Glossary

Arc — Circle's layer-1 blockchain (chain id 5042), where every coin, pool, tracker vault and NAV oracle lives. Blocks come about every half second and are final in under a second; gas is paid in USDC. Its explorer is explorer.arc.io.

Backing — the quote-side balance sitting in a coin's own pool. Before the bond it is USDC; after, the coin's tracker. It is the money the coin's trading has actually put behind it, not a valuation.

Bond — the one-time migration that re-pairs a coin from USDC to its leveraged tracker, at the same dollar price, once the pool has accumulated the launcher's threshold. Permissionless.

bondBackingUsd — the bond threshold, in USDC, immutable and public on the launcher. 15,000 USDC.

Bond-gated tracker — a tracker that has not bonded yet: its NAV is pinned at exactly 1.0 and its vault refuses to send anything to the venue (fundHedge reverts NotBonded). Every shared tracker starts this way; the keeper bonds it (LTFactory.pokeBond) once its vault holds $15,000 of backing.

CREATE2 mining — searching for a deployment salt that produces a coin address sorting below its quote (and below its tracker), so the coin is always token0 and is priced the right way up by every tracker.

Creator fee — 0.7% of every swap, booked to whoever launched the coin, claimable at any time, forever.

Cross margin — one USDC balance backing every position in an edgeX account. A tracker's account holds a single position, so its leverage is simply notional divided by equity.

Direction — long or short. A long tracker rises with its market; a short tracker rises when its market falls. Marked by an S suffix on the tracker symbol.

edgeX — the order-book perpetuals exchange (V2) where every tracker's position is held. Its matching and accounts run on its own chain, EDGE Chain, not on Arc; its markets are quoted and margined in USDC, funding settles every 4 hours, and its stock, index and commodity markets are listed around the clock.

edgeX account — an account under a wallet on edgeX, identified by an account id. Each tracker is meant to have its own, so one tracker's losses never touch another's. Deposits from Arc are only accepted into edgeX's arc account type. Whether one wallet may hold several such accounts is still being confirmed with edgeX; if not, each tracker gets a hedge wallet of its own.

EdgexBridge — edgeX's contract on Arc, 0x61A7EBc69A34e72005a195B42b5d5577C20032aD. The hedge wallet deposits through it, and it pays withdrawals out on Arc about a minute after they are requested — to the tracker's vault. It belongs to edgeX and is controlled by edgeX's 3-of-5 multisig.

Entry — on the hedge book, the mark at which a tracker's position was opened. Added backing averages into it at the mark it arrived at.

Funding — the periodic payment between longs and shorts that keeps a perpetual near its index. On edgeX it settles every 4 hours, at the rate edgeX publishes for each market.

Funding cap (fundableUsdc()) — the most a tracker's vault can send to its hedge wallet right now: its idle USDC above its redemption floor, protocol fees excluded, enforced on chain by fundHedge. Shared trackers keep a floor of zero, so the books never run ahead of the venue.

Hedge wallet — the ordinary wallet (not a contract) that holds each tracker's edgeX account on the protocol's behalf. A tracker's vault records it as its hedgeFunder, the only address fundHedge can pay, and LTFactory.venueRouting(lt) returns it as the tracker's trader. Its key sits online on the keeper's machine, because deposits and recalls run automatically; every withdrawal it signs names the vault as recipient. See The hedge book.

Holdable cap — the most leverage a position can hold on a market: 90% of edgeX's tier-1 cap, rounded down (18× on a 20× market, 9× on 10×, 27× on 30×, 45× on 50×). The factory lists it on chain.

Kill switch — setHedgeFunder(address(0)), called by a vault's owner: from that block no dollar can leave the vault for the venue, whoever asks. It does not reach money already on edgeX.

Leverage (the multiple) — how many times harder than its market a tracker moves. Chosen by the creator at launch, from 1× up to LTFactory.maxLeverageFor(symbol): the lower of the product ceiling (MAX_LEVERAGE = 5) and the holdable cap for the market. 5× on every market listed today.

Leveraged tracker (LT) — an ERC-20 following a real market at a fixed multiple, e.g. NVDAx5. Backed by a perpetual position on edgeX, held in an edgeX account dedicated to that tracker by the protocol's hedge wallet; valued at NAV, mintable and redeemable at NAV.

Limit band — while the underlying stock market is closed (nights and weekends), edgeX rejects market orders on that market and only accepts limit orders priced between limitLowPrice and limitHighPrice, a band around the last close. The keeper clamps its orders into it.

Liquidation threshold — the point at which the venue closes a position for the account. On edgeX, the account's equity falling below its maintenance margin: at 5× on a 20× market such as Nvidia, about 17.9% against a long or 17.1% against a short, from entry. edgeX adds a 1% liquidation fee.

Locked by absence — liquidity that cannot be withdrawn because the holding contract has no function that could, rather than because a timelock currently refuses.

Maintenance margin — the equity edgeX requires an account to keep: the position's notional times the market's maintenance margin rate (for a first-tier position, 2.5% on its 20× markets, 5% on its 10× markets, 1.67% on silver and WTI, 1% on gold). Below it, the account can be liquidated.

marketId — the edgeX market a tracker hedges on, as the factory stores it on chain: edgeX's contract id. Nvidia is 30000020. LTFactory.underlying(symbol) returns (marketId, maxLeverage, listed) and LTFactory.venueRouting(lt) returns (marketId, trader).

MIGRATION_DUST — 1e12, the tolerance for coin left behind by a bond. Anything larger reverts the whole migration.

NAV — a tracker's net asset value: its backing — the equity of its edgeX account, plus the USDC in its vault, plus any USDC on its way between the two — divided by its supply. Signed by the keeper and posted on chain, readable by anyone; the contracts refuse to mint or redeem on a NAV older than 15 minutes.

Notional — a position's exposure: size times mark. Five times the margin behind it, at 5×.

One-hop rule — USDC that reaches the hedge wallet from a vault is deposited into that tracker's edgeX account in the same keeper pass, and returning dollars never pass through the wallet: edgeX pays them straight to the vault.

Order-only key — the keeper's trading key on edgeX, created in edgeX's web app with an orders-only permission. It places and cancels orders; it is not meant to move money out of an account (its exact permissions are still being confirmed with edgeX). Separate from the hedge wallet's own key.

Seed buy — the creator's opening purchase of their own coin, made inside the launch transaction. At least minSeedUsdc (1 USDC), paid in USDC. The only buy the token allows in the launch block.

Single-sided position — a Uniswap V3 position holding only one of the two tokens, valid because the pool is initialised exactly at the range's bound. It is why launching needs no capital.

sqrtPriceX96 — Uniswap V3's price representation, the square root of the price in smallest units, scaled by 2^96. Never square one: (2^160)^2 overflows a uint256.

Tracker pool — a tracker's own USDC market on Uniswap V3 (0.05% tier), with 70% of its depth in a band of ±200 ticks around NAV and the rest full-range underneath.

USDC (on Arc) — Circle's dollar: the quote asset of every coin, the settlement asset on edgeX, and Arc's gas token. The token lives at 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000 with 6 decimals, which is why every price conversion here carries a 10^(18 − dq) term. The same dollars also appear as a wallet's native balance with 18 decimals — one balance shown two ways, never two balances to add. USDC has a blocklist: an address on it can neither send nor receive USDC.

Volatility decay — the ground a constant-leverage product loses on a round trip in the underlying. Structural, not a defect.