Perpetual Futures for Sports

tail.trade is a perpetual futures exchange for team strength indices. You go long or short on a team with leverage, and your position stays open across matches, transfer windows, and entire seasons. Close it when you want — there's no expiry.

This is the same instrument structure that powers the largest crypto exchanges in the world — perpetual contracts with funding rates, cross-margin, and a decentralized limit order book — applied to a completely new asset class.

A New Financial Primitive

Until now, the only way to express a view on a football club was through one-off bets or event-specific prediction markets. Both expire when the event ends. Liquidity fragments across thousands of individual markets. There's no leverage, no short selling, no persistent price.

tail.trade changes this. One market per team. Persistent liquidity. Leverage up to 10×. Native short selling. Continuous price discovery powered by the KOPS oracle. Every match result, every transfer, every market signal feeds into a single continuous index.

How It Compares

Feature	Sportsbooks	Prediction Markets	tail.trade
Position duration	Single event	Single event	Indefinite
Leverage	None	None/limited	Up to 10×
Short selling	Not possible	Awkward	Native
Liquidity	Per event	Per event	Persistent
Withdrawal	Days	At settlement	Instant
KYC	Required	Varies	None
Custody	Custodial	Varies	Self-custody

Built for Traders

• Self-custody — Assets never leave your wallet until settlement. No counterparty risk.
• Permissionless — No KYC, no region locking. Connect a wallet and trade.
• Instant settlement — Withdraw anytime. Zero delays, zero hold periods.
• Verifiable oracle — Every price move traces to a verifiable event. Win always up, loss always down — by construction.

Each market on tail.trade tracks a team strength index powered by the KOPS oracle. The index reflects a team's competitive strength based on match results, market consensus, and live event signals. When you have a position, you are speculating on whether a team's strength index will go up or down — you do not have any ownership stake in the club.

Available Leagues

How Prices Work

Each team's price is derived from an internal strength index via a smooth transformation that ensures prices are always positive and that equal changes in strength produce equal percentage price moves across all teams.

Prices move primarily at match settlement — when a verified result is incorporated into the index. Between matches, prices also reflect changes in market consensus from distributed signal sources. During live matches, sub-second market signals drive continuous price updates.

Open Interest Caps

Each market has a dedicated open interest cap. Once reached, new positions cannot be opened until open interest falls below the limit. Caps are subject to change and will be increased as liquidity grows.

tail.trade is fully on-chain. To start trading, connect a Solana wallet.

Supported Wallets

• Phantom
• Solflare
• Backpack
• Any wallet supporting Solana via WalletConnect

Getting Started

1. Navigate to tail.trade/trade
2. Click Connect Wallet in the top right
3. Select your wallet and approve the connection
4. Fund your account with USDC (see next page)

tail.trade uses USDC as the sole collateral and settlement currency. You'll need USDC on Solana to trade.

Depositing

1. Ensure you have USDC in your connected Solana wallet
2. Click Deposit on the trading interface
3. Enter the amount and confirm the transaction
4. Your balance will update within seconds

Withdrawing

Withdrawals are instant and on-chain. Click Withdraw, enter the amount, and confirm. Funds return to your wallet immediately — no processing delays, no hold periods.

1. Select a market — choose a team from the market selector
2. Choose direction — Long (bullish on team strength) or Short (bearish)
3. Set size and leverage — choose your position size and leverage up to 10×
4. Confirm — review and submit your order

Your position is now open. It will remain open indefinitely — through matches, transfer windows, and seasons — until you close it or get liquidated.

Market Orders

Execute immediately against available liquidity at the best available price. Market orders guarantee execution but not price.

Limit Orders

Set a price at which you want your order to fill. The order will only execute when the market reaches your specified price. Limit orders guarantee price but not execution.

Take-Profit / Stop-Loss

Attach conditional orders to open positions. A take-profit closes your position when the price reaches a favorable target. A stop-loss closes when the price reaches an unfavorable threshold.

tail.trade uses cross-margin by default. Your entire USDC balance acts as collateral for all open positions. This is more capital-efficient than isolated margin, but means losses on one position can affect your other positions.

Leverage

Maximum leverage is 10× across all markets. Leverage is set per-position at the time of opening. Higher leverage means less margin is required to open a position, but also means a smaller adverse price move can trigger liquidation.

Margin Ratio

margin_ratio = equity / total_position_value

Where equity = deposited USDC + unrealized PnL − fees − funding payments.

If your margin ratio falls below the maintenance margin requirement, your position becomes eligible for liquidation. A keeper network monitors positions and executes liquidations to protect the system from bad debt.

Liquidation Process

1. Your margin ratio drops below the maintenance threshold
2. A keeper detects the eligible position
3. The position is closed against available liquidity
4. A liquidation fee is charged from remaining margin
5. Any remaining margin is returned to your account

Perpetual contracts have no expiry, so there is no natural convergence mechanism. The funding rate fills this role — it's a periodic payment between longs and shorts that incentivizes the mark price to track the oracle index.

How It Works

• Mark price > oracle index → Longs pay shorts
• Mark price < oracle index → Shorts pay longs

Funding is computed and settled continuously. The magnitude scales with the deviation between mark and oracle — larger deviations produce stronger incentives to correct.

Practical Impact

If you hold a position for an extended period, funding payments accumulate. During periods of sustained directional bias, funding can become a meaningful cost. Monitor the current funding rate on the trading interface before opening long-duration positions.

Fee Type	Rate	Description
Taker Fee	0.1%	Charged on market orders and limit orders that execute immediately
Maker Fee	0.02%	Charged on limit orders that add liquidity to the book
Liquidation Fee	1%	Charged from remaining margin upon liquidation
Funding	Variable	Continuous payment between longs and shorts

Fees are subject to change. No deposit or withdrawal fees.

tail.trade is a fully on-chain perpetual futures protocol. Every order, cancellation, trade, and liquidation is executed and settled on-chain with single-block finality. The protocol combines three execution layers to provide deep liquidity from day one while scaling to support professional market making.

Virtual AMM

Each market has a virtual automated market maker (vAMM) that provides baseline liquidity. The vAMM uses a constant-product curve with concentrated liquidity around the oracle price, ensuring trades can always execute even in markets with limited organic order flow.

The vAMM is "virtual" — there are no real assets in the pool. It functions purely as a pricing and execution mechanism. Trader PnL is zero-sum: profits realized by one side are exactly matched by losses on the other.

Dynamic Peg

The vAMM center price is continuously re-pegged to the oracle price. This ensures the vAMM always quotes around the current fair value rather than a stale historical price. Re-pegging happens atomically — there is no lag or arbitrageable gap between the oracle update and the vAMM adjustment.

Configurable Depth

Each market's vAMM depth is configured independently based on expected volatility and trading demand. Deeper pools absorb larger trades with less price impact. Pool depth can be adjusted by the protocol as markets mature.

Decentralized Limit Order Book (DLOB)

On top of the vAMM, tail.trade runs a decentralized limit order book. Market makers and keepers place resting limit orders that compete with the vAMM to fill incoming taker flow.

When a taker order arrives, the matching engine compares available execution prices across both the DLOB and the vAMM. The taker always receives the best available price — if a resting limit order offers a tighter spread than the vAMM, the limit order fills first.

Keeper Network

Limit orders are submitted on-chain and matched by a decentralized network of keepers. Keepers are off-chain bots that monitor the order book and trigger on-chain transactions to match orders when conditions are met. Any party can run a keeper — the network is permissionless and competitive.

DLOB Health

As markets mature, the share of volume filled by the DLOB relative to the vAMM is expected to grow. This ratio is a key health metric — higher DLOB fill percentage indicates more organic market making activity and tighter spreads for traders.

Matching Engine

The matching engine determines execution priority across all liquidity sources. For each incoming taker order, the engine evaluates:

1. DLOB limit orders — Resting limit orders at or better than the taker's price are matched in price-time priority.
2. vAMM — Any remaining unfilled quantity executes against the virtual AMM at the curve-determined price.

This priority stack ensures takers always get the best available price while makers can compete to provide tighter liquidity.

Settlement

All positions are settled in USDC. There are no synthetic tokens, no rebasing, no token conversions. PnL is computed as the difference between entry and exit price multiplied by position size, paid directly in USDC.

The risk engine enforces margin requirements, triggers liquidations, and prevents the accumulation of bad debt. It operates continuously and autonomously — no manual intervention is required.

Margin System

All positions are collateralized with USDC. The protocol supports cross-margin (default) where your entire account balance backs all positions, and isolated margin for traders who want to cap risk per position.

Threshold	Description
Initial Margin	Minimum collateral required to open a position. Determines maximum leverage.
Maintenance Margin	Minimum collateral to keep a position open. Falling below triggers liquidation.

Liquidation Engine

When a position's margin ratio falls below the maintenance threshold, it becomes eligible for liquidation. The liquidation engine operates through a decentralized keeper network:

1. Keepers continuously monitor all open positions
2. When a position breaches the maintenance margin, any keeper can submit a liquidation transaction
3. The position is partially or fully closed against available liquidity
4. The liquidating keeper receives a fee from the remaining margin
5. Any excess margin is returned to the position holder

Partial liquidation is preferred when possible — the engine closes just enough of the position to restore the margin ratio above maintenance, preserving the remainder for the trader.

Insurance Fund

Each market maintains a dedicated insurance fund that absorbs bad debt from underwater liquidations. The fund is capitalized through a percentage of trading fees. If a liquidation results in a shortfall (position equity is negative at closure), the insurance fund covers the difference.

Oracle Guard Rails

• Confidence interval checks — Oracle updates with wide confidence intervals trigger reduced leverage limits
• Staleness protection — If the oracle hasn't updated within a configured window, new position opens are paused
• Price band limits — Maximum per-update price movement is capped, preventing single-oracle manipulation from cascading into mass liquidations
• Settlement clamping — The KOPS oracle's cause-effect clamp prevents pathological settlement outcomes at the source

Open Interest Caps

Each market has a maximum open interest limit. When reached, new positions cannot be opened — only existing positions can be reduced or closed. This prevents the protocol from taking on more risk than the liquidity and insurance fund can support.

tail.trade uses the KOPS oracle — a constructive oracle that synthesizes continuous team strength indices from multiple independent signal layers.

Unlike traditional oracles that relay an existing spot price, KOPS constructs the index from first principles. There is no underlying spot market for "team strength" — the oracle creates the canonical price.

Signal Layers

Layer	Signal Source	Active When
Historical Performance	Cumulative match results via network equilibrium solve	Always
Market Consensus	Forward-looking assessments from distributed markets	Between matches
Live Event	Real-time market signals	During matches

Update Cadence

Regime	Cadence
Between matches	30 seconds
During live matches	1-2 seconds
At settlement	Immediate, deterministic

Cause-Effect Guarantee

The KOPS oracle enforces a hard constraint on every settlement:

• A win will never decrease a team's index
• A loss will never increase a team's index

This is verifiable on every settlement event. See Settlement for details.

For full oracle documentation, see KOPS Oracle Docs ↗

When a match ends, the KOPS oracle performs a deterministic settlement. The index update is computed from the verified match result and published to the on-chain feed.

Settlement Lifecycle

1. Match starts — Live Event layer activates, market consensus layer freezes at kickoff values
2. During match — Real-time market signals drive continuous index updates
3. Match ends — Live Event layer deactivates, settlement function executes
4. Settlement — Index update is computed deterministically from the result, cause-effect clamp is applied, new index value is published on-chain

What Determines the Size of the Move?

The magnitude of the settlement move depends on how surprising the result was relative to pre-match market expectations. A heavy favorite winning produces a small move. A heavy underdog winning produces a large move. Draws are treated as partial outcomes for both sides.

Verification

All settlements are logged publicly. Every settlement record contains the pre-event index, post-event index, verified outcome, and whether the causal monotonicity clamp was applied. Anyone can independently verify that the settlement was computed correctly.

Anyone is welcome to market make on tail.trade with their own strategies.

Why Make Markets on tail.trade?

• New asset class — first-mover advantage in a market with no competing venues
• Predictable oracle — deterministic settlement with cause-effect guarantees reduces adverse selection risk
• Hedgeable — team strength indices are correlated with bookmaker odds, enabling cross-hedging
• Maker fee rebates — competitive fee structure for liquidity providers

Getting Started

Market makers can access the full order book via the SDK and API. For dedicated support, higher rate limits, or co-location discussions, please reach out.

If you're interested in market making on tail.trade, email mm@tail.trade or reach out on Telegram ↗.

Resource	Link
App	tail.trade/trade ↗
Twitter / X	@taaborhein ↗
Telegram	Community ↗
KOPS Oracle	kops.ai ↗

What is tail.trade?

A decentralized perpetual futures exchange for team strength indices. You can go long or short on any team with up to 10× leverage.

Is this like betting?

No. Bets expire when an event ends. tail.trade positions are perpetual futures — they stay open indefinitely. You can hold a position for a minute or a year. There's no fixed event to settle against.

Do I own part of a football club?

No. When you hold a position on tail.trade, you are speculating on the team's strength index. You have no economic ownership in the underlying club.

What moves the price?

Match results are the primary driver. A win increases the index, a loss decreases it. Between matches, the index also reflects changes in market consensus. During live matches, real-time market signals provide continuous updates.

What is the funding rate?

A periodic payment between longs and shorts that keeps the trading price aligned with the oracle index. If the trading price is above the index, longs pay shorts (and vice versa).

What collateral do I need?

USDC on Solana.

Is there KYC?

No. tail.trade is permissionless and fully on-chain. No KYC, no region locking.

Can I withdraw anytime?

Yes. Withdrawals are instant and on-chain. Zero delays.