Manipulation defences

A market on a person has one attack that matters: the person. This page names it and shows why each defence exists. Demo mode dodges all of it, because no real money is trading on anyone. Every defence below ships with live trading; three of them already run in the demo.

The attack#

A listed trader shorts himself at 100x, then nukes his own account with garbage trades. If the perp market on him is large next to his book, he can make more on the short than he loses on the trades. Variants: a deposit or withdrawal that moves a balance-based index, or a single rug candle that settles a stop.

Open interest caps#

Each market's open interest is capped relative to the trader's own account size: in demo, the larger of $50,000,000 and 10× the trader's equity; the live multiple is a founder decision. If the perp market on a trader is small next to his book, wrecking the book to win the perp costs more than it earns. Orders that would breach the cap are rejected.

The trader's own addresses#

The trader's known fomo wallets, the ones the feed reads, cannot open a position on his own market; an order from one of them is refused. Addresses those wallets fund are not traced yet, so a determined trader can still get in through a fresh wallet, which is what the open interest caps and the float guard are for.

Median settlement#

The published index is the median of the last five raw samples. One deliberate candle in a trader's book moves the median barely at all; settling anything takes a sustained move across minutes, which costs the attacker real PnL. See The index.

Percent on deployed capital#

The index divides by the capital in positions, not by balance, so deposits and withdrawals cannot move it. The exploit is removed by construction rather than by monitoring. See Deployed capital, not balance.

What ships when#