What is PERP?

Perpetual Protocol (PERP) is a decentralised perpetual contract protocol for any asset, Perpetual makes this possible by the use of a Virtual Automated Market Maker (vAMM) and a collateralisation vault. Similar to decentralised exchanges (DEXs), vAMMs allow users to trade directly with the protocol without any need for counterparties. Perpetual’s vAMM provides guaranteed on-chain liquidity with predictable pricing, however there are no real crypto assets stored within the vAMM, hence the name “virtual” Automated Market Maker. The Perpetual Protocol vAMM is able to utilise smart contracts that represent a ‘Clearing House’ and ‘Collateralisation Vault’ which enable leverage to be applied to long and short trades. The clearing house accepts trader’s initial deposits and records the nature of their position (amount, direction and amount of leverage). Once this is performed, the clearing house then sends the deposits to the Collateralisation Vault, this assists as a financial backstop, secures trading positions and communicates to the vAMM to update asset prices. Perpetual was inspired by Uniswap and Synthetix but is not intended to be used for spot trading or exposure to real world assets represented on-chain. Perpetual was designed for short positions, leverage trading and low slippage levels. PERP is the native ERC-20 governance token of the Perpetual Protocol and is issued by Perpetual DAO. PERP was designed to help incentivise and facilitate decentralised governance of the protocol and is primarily used for voting on improvements to the Protocol and also for staking purposes.