Perpetual Markets
You may have noticed some strange new markets floating around: perpetual markets, or “perps” A normal prediction market asks a question, trades between 0 and 100%, and eventually resolves. A perp is different. It tracks a real-world number directly — the price of Bitcoin, an approval rating, how green the UK power grid is running, or the share of openrouter tokens that is open-weight. Those are just the beginning. [image]If you think it’s going up, go long. If you think it’s going down, go short. There’s no resolution date, and the price doesn’t react to your positions. So, many of you are probably thinking: What’s the point? Leverage Many of you have participated in our older format numeric markets, and the worst part of the experience was correcting a market from 70→85, and then winning 1 mana after 6 months. For smaller, open ended movements, it’s just not worth it. Perps fix this by allowing you to add leverage. Take notice: 5x leverage on M100 bet, means that your position will move like it’s actually M500. If it goes up 10%, you’ll actually gain 50%. Likewise, if it goes down 20%, you’ll be liquidated. At 25x, if the oracle price drops only 4% you will be liquidated. See: [image]64,718.20 → 62,129.47 = liquidated at 25x leverage. However, high risk, high reward. A 4% increase is a 100% gain! Liquidation If the number moves far enough against you, your position is closed and you can lose the margin you put up. Your liquidation price is shown before you confirm the trade — check it. If you go long with no leverage, you cannot be liquidated. Using the bitcoin example, 1x leverage is like owning bitcoin, you own it until you sell it, with one exception: funding rates. Funding rates At regular intervals, the more crowded side pays the other side a small amount. This rewards taking the unpopular side. The current rate and next payment time are shown above the chart. if the losing side can't fully back every winner's profit, winning positions are trimmed slightly ("auto-deleveraging") — profits you've already made stay yours. [image]How much does it have to move to outpace the funding rates? Click the “hold cost” pill above the graph to see. Each of those pills attempt to simplify the delivery of this information, and make all important info possible to visualise on the chart. Mess around with it, hover things, and learn. There’s a lot of information stuffed into that page, and unfortunately nobody has figured out a way to make perps make sense. We're trying something new, so your feedback is essential. Extras Perp profits show up in your portfolio but don't count toward leagues for now. Every perp shows exactly where its data comes from, right below the chart, and if a data feed goes stale, trading pauses until fresh data arrives — nobody gets to trade against an outdated number. This is a brand-new mechanism, so start small while you get a feel for it. Leverage is a chainsaw, not a butter knife. We’re going to increase to 100x leverage once we’re satisfied things work, and there’s mana in the pool. You may get randomly liquidated if there are weird spikes in the oracles, only post margin if you’re happy losing it. If you're interested in the AMM math, here's a writeup by Stephen! https://manifold.markets/maniperp.pdf There’s a lot of changes to come. We hope to improve the frequency and latency of updates, so be careful if you’re building a bot to slightly outpace our updates. We may add fees or a spread if required to prevent position closing to dodge funding, or to add extra liquidity to the pool Limit orders, eventually What should our next perp be? If there's a public, reliable data feed for it, we can probably trade it. We will monitor this page for suggestions! Over the last month we've also been working on: Fixed limit orders being cancelled by mistake. Some limit orders were wrongly cancelled with an "insufficient balance" error even when the owner had plenty of mana. Selling out of a position always works now. Occasionally a sale would fail because of a microscopic leftover fraction of a share; those slivers are now cleaned up automatically. Fixed a bug that blocked some numeric markets from being created. If yours failed to create before, try again. Or, tell us to make a perp if that’s more appropriate! Fixed a bug where some users never received their identity-verification bonus. Everyone affected is being credited the missing mana. Elections page polish: the bet buttons on the maps now work properly on phones, we added the Florida Senate special election, clarified the House district bet dialogs, and added a share button (which includes your referral code). Mod improvements: mods can now fix answers even after a market has resolved, and the moderation tools scroll properly on mobile. Tidied up the home page now that the World Cup is over. A batch of behind-the-scenes fixes to make betting faster and more reliable, especially on markets with lots of limit orders. Looking for work? A reminder from last month: we run a jobs board at manifold.markets/jobs. If you're looking for work, or just open to hearing about something interesting, register your interest. It takes 30 seconds and there's zero downside. As always, I'd love to hear your feedback! Comment here, message me, or come chat in our Discord. I’ve also seen some people sharing Manifold on bluesky — thank you! Tod (Genzy) & The Manifold Team