Glossary
A reference of key terms used throughout the Zenex documentation.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Perpetual futures (perps) | Derivative contracts that let you speculate on an asset's price without expiry |
| Market | A single trading pair on Zenex. Each market is its own trading contract paired with its own vault and oracle feed |
| Settlement token | The token a market uses as collateral and for every fee and PnL figure. Positions in a market are denominated and settled in it |
| Oracle | The price feed (Pyth Lazer) a market is bound to. Keepers submit signed price updates that the contract verifies before any fill |
| Order | A price-free instruction you sign to open, close, or adjust a position. It carries size, collateral, a price bound, an expiration, and (for triggers) a trigger price. A keeper fills it |
| Keeper | A permissionless actor that fills orders, runs liquidations, deleverages, and advances accrual, earning a fee. Anyone can run one |
| Price bound | A one-sided slippage limit on an order. A keeper may only fill at a price at least as good as the bound |
| Trigger | A price condition on an order. Limit, stop-loss, and take-profit orders carry one. The order becomes fillable once the market crosses the trigger |
| Netted position | Your single position per side in a market, addressed by account and side rather than by an id or counter. You hold at most one long and one short per market, and every order adjusts that one position |
| Collateral | Funds posted to back a position and absorb losses. Escrowed from your wallet when you create an increase order and held by the trading contract until the order fills, is cancelled, or the position closes |
| Leverage | Multiplier that amplifies exposure beyond posted collateral. Maximum leverage is one divided by the initial margin |
| Notional size | The total value of a position (collateral x leverage) |
| Open interest (OI) | The sum of position sizes on one side of a market. Long OI and short OI are tracked separately |
| Margin (initial / maintenance) | Initial margin is the collateral required to open and sets max leverage. Maintenance margin is the lower floor below which a position can be liquidated |
| PnL | Profit and Loss, the unrealized gain or loss on an open position. Implied from size and price, not stored |
| Equity | Collateral plus unrealized PnL, net of fees. Determines position health |
| Notional lock | A short window during which newly added size cannot be decreased or closed. A further increase resets the lock |
| Liquidation | Forced closure of a position by a keeper when equity falls below the maintenance margin. A soft liquidation returns leftover equity to the trader, a hard one forfeits it to the vault |
| Skew-split fee | The base trade fee, split so the side that worsens the long/short balance pays more than the side that improves it |
| Impact fee | A fee on every fill whose rate grows with the size of the fill, capped at 10%. Larger trades pay proportionally more |
| Execution fee | A flat fee escrowed with every order (trade or vault) at creation and paid to the keeper that fills it. Refunded if the order is cancelled |
| Borrowing interest (kink model) | Time-based interest paid to the vault by open positions on the market's larger side. The rate follows a kink curve over that side's own utilization and steepens once utilization passes a target level |
| Funding rate | A continuously accruing cost between longs and shorts that anchors the perpetual price. It accelerates toward the dominant side and decays back toward balance |
| Funding pool / claim | Funding is held in an internal pool with per-user claimable balances. Funding you earn accrues to your claimable balance, and a claim action moves it to your wallet |
| ADL (Auto-deleveraging) | Safety mechanism that reduces winning positions on a flagged side when their profit grows too large relative to the vault |
| Profit haircut | A scaling applied to a closing winner's realized profit while the winning side's pending profit is large relative to the vault. The withheld share stays with the vault |
| Vault | The strategy vault paired with a market. Holds the liquidity that backs trades and acts as counterparty to every position |
| Strategy vault | The vault contract deployed alongside a market by the factory. Its immutable strategy is that market's trading contract |
| Vault order | A deposit or redeem routed through the trading contract. It escrows at creation and a keeper fills it in full, subject to a redeem cooldown, fill gates, and a minimum-received floor you set on the order |
| Vault shares | Token representing proportional ownership of a vault's assets. Deposits mint shares on the amount net of the vault fee. Redeems burn the full share amount and pay out assets net of the fee |
| Utilization | Each side's reserved liquidity measured against its half of the vault's capacity. Drives borrowing interest and caps opens and withdrawals |
| Terminal price | A flat settlement price set on a delisted market once its grace window passes. The market then prices every position at it |
| Factory | The contract that deploys a new trading and vault pair together for a chosen oracle feed |
| Smart Account | A passkey-controlled on-chain account created without a seed phrase or browser extension. Enables Quick Trading via session keys |
| Quick Trading | A UI feature (also called session keys) that authorizes a temporary signing key on a smart account so orders can be created without a per-transaction wallet prompt |
| Passkey | A WebAuthn credential stored in the user's device or password manager that signs transactions for a smart account in place of a seed phrase |
| Browser Wallet | A Stellar wallet provided by a browser extension or hardware device (Freighter, xBull, Lobstr, Albedo, Hana, Ledger, Hot Wallet) that signs transactions directly |