Mainnet — real funds at risk
This is the live production deployment and all trades use real USDC. As with any new on-chain protocol, the smart contracts could contain bugs, the price feeds could temporarily go stale, and you can lose some or all of the funds you deposit. If the pool is short on liquidity, a winning close may be queued and paid as the pool recovers. Trade only what you can afford to lose.Structural risks specific to Parquet
Parquet exposes synthetic perp markets on US equities and ETFs, trading 24/7. Beyond the generic smart-contract and oracle risks, there are a few structural risks that come from listing stock-tracking perps on a continuously-trading chain:- Off-hours pricing comes from an off-exchange reference feed, not the underlying US equity venues. During regular trading hours (Mon–Fri 09:30–16:00 ET, US business days), prices track the live US equity market. Outside those hours — overnight and on weekends — prices come from an off-exchange reference feed that tracks the underlying through a separate market. That reference can drift from where the stock would actually trade at the next US open. Positions held across the 4:00 PM ET boundary mark continuously against this off-hours reference — there is no “gap” at next-open, but the off-hours mark can deviate materially from where the equity opens at 09:30 ET.
- Tighter off-hours risk parameters. The leverage tier table is the same in every session, but two off-hours defenses still apply against thinner overnight/weekend liquidity: the per-market open-interest cap drops from 500K, and an ADL tail-backstop is armed (see ADL tail-backstop below). These may constrain new opens that would have been allowed during RTH.
- High leverage amplifies liquidation risk. The smallest position tier can be opened up to 200×. At that leverage the 50 bps initial margin is only 10 bps above the 40 bps maintenance margin, and the 10 bps open fee consumes that — so a fresh max-tier position opens essentially at its liquidation point. Any adverse move — including an off-hours reference-feed move while US equity venues are closed — can liquidate it immediately. This thin buffer at the top of the range is by design; use high leverage only with that in mind.
- A market can be deactivated without notice. If a market’s off-hours reference diverges materially from the US equity venues, or its price feed otherwise becomes unreliable, that market can be made inactive — you would no longer be able to open positions on it. This has happened before as feed coverage has changed. See Markets for the current active list and the inactive symbols.
- SPCX is a synthetic priced from a single third-party feed. SPCX tracks a SpaceX synthetic from a third-party reference feed — it tracks that off-exchange synthetic, not the underlying SpaceX shares. It is not SpaceX stock and confers no ownership or equity claim. SPCX has no independent on-chain oracle feed and, like several other markets, is sourced solely from a third-party reference feed. If that feed is wrong, delayed, or unavailable, there is no second on-chain source — the market freezes or can be deactivated. Treat it as a speculative synthetic. See Markets.
- Off-chain data feeds. Prices come from external, third-party market-data feeds, which can be wrong, delayed, or temporarily unavailable. Bad-data protection runs off-chain: prices that disagree across sources are rejected before they reach the chain. The on-chain price-deviation circuit breaker is intentionally turned off so that large but legitimate moves (such as the Monday-morning open) are not rejected — which also means a bad off-chain price is not caught by an on-chain guard. This is a deliberate trade-off.
- Counterparty pool. All trades are filled against shared, per-category USDC pools (equities share one pool; crypto, commodities, and forex each have their own). Large positions on highly-correlated names (for example, tech-heavy single stocks) can produce concentrated payouts that exhaust a pool’s available liquidity and route winning closes through the FIFO payout queue. See Payout queue.
ADL tail-backstop
Parquet’s primary mechanism for a pool that runs short is the FIFO payout queue — winning closes are reserved and paid as the pool refills, with no broad claw-back of winners. Behind it, a last-resort auto-deleveraging (ADL) backstop is armed off-hours on all markets to bound the queue’s unbacked tail in an extreme, sustained imbalance at low pool liquidity. What it can and cannot do:- It engages only when the unbacked tail of the payout queue exceeds a high trigger and the oldest unbacked entries have aged past a dwell window. In normal operation it never fires.
- When it fires, it applies a capped, pro-rata haircut to the oldest unbacked queued payouts only, bounded by a per-event ceiling and a hard absolute ceiling. It does not touch your open position, your posted collateral, or fully-backed payouts — only an as-yet-unpaid amount already sitting in the queue.
- It is a socialization of last resort on the queue tail — far narrower than the “claw back every winner” model some venues use — but it does mean a queued (unpaid) winning amount can, in a severe off-hours event, be paid out at less than 100%.
- If the tail still cannot clear, the operator can move the venue to reduce-only (closes and liquidations continue; new opens are blocked) until conditions normalize.
Jurisdiction, eligibility, and no advice
- Availability is not universal. Parquet may not be available to all persons or in all regions. You are solely responsible for determining whether you are eligible to use the venue under the laws and regulations that apply to you, and for complying with them.
- Nothing here is financial advice. This documentation, the app, and any associated materials are informational only. They are not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice, and nothing in them is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.
- Synthetic exposure, not ownership. A Parquet position is a synthetic perpetual — a derivative that tracks a reference price. It is not ownership of, nor a claim on, the underlying stock, ETF, or company (including SpaceX via SPCX). You receive no shares, no voting rights, no dividends, and no entitlement against the issuer of the underlying security.