Instruments
An instrument identifies a Perps market: a tradable perpetual contract that tracks an underlying asset such as the S&P 500 Index, gold, or bitcoin. Each instrument carries the information needed to identify the market and the rules for trading it.Perps Accounts
A Perps account is tied to a signer account. The signer account controls private actions such as trading and withdrawals. The Perps account holds the state created by those actions: collateral, open positions, orders, fills, and history. Later sections explain how those pieces change as orders execute, prices move, and funding payments settle. Perps accounts are funded through onchain collateral deposits.If you’re building on Perps, delegated credentials let your app act for the
Perps account without using the owner key for every private action. See
Authenticated Sessions.
Prices
A Perps market has two broad categories of prices: execution prices and calculated prices. Execution prices come from trades in the order book. Calculated prices are produced by Polymarket and used for reference, margin, and liquidation checks. This separation matters because one small or isolated trade should not be able to change an account’s risk state or trigger liquidation by itself.
Calculated prices are computed from external price feeds. The feed set can
change with market sessions, such as regular hours, overnight trading, and
weekends, while funding, margin, and liquidation rules stay the same around the
clock. See Market Sessions.
Orders And Fills
Orders are requests to trade in a Perps market. They can execute immediately or rest in the order book until another order matches them. The order book is the list of resting buy and sell orders for a market. A fill is an executed match between orders in that book.Fills update Perps account state; they are not separate onchain transactions.
Trading Positions
Once an order fills, it changes the account’s position in that market. A position is what the account currently holds: long exposure, short exposure, or no open exposure.
A fill that adds to the account’s current side increases exposure. A fill against
the current side reduces exposure. When the position size reaches zero, the
position is closed. If losses exceed what the account can support, the position
can also be liquidated.
Margin And Liquidation
Perps accounts use collateral to support open positions. Margin checks compare the account’s current value against the collateral required to open, increase, or maintain those positions. Margin checks use these terms:
Account equity moves as the mark price changes and as account debits or credits
settle. It can move up or down even before a position is closed.
At a high level, account equity is the account’s collateral plus open-position
gains or losses, minus amounts owed.
Funding Payments
Funding payments help keep a Perps market close to its index price. They are not order-book trades; they are account debits or credits applied to open positions over time.Funding payments are different from collateral deposits. Deposits add
collateral to a Perps account; funding payments are debits or credits between
long and short positions.
A funding payment credited to the account increases account equity. A funding
payment owed by the account reduces account equity.
The funding rate is the rate used to calculate these payments. Public market
data shows funding rates over time, while private account history shows the
funding payments applied to an account.
Realtime Account State
If you’re building on Perps, realtime account state helps your integration keep a local view in sync. Integrations often keep a local view of account state so they can react quickly to fills, risk changes, and collateral movements. Realtime updates help keep that local view in sync.
Realtime streams can reconnect or detect gaps. When that happens, the integration
should resync by refetching the account state it depends on before trusting the
local view again.