Everything
explained once
The rest of the site is the pitch. This page is the reference: what a perpetual is, how a Scripta market is defined, and what can go wrong.
Overview
Scripta is a perpetuals platform built for markets that don't have a derivatives market yet. Instead of limiting traders to crypto, gold, silver and the major commodities, Scripta focuses on assets with real, fluctuating prices that traditional venues have skipped: hardware, niche commodities, crops, freight, and eventually almost anything that can be given a reliable price.
The long-term position is simple. If an asset has a price, it should be possible to trade its price movement — in either direction, with leverage, without owning the underlying.
Contract parameters differ market by market. Wherever this page says a value is set per market, it means exactly that: the number is published with the market at launch rather than fixed platform-wide.
What counts as a weird asset
"Weird" is not a judgement about the asset. It describes the gap between how real the price is and how tradable it is. A market qualifies for Scripta when it looks like this:
- The price is real — it is quoted, published and revised by someone outside the platform.
- The price fluctuates enough that having a view on it is meaningful.
- No accessible derivative exists, or the only one that exists is institutional, physical or regional.
- The market is fragmented, unconventional or too small to interest a traditional exchange.
That covers a wide range: DRAM and NAND, GPUs and accelerators, wafer and rack capacity, electricity and uranium, lithium and cobalt, cement and plywood, wheat and cocoa, eggs and beef, container rates and jet fuel, used cars and sneakers, credits and water rights.
Perpetual futures
A perpetual future is a derivative that tracks the price of an underlying asset and never expires. It has no delivery date, no settlement month and no roll. You open a position, you hold it as long as it stays funded and solvent, and you close it when you want.
Long and short
A long position gains when the underlying price rises and loses when it falls. A short position is the mirror. Because the contract is cash-settled against a reference price, a short does not require borrowing or holding the physical asset — which is what makes short exposure to things like DRAM, freight or fertilizer possible at all.
Why perpetuals suit these assets
- Many of the underlyings are published on a rolling basis rather than in contract months.
- There is no natural delivery mechanism for an index of GPU rental rates or sneaker resale.
- Traders can hold a structural view for as long as it takes without managing expiries.
No expiry means no automatic exit. A position that is never closed is exposed indefinitely, and funding is paid or received for the entire time it is open.
Reference & mark price
Every Scripta market is defined against a reference price: a published price for the underlying, expressed in the unit the physical market already uses — per GB, per tonne, per bushel, per GPU-hour, per FEU.
Two prices matter while a position is open:
| Price | What it is | What it drives |
|---|---|---|
| Reference price | The externally published price of the underlying asset, as defined in that market's spec. | Funding, and the anchor the contract is expected to track. |
| Mark price | The price the platform uses to value open positions, derived from the reference price. | Unrealised PnL, margin ratio and liquidation. |
Underlyings differ enormously in how often they update. Some publish continuously, some daily, some weekly. Each market spec states its source, its update cadence and how the mark price is derived from it, so the behaviour of a slow-updating market is known before you trade it.
Funding
A perpetual has no expiry to force convergence, so a funding mechanism does that job instead. Funding is a periodic payment exchanged directly between longs and shorts, sized by how far the contract is trading from its reference price.
- When the contract trades above the reference, longs pay shorts.
- When it trades below, shorts pay longs.
- The payment is a transfer between traders. It is not a platform fee.
The funding interval and the formula's bounds are set per market, because a market on a continuously quoted underlying and a market on a weekly print should not be pulled at the same rate.
Funding accrues for as long as a position is open. On a market where one side is persistently crowded, funding can become the dominant cost or the dominant return, independent of price direction.
Margin & leverage
Positions are opened against collateral rather than paid for in full. Two thresholds define the position's life:
- Initial margin — the collateral required to open a position of a given size. It sets the maximum leverage.
- Maintenance margin — the minimum collateral required to keep it open. Falling below this triggers liquidation.
Maximum leverage is set per market and reflects how the underlying behaves: how liquid its reference market is, how often it reprices, and how violently it has historically gapped. A thin, weekly-printed underlying will carry lower maximum leverage than a deep, continuously quoted one.
Leverage magnifies both directions symmetrically. At 10x, a 1% adverse move in the
underlying is a 10% move against the collateral backing that position.
Liquidation
If the mark price moves far enough against a position that its collateral falls below the maintenance margin, the position is liquidated: it is closed by the platform rather than by you, and the remaining collateral absorbs the loss.
What reduces the chance of it happening:
- Lower leverage, which moves the liquidation level further from the current price.
- Collateral held in excess of the initial requirement.
- Position sizes chosen against the underlying's realistic move, not its average one.
Assets that reprice on a schedule rather than continuously can gap. A single print can move a slow-updating market far enough to skip past intermediate levels, so a liquidation may execute worse than the level implied by the last observed price.
Listing a market
A candidate underlying has to clear four questions before it becomes a Scripta market:
- Is the price reliable? There must be a published source that can be pointed at and checked.
- Is it well defined? Grade, region, unit and cadence have to be specific enough that two people reading the spec agree on what is being traded.
- Does it actually move? A price that is administratively fixed makes a market with nothing to disagree about.
- Is there a reason to hold a view? Either a hedging need, or a thesis someone genuinely wants exposure to.
When a market launches, it publishes its own spec: reference source, unit, update cadence, funding interval, maximum leverage and margin requirements. Those are the numbers that define the contract, and they belong to the market rather than to the platform as a whole.
Full universe
The market universe Scripta is built around, grouped by sector. The interactive version, with search and filters, is on the markets page.
Risk
Leveraged derivatives can lose more than the move in the underlying would suggest, and a liquidation can cost the entire collateral backing a position. The specific risks worth understanding before trading a weird asset:
- Thin liquidity. Niche markets can have wide spreads and shallow books. Entry and exit prices may differ meaningfully from the mark.
- Gapping. Underlyings that print daily or weekly can jump between observations.
- Reference risk. A market is only as good as its source. Sources can be delayed, revised, or change methodology.
- Funding drag. A crowded side pays continuously. Over a long hold this can outweigh the price move you were right about.
- Correlation surprises. Unusual underlyings behave in unusual ways, including against the assets you are using as collateral.
Nothing on this site is financial advice or a recommendation to trade any market. Trade only what you can afford to lose entirely.
FAQ
Do I ever receive the physical asset?
No. Scripta markets are cash-settled against a reference price. There is no delivery of RAM, cocoa or containers at any point.
Why perpetuals instead of dated futures?
Most of these underlyings publish on a rolling basis and have no natural delivery month. A perpetual lets a view be held for as long as it takes, without rolling.
Can I short an asset I could never borrow?
Yes — that is the main thing the format unlocks. Because settlement is in cash against a reference price, short exposure does not require sourcing the physical asset.
What happens if a market's price source stops publishing?
Each market spec states how its reference is defined and what happens if that source becomes unavailable. This is part of the published spec rather than a platform-wide rule.
Which markets exist right now?
The markets page lists the universe Scripta is built around. Individual markets carry their own spec and go live with it.
Where do announcements go?
@onScripta on X.