Risks

Funding moves fast

Funding is set by traders on Phoenix and changes every hour. A swap's floating leg can run far from its fixed rate within days: on Phoenix, daily SOL funding went from +22.2% to −28.7% a year between 31 May and 7 June 2026, and one hour on 7 June ran at −36.8%. A position whose losses reach its headroom at any checkpoint closes there, before funding has a chance to come back.

What Tack does: margin floors of 25% to open and 10% to stay open, a stress loss that assumes a 100% move on top of the fixed rate, and a liquidation line on every ticket and position.

The floating leg can be pushed

Funding follows the gap between Phoenix's SOL mark price and its index price. A trader with a large Tack position could trade the perp to move funding in their favour.

What Tack does: caps open interest at 1% of Phoenix's SOL open interest, per maturity and across all maturities together, rechecked at every fill.

Phoenix can stop or change

If Phoenix stops updating, skips an interval, removes its SOL market or changes the layout or units Tack reads, Tack's markets stop taking trades. If that lasts beyond the freeze grace, a market closes at its last verified checkpoint, and positions end there rather than at maturity.

What Tack does: checks Phoenix's account, its layout and its units on every read, refuses anything else, and never lets anyone supply a funding value. Phoenix upgrades its program often; an upgrade that keeps what Tack reads changes nothing. See Maturity and frozen markets.

Your counterparty is one account

Each swap is between two traders. If a checkpoint's loss is larger than the losing side's balance, the winner receives that balance and nothing more, and the swap ends. There is no insurance fund and no shared pool.

What Tack does: maintenance closes positions while they still hold a tenth of notional, so collateral runs out only on a move larger than that in a single checkpoint. See Collateral exhausted.

A closed position is not the fixed return

If either side is closed at maintenance, the swap ends at that checkpoint for both. The side that stayed healthy gets the result up to then, not the fixed rate to maturity. To keep the exposure, it has to trade again at whatever rate is quoted then.

Liquidity is quotes

There is a fixed rate to lock only while someone quotes one, and lots are whole. Tack has no early close: leaving early means opening the opposite side, which needs a quote on that side.

The crank has to run

Checkpoints must be published one record at a time. If no one publishes a record before Phoenix closes the next hour, the market cannot continue and closes at its last checkpoint after the grace. Tack runs its crank for every market it lists; anyone else can publish checkpoints and settle positions too, at the cost of Solana fees and checkpoint rent.

SOL's price

The floating leg is funding on a fixed amount of SOL, set by the market's reference price. When SOL's price moves, the dollar size of the floating leg moves with it, while the fixed leg stays on the notional. A hedge sized in SOL is unaffected; a view taken in dollars is not.

Everything under it

• The program is software. A defect in it could lose or lock collateral.
• USDC can be frozen by its issuer, in a market's vault or in your wallet.
• Solana can halt or congest. Settlement waits for the chain, and checkpoints may be missed if it stalls for longer than Phoenix's records continue.
• Rent for quote and position accounts is not refunded.