A to C
Anchor - The Solana smart-contract framework Continuum is built on. Version 0.32.1. Ask trim - Keeper inventory rule: ask-side synth worth more than 1.5× the bid side sweeps back to CLP custody (pool_sweep_synth). Ask depth the bid side cannot absorb only invites arbitrage.
asset_symbol - The market’s ticker, for example "QQQ". Up to 10 characters. It seeds the Market PDA.
ATA (Associated Token Account) - Solana’s standard derivation for a wallet’s token account: getAssociatedTokenAddressSync(mint, owner). Always derived, not always created, so create it idempotently before instructions that expect it.
Authority - A signer with rights over an account: market.authority (the market admin), market.keeper_authority, oracle_config.admin_authority, oracle_config.keeper_authority, the CLP authority on GlobalClp and each Clp, and the treasury guardian on TreasuryPolicy.
Base price - A book’s posted centre, Pool.base_price_1e6: NAV moved by the inventory centre-shift, or the last price during free float. Ask bins ladder above it, bid bins below.
Bid cap - Keeper inventory rule: each side’s bid cUSDC is held at the depth its next free-float book will post ($500 a side until the keeper has measured flow; CLMM_BID_TARGET_USD overrides it). The excess goes to the CLP vault, and bids that sellers spent are refilled from it. Large sells use committed orders while the market is open.
Bin step - The spacing between bins, in bps. Books use a fine core step for the first core_bins bins and a wide wing step beyond. On the live books the core is 10 to 50 bps over 3 bins and the wings 200 to 700 bps.
bps (basis points) - 1 bps = 0.01%. Fees are quoted in bps: mint_fee_bps = 18 means 0.18%.
Buffer target - A market’s overcollateralization target over parity, Market.buffer_target_bps, which the keeper posts with set_buffer_target. The target collateral ratio is 100% plus the buffer. Since 12 Oct 2026 a job recomputes each market’s buffer daily with a jump-diffusion Monte Carlo from its live leg imbalance, γ and volatility regime: at most a 1% chance a year of falling below 100%, never below 1%. On 12 Oct it ranged from 1% (FX) to 12.4% (TSLA). On chain it gates only how much excess a market can shed; mints and redeems don’t depend on it. The program clamps any target to 101% to 150%. → Solvency.
CLP (Continuous Liquidity Provider) - Continuum’s on-chain treasury and trading program. It holds protocol capital and hosts committed orders and the bin books. The instant oracle swap it also hosted was retired on 11 Oct 2026. → CLP concept.
CNTM - Continuum’s planned governance token. Not active.
Collateral floor - swap_guards.collateral_floor_bps: the lowest collateral ratio, at the settle price, at which a committed order can fill. It is 100% on every market with swap guards on. Below it the order waits for a later push, and the keeper’s treasury backstop tops the market up.
Committed order - The open-hours venue, at any size. commit_swap(side, direction, amount_in, min_out, nonce) escrows the input, which fills at NAV ± max(commit_spread_bps, 10) bps at any keeper push after the commit. The keeper posts clamp(half-spread, 10, 500) bps; on 10 Oct 2026 that was 18 on QQQ, 15 on SPY and 18 on XAU. Since 11 Oct 2026 every live market accepts committed orders. A fill waits while the market is below its collateral floor or the price fails the oracle checks. After the 180 s TTL, anyone can send cancel_swap to refund an unfilled order to its owner, and the keeper does so about 5 s after expiry. → Trade flow.
Confidence interval - The uncertainty band around a pushed price, stored as Market.oracle_confidence. On devnet it comes from a GJR-GARCH volatility model. Worst-case quoting widens mint and redeem quotes by it.
Constant-product invariant - L_NAV × S_NAV = K × γ, where K = initial_l_price × initial_s_price and γ is the short leg’s volatility-decay index. As one leg rises the other falls.
CPI (Cross-Program Invocation) - Solana’s mechanism for one program to call another. The CLP calls mint-redeem by CPI to mint and redeem pairs from its own vault (vault_mint_pairs, vault_redeem_pairs).
cUSDC - Continuum’s devnet collateral mint (B1c5xBYkp7AAemYhcu4VuH4CU4sPJDDuG2iuv6ts38uE). On mainnet the collateral is real USDC. These docs say “cUSDC” to avoid confusion.
D to L
Drift gate (reposition gate) - The move in a book’s target centre that triggers a re-centre: 20 bps by default (CLMM_REPOSITION_BPS), cut further so the book moves before NAV reaches the floor of its first funded bin.
Dynamic buffer - The formula the keeper used to compute each market’s buffer target live from realized volatility, B = δ²/2 + |q|·δ + margin. Per-market Monte Carlo targets replaced it on 11 Oct 2026, recomputed daily since 12 Oct. See Buffer target.
Force price - The oracle program’s force_price instruction. It exists in the source only behind the devnet build feature, is not in the published IDL and is not deployed. An operator emergency tool.
Free float - The book the keeper posts while mint and redeem are frozen (last push over 300 s old): anchored at the last price, each side in one bin within 1% of it, sized to measured demand ($500 a side until flow is measured) and limited by a risk cap on that market’s share of the treasury. A guard can pull bins that other venues show have gone stale. → Book management.
γ index - Market.s_gamma_index, the short leg’s volatility-decay index (1e9 = 1.0), which multiplies its NAV. The keeper lowers it as realized volatility accrues (set_s_gamma_index); the program rejects writes that raise it or fall out of range. reanchor_gamma (authority only, at least 14 days apart) folds γ into initial_s_price and resets it to 1. It is not a reset to the spot price. → Volatility decay.
Guardian - The freeze-only key on the CLP’s TreasuryPolicy. It can freeze and unfreeze treasury withdrawals, cancel a pending loosening of the limits, and hand its role to a new key. It can’t move funds. Only the guardian can unfreeze. → Treasury.
initial_l_price / initial_s_price - Anchors set when a market is initialized. Their product is K in the NAV formulas. NAV never falls back to them. reanchor_gamma folds γ into initial_s_price.
Instant depth - The book’s standing bin liquidity: what a pool_swap can fill immediately while the market’s price is stale. Deliberately lean.
Inventory centre-shift - The keeper’s shift of each book’s centre to work off the protocol’s own inventory. When the public holds more L than S, the CLP holds the extra S, so the long book is quoted dearer and the short book cheaper. At most half the narrower leg’s half-spread. On by default.
is_long - Boolean argument to the single-leg instructions (keeper_mint_single, keeper_redeem_single, keeper_burn_single, permissionless_burn). true means the long leg, false the short leg.
Keeper - The off-chain Rust service the protocol runs: price pushes, book management, committed-order settlement, inventory moves and parameter posting. Its source is not published. → Keeper overview.
keeper_authority - The pubkey stored on Market that may push prices (update_risk_state_v2), post buffer targets and γ, rebalance collateral between markets, and call the keeper-only single-leg instructions.
L (Long) - One half of a Continuum paired position. Rises in value as the underlying rises.
L_NAV - Long-leg NAV: Market.user_twap_price, the spot price the keeper pushes, scaled to 1e6 and adjusted for corporate actions. If it is 0 or more than 300 s old, mint and redeem revert with TwapNotAvailable.
LP (Liquidity Provider) - The protocol is the only LP, through the CLP. There are no user LP shares.
M to R
mint_fee_bps - Per-market mint fee, posted by the keeper as clamp(fee_mult × half-spread, 10, 100) bps. As of 13 Oct 2026: QQQ 18, SPY 16, NVDA 31, TSLA 39, EUR/GBP/JPY 10. The risk-state multiplier applies on top (1.5× in ProxyMode), and 10% of the fee is a dev tax.
mint_paired - User-facing instruction. Deposits at least 10 cUSDC and returns L and S at NAV, half the net value each. → Mint flow.
Mint authority - The signer that can mint new SPL tokens. For Continuum’s L and S mints it is the Market PDA. There is no freeze authority.
MVP - The release deployed on devnet today. It has no governance and no user LP, and its collateral yield is emulated rather than earned.
NAV (Net Asset Value) - The on-chain protocol price for L and S, used by mint and redeem. → NAV math.
Native book / bin book - Continuum’s own per-leg quote book: one Pool account per market and side, up to 16 bins stored inline (no per-bin rent), filled by pool_swap only while the market’s price is stale (PoolClosedWhileLive otherwise). Each bin holds a fixed amount at a fixed price, and a swap walks outward from the centre. The CLMM_* keeper variables and clmm.rs keep an older label. → What the book actually is.
OI (Open Interest) - Outstanding token supply, tracked per leg on the Market account (total_l_supply, total_s_supply). The exposure cap works on traders’ net position, not on OI.
oi_cap - The exposure cap stored on each market’s Clp account, in cUSDC atoms (0 means uncapped). It bounds traders’ net position E. The keeper posts it nightly. → Exposure cap.
Exposure (E) - Traders’ net position in a market: (L supply − CLP-held L) · l_nav − (S supply − CLP-held S) · s_nav. CLP-held is the pool’s synth vault plus the CLP’s own token account for that leg. Above 0, traders are net long and the treasury is net short.
Oracle - The oracle program, which holds a per-market OracleConfig with feeds, TWAPs and health state. On devnet the keeper does not update it; mint and redeem use the price the keeper writes to Market. → Oracle concept.
Paired - As in mint_paired and redeem_paired: the user-facing entry points, where L and S are minted or burned together at NAV-weighted values rather than in equal quantities.
PDA (Program Derived Address) - Solana’s deterministic pubkey derived from seeds. Continuum has many: Market, Clp, OracleConfig and others. → PDA derivations.
Protective skew - The spread engine’s trend response: the side a continuing trend would hit widens with the drift z-score, and the other side never tightens below the symmetric shape. An antisymmetric variant, which also tightened the other side, failed in backtests.
ProxyMode - The risk state every devnet market runs in. The programs price from Market.user_twap_price, and fees and the confidence band are multiplied by 1.5. → Risk states.
Pyth - The oracle network mainnet will use (Pyth Pro). On devnet the keeper prices markets from a free public quote source, because Pyth’s public price endpoint now needs an API key.
Realized ratchet - The spread engine’s fast term: a trailing empirical q90 of window moves, warm after about 8 windows. One of four terms in the half-spread.
Rebate pot - The per-market cUSDC account at ["rebate_pot", market] in the trading program that the short rebate pays from. The keeper funds it from the treasury, never beyond the collateral yield the market has harvested since the rebate opened, and the reward index allocates no more than the pot has received.
Recovery - The risk state after Stress. The fee and confidence multiplier falls from 3× to 1× over the hour after the market enters Recovery.
redeem_fee_bps - Per-market redeem fee. The keeper posts the same value as mint_fee_bps.
redeem_paired - User-facing instruction. Burns the largest value-balanced pair inside two maximum amounts (both above zero), leaves the rest of the larger leg with the caller, and returns cUSDC at NAV less the redeem fee. The pair burned must be worth at least 10 cUSDC. → Redeem flow.
Registry - The on-chain symbol-to-market index (Hss7QZ46RcrV4ta63q2EM2Wf1Pzbjnd5FNjaTTDZHnau). It is deployed and initialized, but it holds no markets and nothing reads it yet. Its only venue type is BinBook. → Registry program.
risk_state - Normal, ProxyMode, Stress or Recovery, stored on Market and written by the keeper with update_risk_state_v2. Devnet markets are always in ProxyMode. Fee and confidence multipliers: 1×, 1.5×, 3×, and 3× falling to 1× over 1 hour. → Risk states.
S to Z
S (Short) - One half of a Continuum paired position. Rises in value as the underlying falls.S_NAV - Short-leg NAV: K / L_NAV × s_gamma_index / 1e9, with K = initial_l_price × initial_s_price.
Short rebate - cUSDC paid to S staked from a trading account, at an annual rate on the staked S’s value of cap × ramp. The cap is twice the market’s realised collateral yield, and the ramp rises from 0 to 1 as traders’ net long averages up to half the exposure cap. The rate can be 0, and nothing promises a return. → Short rebate.
Slippage - The difference between the expected and the actual swap output. On the bin books it is the real cost of walking the bin ladder. Committed orders have none: they fill at NAV ± max(commit_spread_bps, 10) bps whatever their size.
Slow auto-floor - The spread engine’s slow term: floor_mult × σ_60d, never below 5 bps. It needs about 10 days of history in memory to engage, and the static floor applies before then.
Solvency invariant - A property the protocol enforces at all times. → Solvency invariants.
Stress - The risk state for extreme confidence or staleness. Mint and redeem are both blocked by default: allow_mint_in_stress and allow_redeem_in_stress are false on every live market.
Swap guards - Clp.swap_guards, set with configure_swap: whether a market takes committed orders (enabled, frozen), plus the price checks and the collateral floor that settle_swap applies. On for every live market since 11 Oct 2026. → Trade flow.
Treasury - The CLP’s global vault, the cUSDC ATA of the GlobalClp PDA (5GSTKN4u5LfropcnQQoqFht48JMaF1SzZzBcgDNL5VKy). It held about 40.0M cUSDC late on 12 Oct 2026, after the keeper’s liquidity reallocator returned idle CLP cash on 11 Oct and the CLP’s own holdings were cut to working size on 12 Oct. The devnet keeper is now burning it down, and it held 36.1M on 13 Oct 2026. backstop_market moves it into a market’s collateral with no limit. The keeper does that when a market falls below 100% or stays short of its posted target, filling to that target, at most 130%. admin_withdraw takes it out of the protocol at a capped rate, set in TreasuryPolicy, to one named account. The keeper’s yield allocator counts it as first-loss capital. → Treasury.
TWAP (Time-Weighted Average Price) - A price averaged over a window. The oracle program keeps TWAPs in OracleConfig, but nothing updates them on devnet. Market.user_twap_price is a spot price despite its name.
Two-zone geometry - The book’s bin layout: a fine core step near the centre for tight instant pricing, and wide wing steps beyond core_bins.
user_twap_price - The Market field that drives L_NAV. The keeper writes it with mint-redeem update_risk_state_v2, along with twap_updated_at.
Vault (collateral vault) - The token account holding a market’s backing cUSDC (market.collateral_vault). Every market has its own: the cUSDC ATA of its Market PDA. QQQ, SPY and XAU shared the unified vault (PDA [b"unified_vault"], 5a51yurKcqxy6rVAV1ykif5fDzhHdjgZs3EL7yncLrp8) until 11 Oct 2026. It holds 0 cUSDC, and that day’s upgrade removed it from the program.
Venue split - Routing by market state: committed orders while a market’s price is live, and the bin books while it is stale. The instant oracle swap (clp_swap) was retired on 11 Oct 2026. Both venues price off the same keeper-pushed NAV.
Worst-case quoting - Mint and redeem price each leg against the user by c = oracle_confidence × state multiplier: mint values L at P + c and S at K / (P − c) × γ, redeem L at P − c and S at K / (P + c) × γ. A per-market switch (worst_case_config.enabled), on everywhere except QQQ as of 10 Oct 2026.
Yield allocator - The keeper task that decides how much of each market’s collateral to lend, and where, from live mainnet venue state. Each venue’s total position across all markets is capped at first-loss capital divided by the venue failures to cover (1 by default). First-loss capital is the treasury plus half of all markets’ collateral above 100%. It lends only on mainnet with COLLATERAL_YIELD_ENABLED=true. On devnet an emulator credits the interest its plan would earn. Every live market has yield_enabled = true as of 11 Oct 2026, and new markets start with it true. Harvested yield is added to the market’s own collateral.
See also
Errors
Per-program error catalog.
Live markets
All current devnet pubkeys.