The DEX

Say you have an opinion about graded Pokémon. Perhaps a year of headlines has pushed the category too high, or perhaps the vaults have barely started filling. For a long time the hobby offered a single tool for acting on either view: an actual card. You bought one and hoped you had picked well, or you listed one and waited for someone to take it. The DEX is the second tool. It takes the level Quanta publishes for an entire category and makes it a market you can go long or short on, at any hour, straight from your own wallet.

What you trade

Each tradable index gets one market, and the first is PKMN, graded Pokémon, live at /trade/PKMN. The instrument is a perpetual contract on the index. It follows the index price, it has no expiry date, and your position stays open for as long as there is margin behind it. There is no settlement day and nothing gets delivered, because the contract never ends. You open a position, the level moves, your position gains or loses with it, and you close whenever you choose.

Most of the meaning sits in the word index. The contract's reference is the level Quanta computes from real sales of graded cards, with the public on-chain record of vaulted card sales as the verifiable layer the index engine reads (What is a Quanta index). Quanta's oracle delivers that level to the market at least once per second. Positions are valued and liquidated against a mark price, which the matching engine builds from the index and the orderbook and then clamps inside a narrow band around the index: a few percent at most, with the exact factor shown on the market page. The mark price is anchored to the index inside that band, so the perpetual stays on the level. Index price, mark price, last price breaks the mechanism down, and Funding covers the payments between longs and shorts that pull the market back toward the level whenever it drifts.

PKMN is the first market. Which indexes follow it, and how an index earns a market of its own, is covered on The index family.

An orderbook with shared liquidity

Orders on the DEX meet on a central limit orderbook. You see every bid and ask, you can rest a limit order at your price and let it wait, and any fill you get is a price another trader accepted. Price discovery happens in public, one order at a time, rather than inside a pricing formula. Matching runs in the infrastructure's engine, while deposits, withdrawals and settlement happen on-chain.

Quanta runs its markets on a professional orderbook infrastructure and lists and operates them itself. That infrastructure is shared with other trading front ends, which can route orders to the same PKMN book, so the market's liquidity is not limited to whoever has the Quanta page open. Depth comes from everyone quoting the book, wherever they connect from.

Self-custody, open all hours

You fund your account in USDC from the Solana wallet you connect (Getting started). Deposits and settlement are on-chain and your funds stay in your control: Quanta never holds them, in the same way it never takes custody of a card. Withdrawals are processed by the trading infrastructure and settle on-chain as USDC sent back to your wallet.

The market also never closes. Collectibles have never had a closing bell. A card sells at 3 a.m. in one time zone and at midday in another, and the sales record behind the index keeps running through the night. The DEX keeps the same hours, weekends included.

Solana and USDC

The DEX runs on Solana, and you deposit USDC, a dollar stablecoin, from your connected Solana wallet. USDC is also the unit your trading account keeps its books in. Margin, profit and loss, fees and funding are all counted and settled in it, so a position on graded Pokémon reads in dollars, the same unit the card market already uses, and nothing you deposit gets converted on the way. Solana transactions pay their network fee in SOL, the network's native token, so the network fee on a deposit, plus the fee on the message that passes the deposit to the trading infrastructure, comes out of the SOL in your wallet (Fees). A withdrawal is a message your wallet signs; it pays USDC out to that wallet, minus the withdrawal fee charged by the trading infrastructure.

Both directions

Go long if you expect the category to rise. Go short if you expect it to fall.

The long side has always been open to anyone with a card and somewhere to store it. The short side is new. You can now be short a whole category of physical collectibles, rather than holding one card and hoping someone buys it from you at a lower price later. That is useful to a trader who thinks a run has gone too far, and to a collector who owns physical cards and wants to keep them through a downturn without absorbing the full drop on the shelf.

Perpetuals, explained for collectors works through both sides with round example numbers. On either side, margin is isolated: every position carries its own margin, and your loss is capped at the margin on the position (Margin, leverage and liquidation). Leverage goes up to 20x, which turns a small move in a steady index into a large move on your margin, in either direction. A 2% move at 20x is a 40% move on the margin.

The market page on one screen

Open /trade/PKMN and everything is on a single page. The chart plots the index and the mark price on the same axis, with the band drawn around the index, so you can read the gap between them at a glance and see the full range the mark can travel. Below the chart, a gauge shows the premium or discount, meaning how far the market sits from the index right now, next to the current and predicted funding rates, since funding is priced on exactly that gap. The order form sits on the right: long or short, size, leverage, margin, and the button that sends the order as a limit order or at market. Your open positions are listed underneath with their margin, unrealized profit and loss, accrued funding and liquidation price.

The page also shows who lists the market, so you always know who operates the book you are trading on. Taker and maker fees are on Fees, and the path from an empty wallet to your first position is on Getting started.

Sources for this page are listed in Sources.