Prior Protocol / Docs
Exchange / Docs / Introduction / Overview

Overview

What the protocol is and what ships today.

Prior Protocol is an exchange for equity options on a public ledger. It lists calls and puts on any underlying with a ratified price adapter, offers perpetual exposure to implied volatility directly, and extends credit against an options book without requiring the book to be closed.

What ships today

Everything described in these pages runs. The testnet terminal is the production pricing engine, the production Greeks and the production margin model executing locally in a browser against synthetic marks. What changes at mainnet is the settlement layer and the price adapters, not the mathematics.

ComponentModuleTestsStatus
Pricing, Greeks, surface, solversite/options.js21Running
Indices, funding, margin, collateralsite/perp.js24Running
Counterparty risk pricingsite/underwrite.js18Running
Claims, commitments, resolutionlib/38Running
101 tests in total. Zero runtime dependencies, no build step for the library itself.

Three products, one margin account

Options. European, cash settled, priced from a volatility surface with skew and term structure rather than a single number per underlying.

Volatility perpetuals. A perpetual whose index is 30 day at the money implied volatility. One unit is one vega and delta is exactly zero.

Credit. Borrowing power derived from the same scenario computation that produces margin, so the advance rate reflects the shape of the risk rather than a flat percentage of market value.

Design principles

  • No hand entered figures. Every number in this documentation and on the site is produced by the reference implementation and regenerated by npm run emit.
  • Revaluation over approximation. Margin prices the actual payoff in every scenario rather than expanding it locally, because the positions whose margin matters most are precisely those that are not locally quadratic.
  • State the limits. The limitations page is written at the same length as the results.