📽️Products
Spot, Perpetuals, and Money Markets.
Vertex is an orderbook-based decentralized exchange (DEX) designed to seamlessly share perpetuals liquidity across multiple networks through Vertex Edge.
Vertex offers three core products:
Spot Trading
Perpetuals Trading
Money Markets
All 3 products are bundled together under a single, unified cross-margin engine.
Each Vertex Edge deployment provides the same unified DEX functionality, while a synchronized orderbook layer harmonizes perpetual liquidity across every supported network—ensuring a smooth, efficient trading experience from any supported chain you choose.
By unifying spot, perpetuals, and money markets under a single platform, Vertex empowers users to optimize their capital efficiency, calibrate their risk with precision, and execute unique strategies all in one place.
Vertex’s Core Product Suite
Vertex’s technical nucleus produces the optimal architecture for a vertically integrated product stack – containing three core products of DeFi. These include:
Spot Markets
Perpetual Markets
Money Market
Many DeFi traders face a patchwork of disconnected platforms. One app for spot markets, another for derivatives, and yet another for lending and borrowing. The fragmented approach leads to tedious asset transfers, burdensome fees, and generally sub-optimal capital deployment.
Vertex’s integrated design eliminates the fractured experience of juggling multiple protocols and accounts. With Vertex, you can do it all – from simple spot trades to advanced hedging with leveraged perpetuals – using one streamlined interface and unified margin system.
Spend more time capitalizing on market opportunities. Gain an edge with Vertex.
Spot Markets
Spot markets involve buying and selling crypto assets for immediate delivery and payment – no waiting, no future contracts, and no delayed settlements. Unlike derivatives, such as perpetuals or futures, which trade based on the expected value of an underlying asset at a future time, spot markets let you own the asset outright the moment you purchase it.
On Vertex, spot trading is enabled 24 / 7 every day of the year. You remain in control of your spot assets at all times, as they stay securely on-chain under your custody. Vertex lists assets paired with USD-denominated stablecoins, ensuring that you can easily buy or sell a wide range of crypto tokens directly and transparently.
The hybrid architecture behind Vertex enables spot markets with native assets available from each chain plugged into Vertex Edge.
Vertex lists assets paired with USD-denominated stablecoins, ensuring that you can easily buy or sell a wide range of crypto tokens directly and transparently.
On Vertex, you always retain custody of your spot assets on-chain.
Vertex’s spot markets allow you to buy or sell listed crypto assets paired with USD-denominated stablecoins.
Spot assets on Vertex are quoted in USDC.
You can find the spot asset listings for each chain supported by Vertex Edge in the sections below:
Vertex consistently lists new spot assets across deployments of Vertex Edge to different chains, including native assets specific to that chain.
On Vertex, spot assets are integrated directly with Vertex’s unified margin engine, unlocking advanced functionality, including:
Unified Collateral: Spot holdings immediately contribute to your margin capacity.
Collateral for Perpetuals: Use your spot assets as margin to support leveraged trades in the perpetuals market.
Leveraged Spot Borrowing: Tap into the integrated money markets to borrow additional assets against your spot holdings, fueling even more sophisticated strategies.
Deposit Interest: Users automatically earn interest on their spot asset deposits on Vertex.
Seamlessly pivot from straightforward spot buys to leveraged derivatives and borrowing without managing collateral across multiple accounts.
Additional resources relevant to trading on Vertex spot markets include:
On Vertex, your spot assets no longer just sit idle—they become active, flexible resources that power a vibrant trading experience.
Perpetuals Markets
Perpetual markets on Vertex let you trade price movements of crypto assets without delivery of the underlying tokens. Unlike traditional futures, these contracts never expire. You can hold them indefinitely, adjusting your positions as markets shift – all within Vertex’s unified margin environment.
A key mechanism called the funding rate keeps perpetual prices anchored to the underlying spot market.
Funding payments flow regularly between long and short traders:
When the perpetual’s price rises above the spot price, longs pay shorts.
When it drops below the spot price, shorts pay longs.
The interplay between longs and shorts via the funding rate mechanism encourages prices between the spot asset and corresponding perpetual market to realign, preventing perpetuals from drifting too far off their underlying asset’s value.
By integrating perpetuals directly into the Vertex ecosystem, you can easily deploy spot collateral and borrowed assets to back your leveraged positions – no separate accounts or platforms required.
This synergy offers a more efficient, flexible, and strategic way to engage with the crypto derivatives market.
You can find a breakdown of Vertex’s funding rate calculations here.
Perpetual products are primarily used for speculation and risk-hedging purposes and are the most popular futures product in crypto markets. Vertex’s perpetuals enable traders to long or short crypto assets with up to 20X leverage to amplify price exposure or hedge risk.
Perpetual markets on Vertex trade 24/7 – meaning you can buy or sell perpetuals at any time of day or night.
All of Vertex’s perpetual products use USDC.e as primary collateral.
With Vertex Edge, every cross-chain deployment of Vertex lists the same perpetual markets. Liquidity between each perpetual market on a supported Edge chain is shared within a synchronous orderbook layer.
More specifically, this means that traders of a perpetual market on one Vertex Edge chain are trading against the aggregate resting liquidity profile of that perpetual market across all supported Vertex Edge chains.
Learn more about Vertex Edge here.
Vertex Perpetuals Highlights
Maximum Leverage: 20X
Cross-Margin Efficiency: Use spot balances and borrowed assets to fortify your perp positions.
Hedging and Arbitrage: Implement strategies that might be too cumbersome or capital-intensive elsewhere, thanks to the unified account structure.
Oracle Pricing: Perpetual contract oracle pricing is derived from Vertex’s oracle provider Stork Oracle. You can find Vertex’s oracle architecture here.
Health: Calculations of weighted margin (i.e., health) related to a cross-margined account with open perpetual positions can be found here.
Liquidations: Details on how at-risk perpetual positions are liquidated on Vertex can be found in the link here.
PnL Settlements: Information on PnL and how perpetual positions are settled on Vertex is available in the section here.
Additional resources relevant to trading perpetual products on Vertex include:
Go long or short, scale your leverage, and hedge positions across multiple assets with perpetuals on Vertex -- all under one roof.
Money Markets
Decentralized money markets have reshaped DeFi by enabling trustless, overcollateralized borrowing and lending without traditional intermediaries. Interest rates are programmatically determined by smart contracts, fostering more predictable market behavior and insights.
Vertex money markets enable users to:
Earn interest on deposits.
Borrow against spot assets for leveraged spot trading.
Use spot assets as collateral for perpetual positions.
By integrating a money market directly into its DEX, Vertex users can borrow spot assets automatically using their portfolio margin to secure loans. The money market’s smart contracts are contained on-chain and housed within the Vertex risk engine and clearinghouse.
Interest Rates
In Vertex’s integrated money market, depositors act as liquidity providers (LPs).
By supplying capital to the lending pool, they earn a proportional share of the interest that borrowers pay, generating passive yield on idle assets. Borrowers, on the other hand, obtain spot collateral-backed loans at prevailing interest rates, which are determined directly by supply and demand within the pool.
Dynamic Interest Rate Model
Vertex employs a dynamic interest rate mechanism that adjusts to real-time market conditions.
An algorithm continuously analyzes the ratio of borrowed to available assets, raising interest rates as borrowing demand increases and lowering them when liquidity surges. This fluid balancing act encourages healthy lending and borrowing behavior, ensuring that capital remains actively and efficiently deployed.
Borrowers vs. Leverage Traders
In this context, “borrowers” specifically refers to spot margin borrowers—distinct from traders who simply take leveraged long or short positions in perpetual markets.
Spot margin borrowers must maintain adequate collateral throughout the borrowing period. These collateral requirements, enforced by smart contracts, help safeguard the system and mitigate default risk.
Key Parameters
Collateralization: Borrowers post supported crypto assets as collateral, kept in a secure on-chain contract until repayment. This ensures that loans remain overcollateralized and secure, reducing counterparty risk.
Dynamic Rates: Interest rates evolve based on current demand. More borrowing drives rates higher to slow demand, while plentiful liquidity and fewer borrowers push rates lower, spurring new loans.
Below, we present the specific formulas and parameters that govern Vertex’s dynamic interest rate calculations.
Money Markets — Spot Rates
For each spot product, there are four attributes:
small_cap, large_cap, floor, and inflection.
borrow_rate and deposit_rate calculated according to the market parameters, and utilization ratio on average every 15 minutes.
Protocol fees are represented by a global attribute called interest_fee, and the value is 0.2 for now.
Parameter definitions:
r is the utilization ratio.
Small_cap is the peak interest rate in the first part of the utilization curve.
Large_cap is the peak interest rate at 100% utilization.
Floor is the minimal rate for borrows.
Inflection is the utilization rate where the interest rate curve steepens.
Interest_fee is the protocol fee taken from the borrow/lending markets.
Calculations for borrowing and depositing are then computed as follows:
borrow_rate is defined below:
deposit_rate is defined below:
Automated Loan Management: To ensure that loans are managed automatically, smart contracts are programmed to execute based on predefined rules and conditions. If a borrower fails to maintain the required collateral level, keepers will liquidate the collateral and use it to repay the lender. On Vertex, loan management is rolled into the cross-margin function associated with each subaccount – making loans easier and more efficient to manage.
You can find details on aspects related to managing open borrow positions in the sections below:
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