Perpetual futures platforms with rigorous margin and liquidation engines.
BitAzure engineers the risk core of a derivatives venue: index and mark price services fed by aggregated oracles, cross and isolated margin, a deterministic liquidation engine, an insurance fund and auto-deleveraging as the final backstop.
- Funding rate, mark price and index price services
- Cross and isolated margin with tiered risk limits
- Liquidation engine, insurance fund and auto-deleveraging
- Oracle aggregation with outlier and staleness protection
What is a perpetual futures platform?
A perpetual futures platform is a derivatives trading system for contracts that track an underlying asset without an expiry date, using periodic funding payments between longs and shorts to keep the contract price near the index. It requires a margin system, a mark price that resists manipulation, a liquidation engine and backstops such as an insurance fund and auto-deleveraging.
BitAzure engineers perpetual futures systems for centralised exchanges and on-chain protocols. We build the pricing services that compute index and mark prices from aggregated oracle sources, the margin engine that tracks cross and isolated positions, the liquidation engine that closes under-margined positions in a controlled sequence, and the funding scheduler that settles payments on time.
Because a derivatives venue fails through insolvency rather than slowness, the emphasis is on the risk model: tiered risk limits, conservative maintenance margin, deterministic liquidation ordering and continuous reconciliation between positions, collateral and the insurance fund.
Perpetual futures development services
The same risk model can be delivered inside an exchange engine or as smart contracts with keeper networks.
Contract & Pricing Services
- Perpetual contract specifications: tick size, lot size and leverage tiers
- Index price from volume-weighted multi-source aggregation
- Mark price with basis smoothing and impact-price components
- Funding rate calculation with interest and premium terms
- Funding scheduler with settlement snapshots
Margin System
- Cross margin with shared collateral across positions
- Isolated margin with per-position collateral
- Initial and maintenance margin by risk tier
- Multi-asset collateral with haircuts
- Real-time unrealised PnL and margin ratio
Liquidation Engine
- Margin-ratio triggers evaluated on every mark update
- Partial liquidation and tier step-down before full close
- Liquidation order routing to the book with price limits
- Insurance fund absorption of liquidation shortfalls
- Auto-deleveraging (ADL) ranked by profit and leverage as the final backstop
Risk Limits & Position Management
- Tiered risk limits scaling margin with position size
- Open interest and per-account exposure caps
- Position management: reduce-only, take-profit, stop-loss and close-all
- Leverage adjustment with margin re-validation
- Account-level risk dashboards
Oracle Infrastructure
- Aggregation from multiple spot venues and oracle networks
- Outlier rejection, staleness checks and fallback sources
- Signed price attestation for on-chain settlement
- Circuit breakers on abnormal price moves
- Historical price archive for dispute resolution
Platform & Operations
- Order management and matching for derivative instruments
- Settlement ledger with funding and fee accounting
- Insurance fund accounting and reporting
- Monitoring: margin distribution, liquidation queue and oracle health
- On-chain deployment variants with keeper networks
Reference perpetual futures architecture
Orders pass through matching and a margin check before positions are recorded in the settlement ledger. An oracle aggregator feeds the index and mark price service, which drives margin evaluation, liquidation and the funding scheduler. Shortfalls flow to the insurance fund, with ADL as the last resort.
Hover or focus a component to see its role in the architecture.
- Trading UI & API (Web · REST · WS): Trader interfaces and API clients with real-time positions and margin ratios.
- OMS & Matching (Derivative instruments): Order intake and matching for perpetual contracts, including liquidation orders.
- Settlement Ledger (Positions · collateral): Positions, collateral, realised PnL, funding and fees in double-entry form.
- Funding Scheduler (Periodic settlement): Computes and settles funding payments between longs and shorts at each interval.
- Margin & Risk Engine (Cross · isolated · tiers): Pre-trade margin checks and continuous margin-ratio evaluation on every mark update.
- Liquidation Engine (Partial · full · ADL): Closes under-margined positions in a defined sequence with price limits and shortfall accounting.
- Insurance Fund (Shortfall absorption): Segregated fund that absorbs liquidation losses before auto-deleveraging is triggered.
- Index / Mark Price (Smoothing · staleness checks): Index from aggregated spot sources; mark price with basis smoothing for PnL and liquidation.
- Oracle Aggregator (Multi-source feeds): Spot venues and oracle networks with outlier rejection and fallback sources.
Order flow
- OMS & matching
- Position management
- Settlement ledger
Risk
- Margin engine
- Risk limit tiers
- Liquidation engine
Pricing
- Oracle aggregation
- Index & mark price
- Funding scheduler
Backstops
- Insurance fund
- Auto-deleveraging
- Circuit breakers
Where perpetual futures engineering applies
Centralised derivatives exchanges
Full perpetual venues with cross and isolated margin, funding and liquidation.
On-chain perpetual protocols
Contract-based perpetuals with oracle pricing, keeper-driven liquidation and on-chain insurance funds.
Brokers adding derivatives
Perpetual products layered on existing spot platforms with shared collateral.
Synthetic and index products
Perpetuals on baskets, indices or non-crypto underlyings with custom index construction.
Institutional margin accounts
Portfolio margin, sub-accounts and reporting for professional traders.
Risk analytics
Margin distribution, liquidation exposure and funding analytics for risk teams.
Why venues build derivatives with BitAzure
Solvency-first design
Margin tiers, liquidation ordering and backstops are modelled before any interface is built.
Manipulation-resistant pricing
Mark and index prices are aggregated, smoothed and guarded against stale or outlier sources.
Deterministic liquidation
Liquidation sequencing is reproducible, logged and testable against stress scenarios.
Continuous reconciliation
Positions, collateral, funding and the insurance fund are reconciled on a schedule.
Configurable risk parameters
Tiers, leverage caps and funding intervals change through governed configuration, not code.
Centralised or on-chain
The same risk model can run in an exchange engine or as smart contracts with keepers.
Technologies we use for perpetual futures
Rust
BackendMemory-safe, low-latency engines, on-chain programs and tooling.
Go
BackendConcurrent network services, relayers and infrastructure daemons.
C++
BackendUltra-low-latency components in matching and market-data paths.
Solidity
BlockchainEVM smart contracts: tokens, DeFi protocols, governance, vesting.
EVM
BlockchainEthereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Avalanche.
Kafka
DatabaseDurable event streaming between engines and services.
PostgreSQL
DatabaseTransactional ledgers, ledgers-of-record and analytical workloads.
Redis
DatabaseCaching, sessions, rate limiting, pub/sub and order-book snapshots.
ClickHouse
DatabaseColumnar analytics for trade history and market data.
Kubernetes
InfrastructureAutoscaling, rolling deployments and workload isolation.
Prometheus / Grafana
InfrastructureMetrics, dashboards and alerting for every service.
TypeScript
FrontendStrict typing across the entire stack, client to contracts tooling.
How we deliver perpetual futures systems
Every engagement follows a documented, milestone-driven path from discovery to continuous development.
- 01
Risk model definition
Contract specs, margin tiers, funding formula, liquidation policy and backstop rules are documented and reviewed.
- 02
Pricing service design
Index sources, weighting, mark price construction and failure handling are specified with test scenarios.
- 03
Engine implementation
Margin, liquidation and funding engines are built with simulation harnesses driven by historical price paths.
- 04
Stress and scenario testing
Flash crashes, oracle outages and cascading liquidations are simulated against the insurance fund model.
- 05
Integration and launch
Engines are integrated with matching, ledger and interfaces, then launched with conservative limits.
- 06
Parameter governance
Risk parameters are tuned from live data under a documented change process.
Risk and security controls in derivatives platforms
Oracle integrity
Multiple sources, median or TWAP aggregation, staleness rejection and signed attestations.
Margin isolation
Margin calculations run in a dedicated engine with no bypass from order gateways.
Liquidation controls
Price limits, rate limits and operator pause on the liquidation path to avoid runaway closes.
Insurance fund custody
Fund balances held in segregated accounts or contracts under multisig control.
Parameter change control
Risk tier and leverage changes require multi-party approval and are logged.
Audit trail
Every margin call, liquidation and ADL event is recorded with the prices that triggered it.
We coordinate independent third-party audits on request and never claim an audit, certification or compliance status unless it has actually been obtained.
What to decide before launching perpetuals
Funding interval and formula
Shorter intervals track spot more closely but increase settlement load and complexity.
Mark price construction
Impact-price and basis components reduce manipulation but must remain explainable to users.
Cross vs isolated default
Cross margin is capital efficient; isolated limits contagion. Most venues offer both with different defaults.
Insurance fund sizing
Fund contributions from liquidation fees must be modelled against tail-risk scenarios.
ADL policy
Auto-deleveraging protects the venue but is unpopular with profitable traders; ranking rules need to be transparent.
Jurisdiction
Derivatives are heavily regulated in many markets and may restrict who can access the product.
Perpetual Futures questions
A typical formula combines an interest rate component with a premium index derived from the difference between impact bid and ask prices and the index. The rate is clamped and settled at fixed intervals. We implement the formula your product specifies.
Launching a perpetual futures product?
Share your target markets and risk appetite. We will respond with a risk model outline and an engine architecture.