Leverage
A position controls notional many times its margin: 20x on BTC-USD means a 5% adverse move in the mark removes the whole initial margin. Gains and losses are both multiplied, and a position can lose its entire margin.
Margin methodologyLegal
Risk disclosure.
Perpetual futures are leveraged derivatives. Even with test collateral, understand what can happen to a position before you open one. This is the operator's statement of the risks, not advice.
Read this first
Elysta is an on-chain perpetual futures exchange. A perpetual future is a leveraged contract with no expiry whose price is kept near an index by funding payments. You can lose the entire margin of a position, be liquidated without notice, pay funding every interval, and be unable to act while a market is halted. The rules that decide each of these are public and documented on the methodology page; this page lists the ways they can hurt you.
Elysium mainnetYou can lose all of a position’s marginUnaudited software
The risks
Liquidation
When equity falls below maintenance margin, anyone may liquidate the position at the mark price, taking over the quantity needed to restore the initial margin ratio or all of it. A penalty of the liquidated notional is charged. Liquidation can happen while a scheduled market's session is closed, as long as the index is valid, and nobody warns you first.
Liquidation methodologyFunding
Every interval, longs pay shorts or shorts pay longs according to the premium of mark over index. Holding a position on the paying side costs collateral steadily; the rate is capped per interval but there is no cap over time.
Funding methodologyOracle and price
The index comes from oracle adapters. Today it is relayed by a single keeper from HyperCore's published prices. A stale, missing or deviating price halts the market: positions cannot be closed, liquidated or funded until a valid price returns, and the first price after a gap may be far from the last one. An incorrect price that nevertheless passes validation would mark positions incorrectly.
Oracle validationSmart contracts
The contracts are unaudited software. A defect could lock, misaccount or lose collateral despite the tests and invariants that exist. An external security review is an open roadmap item, not a completed one.
RoadmapMarket gaps and sessions
Scheduled markets (equities, commodities, indices) are closed on weekends and holidays while their references may keep moving. A reopening can gap through your liquidation price with no chance to react. Thin books can move the mark within its band around the index.
Markets and sessionsLoss beyond margin and bad debt
A loss larger than a position's margin is paid by the insurance fund; if the fund cannot cover it, bad debt is recorded and the market halts. Counterparties' gains are backed by the fund, not guaranteed beyond it, and there is no auto-deleveraging or socialised loss mechanism.
Insurance fundOperational dependencies
The website, API, indexer and keeper can be unavailable. The contracts keep working without them, but you may be unable to see your position or act on it through this interface, and prices stop updating if the keeper stops, which halts markets.
StatusAdministration
Today a single key holds every administrative role. It cannot edit balances, force fills or write prices, but it can pause orders, pause deposits, pause withdrawals for up to 3 days, change parameters with immediate effect and grant roles. A compromised key could install a new ledger writer. A multisig and timelock are planned before any real collateral, not in place now.
GovernanceTransactions and wallets
A transaction you sign cannot be undone. Gas is spent even on a revert. Phishing sites imitating this one could ask you to sign something else; verify the contract addresses against the deployment record and never share your seed phrase.
Contract addressesThe collateral has no value
Nothing settled on Elysta is money. Gas is.
The settlement collateral, tUSD, is minted by a public faucet and cannot be redeemed for anything. Balances, PnL, funding and liquidations are denominated in it, so none of them is money. Every transaction on Elysium mainnet pays gas in HYPE, which has real value and is not refunded; Elysta never sells, distributes or reimburses HYPE. The contracts may be replaced by a new deployment, and nothing settled in tUSD carries over to a deployment with real collateral.
The risks above are nevertheless real in the sense that matters for learning: a position that is liquidated here would be liquidated with real collateral too, by the same code. Treat outcomes as information about the mechanism, not as a promise about any future deployment.
No advice
Nothing on this site is investment, financial, trading, legal or tax advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to open, hold or close any position. Figures shown are measurements from the chain or documented calculations with labelled inputs. Worked examples are illustrations of the rules, marked as such, and never describe a real market. You alone decide what to sign.
No company or jurisdiction has been selected for Elysta; this disclosure is the operator’s statement for a product whose collateral has no value, and will be replaced when an entity is selected or real collateral is considered.