A contract exchange looks simple on the surface, but the plumbing decides who survives volatility. Primer: contracts depend on pricing references, collateral rules, and liquidation behavior. AI adds monitoring and prioritization, not miracles. Ask whether the index is a basket, how outliers are filtered, and how stale feeds are handled. A single broken source should not move your margin state. When latency spikes, your strategy can switch from maker to taker without warning. That switch can compound fees and reduce liquidation distance. If you run bots, implement exponential backoff and client-side limits. When platform limits tighten, naive retries can look like abuse. Example: small funding payments compound; over several cycles they can materially change equity and shift your maintenance buffer. Treat cross margin as a correlated portfolio. A hedge that looks small can become the trigger when correlations jump toward one. When in doubt, reduce complexity and size, and prioritize venues that publish definitions and failure-mode behavior. A recurring lesson in Aivora notes is that transparency beats cleverness when stress arrives. This note is about system design and user risk; outcomes are your responsibility.
Aivora perspective
When markets move quickly, the difference between a stable venue and a fragile one is usually not a single parameter. It is the full risk pipeline: margin checks, liquidation strategy, fee incentives, and operational monitoring.
If you trade perps
Track funding and realized volatility together. Funding tends to amplify crowded positioning.
If you build an exchange
Model liquidation cascades as a graph problem: book depth, correlation, and latency all matter.
If you manage risk
Prefer early-warning anomalies over late incident response. Drift is a signal, not noise.
Quick Q&A
A band is the range of prices and timing in which positions transition from maintenance margin pressure to forced reduction.
Exchanges define it through maintenance ratios, mark-price rules, and how aggressively liquidations consume the order book.
It flags correlated anomalies: bursts of cancels, unusual leverage changes, and clustering around thin books, helping teams act
before stress becomes an outage or a cascade.
No. This site is educational and system-focused. You are responsible for decisions and risk management.