拆解tradeXYZ定价机制，他们是如何提前定价的？

Editor's Note: Last week, Cerebras Systems, the AI chip startup dubbed the "Nvidia challenger," officially landed on the Nasdaq. On its debut day, the stock price briefly surged to $350, nearly doubling from its IPO price of $185, sparking widespread market attention.

However, before the official listing, the Pre-IPO perpetual contract on tradeXYZ had already provided on-chain price discovery for CBRS hours, even weeks, in advance. By using the perpetual contract form, tradeXYZ achieves continuous trading and real-time price discovery that traditional finance cannot access, while also allowing ordinary investors to participate in new stock pricing weeks early. This means that the IPO gray market and roadshow models of traditional finance are being disrupted by on-chain finance, and the pricing power of traditional finance is gradually being eroded.

Today, according to official sources, tradeXYZ's Pre-IPO market has officially launched SpaceX under the ticker SPCX. As one of the most anticipated private companies globally, SpaceX is considered a potential IPO of historic proportions, with market valuation expectations already pointing towards $2 trillion. If tradeXYZ successfully completes on-chain pricing for SpaceX ahead of time once again, its influence could expand further.

This article was first published on March 19th, providing a detailed breakdown of tradeXYZ's pricing mechanism and operational logic. The following is the original content:

In the early hours of March 9th, the situation in Iran escalated. CME was closed, ICE was closed, and all major global futures exchanges were shuttered. The next official price for crude oil would not come until Monday's morning trading session, over a dozen hours away.

But the crude oil contract, CL-USDC, on Hyperliquid did not wait. That day, the trading volume of this on-chain perpetual contract surged from the daily average of $21 million to over $1.2 billion. During the window when traditional markets were closed, traders used an on-chain protocol to instantly price geopolitical risks.

This event was touted within the crypto circle as another victory for DeFi. But few asked a more fundamental question: When external markets are closed, where does the price on this on-chain exchange come from?

When There's No External Quote, Where Does the Price Come From?

tradeXYZ is the largest provider of traditional asset perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, operating on the HIP-3 protocol and accounting for 90% of HIP-3's total open interest. The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, WTI crude oil, gold, silver, and individual Korean stocks can all be traded 24/7 on it. However, the pricing logic of perpetual contracts is entirely different from spot trading. Prices on spot exchanges are generated directly from the matching of buyers and sellers. A perpetual contract needs an "anchor" to tether the contract price to the real price of the underlying asset. This anchor is the oracle.

In traditional futures markets, the exchange itself is the pricing anchor. The CME's crude oil futures price *is* the price of oil; no external reference system is needed. But tradeXYZ's contracts run on the Hyperliquid chain, with no direct connection to Chicago's matching engine. When CME is open, tradeXYZ's oracle directly references the CME's quote, which is not technically challenging. The real difficulty arises after CME closes.

tradeXYZ's solution is for its oracle to extract information from its own order book. The system calculates a "impact price differential." Simply put: if someone wanted to buy a large amount right now, how much higher would the average execution price be than the current price? If someone wanted to sell a large amount, how much lower would it be? This deviation reflects the imbalance of buying and selling pressure in the order book. The oracle adds this deviation to the current price to get a "target price," and then uses a decay function to slowly move the current price towards the target price.

The keyword here is "slowly." The oracle updates every 3 seconds, but each time it only moves a fraction of the gap between the current price and the target price. This speed of movement is controlled by a time constant. The larger the time constant, the slower the oracle reacts, making it harder to manipulate, but also less capable of reflecting real market sentiment.

In the early days of tradeXYZ, this time constant was set to 8 hours. In November 2025, this parameter was lowered to 1 hour. The reason for the reduction is tied to traders' real money: tradeXYZ settles funding rates every 1 hour. If the oracle is too slow in tracking the real price, profitable traders get continuously drained by the funding rate.

As shown by the red line in the chart below, after 8 hours, if you are long on crude oil and your direction is correct, but the oracle took 8 hours to catch up to the real price, your PnL would be significantly eroded by funding fees during those 8 hours when the price hadn't yet reached your target.

With the parameter reduced to 1 hour, it only takes 5 hours for the price to reach your expected level (blue line). The price confirms your judgment faster, and you pay a few less funding fees compared to before.

But a faster oracle also introduces new risks. If the oracle fails for 6 hours and suddenly recovers, according to the formula, it would jump to 99.7% of the target price instantly. Such an instantaneous price jump could trigger large-scale liquidations. tradeXYZ's solution is to add a safety valve: regardless of the actual elapsed time, the effective time difference for each update is capped at a maximum of 6 minutes. Even if the oracle recovers after a crash, the price can only chase up in small steps.

The Cage, the Re-Anchor, and Monday's Opening Gap

Oracle pricing solves the problem of "how to quote over the weekend." But another question arises: to what extent can the price move freely?

tradeXYZ draws a "cage" for each contract. The mark price is capped within a certain percentage above and below the last external closing price. This percentage equals the reciprocal of the maximum leverage. The maximum leverage for the crude oil contract is 20x, so the cage is within 5% above and below the closing price. If crude oil closes at $100 on Friday, the weekend mark price can only fluctuate between $95 and $105. If it touches the boundary, trading is halted immediately.

Crude oil contract weekend halt in early March

On a normal weekend, this mechanism works fine. A 5% range is enough to absorb most overnight volatility. But a geopolitical event of the magnitude seen on March 9th can push the price directly to the edge of the cage. If real price gapped 8% when CME opened on Monday, a huge gap would form. Short traders would be liquidated instantly, and market makers would suffer losses due to their inability to hedge gradually.

In March 2026, tradeXYZ deployed "Price Discovery Boundary v2" on the crude oil contract. The core change: the cage size remained the same, but the cage became mobile. When the oracle price touches 90% of the current boundary, the system re-anchors the center of the cage to that boundary value, drawing a new cage of the same size around the new anchor. This re-anchoring can be executed a maximum of two times in each direction.

Using specific numbers: The initial cage is $95 to $105. When the oracle rises to $104.50, a re-anchor is triggered, and the new cage becomes $99.75 to $110.25. After a second trigger, it becomes $104.74 to $115.76, which is the endpoint. Starting from $100, the maximum discoverable range expands to approximately $115.76.

This design keeps the immediate fluctuation range at 5% at any given moment, so the market maker's risk model does not need to change. At the same time, re-anchoring means the system "acknowledges" the price movement that has already occurred, narrowing the gap at Monday's opening. However, the cost is also clear: a long position with a liquidation price at -8% is absolutely safe under v1 (because the price can't reach -8%), but under v2, it might enter the liquidation zone after a downward re-anchor. tradeXYZ chose to deploy v2 first on two crude oil contracts, stating it will decide on broader rollout after observing the results.

Another key component of the pricing system is the funding rate. The funding rate is the elastic band that tethers the perpetual contract price to the oracle price: if the mark price is higher than the oracle, longs pay shorts; if lower, shorts pay longs. tradeXYZ's funding rate formula is similar in structure to most crypto exchanges, but it includes a scaling factor of 0.5.

This 0.5 factor is a calibration specific to traditional assets. The base annualized funding rate for crypto perpetuals is around 11%, reflecting the cost of holding pure leverage, which is reasonable for assets like Bitcoin that have no dividends. However, for stocks and commodities, the true cost of carry is close to SOFR plus 1 or 2 percentage points, around 5% to 6%. Multiplying by 0.5 reduces the base annualized rate from ~11% to ~5.5%, aligning it with traditional assets. This is especially critical on weekends: the scaling factor directly halves the weekend funding rate. Working in tandem with the 1-hour time constant oracle, it allows traders with the correct directional bias to retain most of their profits.

Different Assets, Different Processing Pipelines

Precious metals have active global spot markets. External prices for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium are directly derived from spot quotes, avoiding the issue of futures rollover. However, there is no unified spot quote for crude oil and industrial metals, so tradeXYZ must use CME futures contracts as its pricing basis. Futures have expiration dates, requiring the system to roll over from the current month's contract to the next month's contract each month. The problem is that the prices of these two contracts are usually different. Storage costs and supply/demand expectations often make the distant month contract more expensive than the near month. If the price jumps during the rollover, the PnL of position holders will see an unrealized fluctuation, potentially triggering undeserved liquidations.

tradeXYZ's approach is to use a 5-trading day transition period: from the 5th to the 10th business day of each month, the oracle price is a weighted average of the near-month and far-month contracts, with the weights changing linearly day by day.

Pricing for equity index contracts is more complex. XYZ100 tracks the Nasdaq 100, but CME's Nasdaq futures trade almost around the clock (5 days x 23 hours), providing a longer-duration price reference than the spot index. Initially, tradeXYZ derived the spot price from futures prices, using a fixed 4% discount rate to strip out the cost of carry. However, this fixed value would deviate whenever the Fed raised interest rates. The v2 solution, launched in February 2026, switched to dynamic calculation: during US stock market hours, it directly uses the spot index value, while simultaneously calculating the implied discount rate from the spread between futures and spot prices; during after-hours, it uses this discount rate to derive the spot price.

Then there's a special case: individual Korean stocks. tradeXYZ lists Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Hyundai Motor Company, which trade on the Korea Exchange quoted in Korean Won (KRW). The oracle needs to overlay a USD/KRW exchange rate conversion on top of the raw quote. Position holders' PnL reflects both stock price fluctuations and exchange rate fluctuations.

Who is Responsible for the Consequences of Parameter Choices?

All these pricing mechanisms rest on a single premise: there are enough market makers in the market willing to continuously provide liquidity. Hyperliquid's HLP market-making treasury provides liquidity for native BTC and ETH perpetual contracts but does not cover third-party contracts deployed on HIP-3. tradeXYZ's liquidity depends entirely on the voluntary participation of external market makers. In extreme market conditions, if a liquidated position cannot find a counterparty to absorb it, the system will not be backstopped by a treasury like the Hyperliquid main site. Instead, it directly triggers ADL (Auto-Deleveraging), forcibly closing the most profitable counterparty positions ranked by PnL.

The brilliance of this pricing system lies in its use of a set of counterbalancing parameters – the oracle's tracking speed, price discovery boundaries, and the funding rate scaling factor – to construct a self-sufficient pricing environment that functions without external quotes. When Standard & Poor's chose to license to tradeXYZ on March 18th, it was likely this infrastructure, proven under real geopolitical crisis, that they were looking at.

But this system also has its costs. The oracle extracts information from the order book, meaning that during periods of thin liquidity (e.g., late-night trading of Korean stock contracts), a small number of orders can cause the oracle to move significantly. The Price Discovery Boundary v2 expands the range of positions liquidatable over the weekend, requiring leveraged traders to reassess their safety margins. ADL means that even if your prediction is correct, you could be forcibly liquidated in extreme market conditions.

tradeXYZ has chosen a path completely different from traditional exchanges: shifting pricing power from a centralized matching engine to a set of on-chain parameter systems. Traditional exchanges close because they require windows for manual intervention in clearing, risk control, and market making. tradeXYZ cannot close, because there is no concept of "off-hours" for on-chain contracts. It must provide a price at every moment. The March 9th crude oil event proved the system can function under pressure. But it also exposed a deeper question: when an on-chain protocol assumes the pricing function of traditional financial infrastructure, who is responsible for the consequences of the parameter choices?

The time constant change from 8 hours to 1 hour was a parameter decision made by the tradeXYZ team. The upgrade from v1 to v2 of the Price Discovery Boundary was another. These decisions affect every position holder's liquidation line and funding rate. In a traditional exchange, rule changes of this kind require regulatory approval and a public comment period. On-chain, a single parameter update suffices.

In a system with no HLP backstop, no regulatory arbitration, and total reliance on parameter design to maintain order, understanding how these parameters affect your position is understanding the true risk you are taking.