Basics
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For sophisticated traders only
Designing and executing profitable maker strategies may be difficult and require active management, hedging in other venues, etc. Providing liquidity carries significant risk of financial loss including: impermanent loss and liquidation (partial or complete). Do not provide liquidity until you understand the risks and challenges. As a maker on Perpetual Protocol, your liquidity may be split into base token (e.g. ETH) and quote token (e.g. USD). When you remove your liquidity, you must return the same amount of base token as you received. Let's say you initially provided 1 ETH and 1000 USD. To remove your liquidity, you will still have to return 1 ETH and 1000 USD. If the price of ETH goes up, it will cost more to remove the liquidity than it was initially worth.
Order Book vs AMM
Perpetual Protocol is an AMM-based exchange. There is no order book.
However, there are some similarities with an order book exchange thanks to the protocol's use of Uniswap v3 as the trading engine. This gives traders the ability to place orders in certain price ranges, and takers will use this liquidity when placing market orders.
Because of this, there will be a distribution of liquidity along a range of prices, typically with the bulk of liquidity concentrated around the current price.
Providing Tokens
Liquidity can be provided in USDC or any of our non-USDC supported collaterals (currently ETH/WETH, FRAX and OP). Other tokens are not used for providing liquidity at this time.
Token Loans
Providing liquidity will take one of three forms.
Liquidity is below active price range 100% of liquidity is in USD (quote token)
Liquidity is within active price range. Part of liquidity is in USD, and part in base token (ETH, BTC, etc.)
Liquidity is above active price range 100% of liquidity is in base token (ETH, BTC, etc.)
In cases 2 and 3, you will receive base tokens in the form of a loan. These tokens must be paid back when liquidity is removed. If the token value increases, the amount of USD needed to cover the loan increases (i.e., you will be able to withdraw less USD than you originally added).
Funding Payments
You will pay or receive funding payments once you have a maker position (AKA impermanent position). Payments follow the same principals as regular funding payments:
If funding is positive, longs pay shorts
If funding is negative, shorts pay longs
More on funding payments: https://support.perp.com/hc/en-us/articles/5257580412569-Funding-Payments
Liquidation
Maker positions can be liquidated if the value of loaned assets increases and approaches a point beyond your ability to pay back.
Full article: https://support.perp.com/hc/en-us/articles/6456586794649
Anatomy of a Trade
You place liquidity at any price range.
When the current price is within this range, your liquidity will be bought and sold by traders making market orders (aka takers).
When takers open longs (causing asset price to increase), some of your base tokens (ETH, BTC, etc.) are sold for USD, putting you in a short position.
When takers open shorts (causing asset price to decrease), some of your quote tokens (USD) are sold for base token, putting you in a long position.
When takers close their positions, tokens are swapped back. Therefore if a short position closes, you will end up with more quote token, and if a long position closes, you will end up with more base tokens.
When you remove liquidity, a few things happen:
If the current price is different from the initial price when you added liquidity, you will see an ‘impermanent position’ in your account. This will become a regular ‘taker’ position after you remove liquidity, and can be closed like a regular position anytime you want.
You must repay your loan of base token at the current price. E.g., if you provided 1 ETH as liquidity, you must repay 1 ETH at the current price.
Fees
Makers collectively receive 80% of the fees generated. As well as a share of the trading fees, LPs can also earn OP and PERP tokens from the Pool Party rewards .
Fees from liquidity positions are automatically added to your free collateral.
As long as the position is active (check on the pool page, e.g., https://app.perp.com/pools/ETH:USD), the fees will accumulate.
For How Long Will I Earn Fees For?
Fees accumulate in the lifecycle of the liquidity position. Only once it is fulled closed will you stop earning fees. It's also important to note that if your liquidity position is out-of-range, then you will not earn any fees until the price moves back into your range.
How Does Adding/Removing Partial Liquidity Affect Fees?
Adding partial liquidity will increase your share of fees, provided liquidity from other participants and trading volume remain the same. So when adding more liquidity, you can potentially earn more in fees, but it will depend on the overall liquidity in the pool, the range you've set, and trading volume.
Removing partial liquidity will reduce your share of fees earned.
Also, any change in your liquidity position will trigger pending funding payments.
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