short rebate. S staked from a trading account earns cUSDC from a pot that the keeper funds out of the collateral yield the market has harvested. The annual rate is twice that yield at most, and it is scaled from 0 up to full as traders’ net long builds toward the exposure cap. It is 0 until a market’s cap is live and traders are net long. It isn’t a points program, and nothing promises a return, so read RebateMarket.rate_bps on chain for the current rate. Steps are on Trading account.

​
Why is the protocol the sole LP?

To keep the MVP simple. The protocol funds the CLP’s capital itself, and there are no user LP shares.

​
Is there a token?

Continuum’s planned governance token is CNTM. It is not live, and nothing on chain is governed by it today.

​
Where do I report bugs?

​
How can I get cUSDC for testing?

Use the faucet: Get 1000 cUSDC on /faucet, once per wallet every 24 hours. → Faucet program · Quickstart.

​
Why “Continuum”?

Synthetic exposure across the continuum of real-world assets (stocks, indices, commodities and FX), available at any hour from any Solana wallet.

​
Can I integrate Continuum into my own product?

Yes, please. Long and short tokens are SPL tokens, paired mint and redeem are open to anyone, NAV is on chain, and CPI works. The protocol is permissionless, so integrating needs no approval. Building an integration? Tell us in #general on Discord. → Composability.

​
Where do I find the source code?

The program, keeper and frontend source is not public. The IDLs for all six programs are published in the docs repo, under idl/, and are enough to build clients and CPI integrations. This docs site’s source is github.com/continuum-markets/continuum-docs. PRs welcome.

​
See also

Quickstart

First-time mint flow.

Concepts

The full mental model.

Glossary

Every term explained.

Errors

What to do when things fail.