What is Contango?
Last updated
Last updated
Contango lets you loop anything on-chain.
You can:
Create leveraged positions similar to perps, but with low funding.
Lever up on the yield of liquid staking and restaking assets, such as stETH or eETH.
Lever up on the fixed yield of Pendle's PTs.
Create delta neutral plays to farm funding rates.
Arbitrage rate differentials on stablecoins.
Farm rewards, airdrops, and points with leverage.
And much more! See all its use cases.
The architecture behind Contango makes it the ultimate looping layer in defi.
Regardless of whether you use the Advanced or the Simplified interface, all positions are built by automating a looping strategy, using spot and money markets.
Likewise, regardless of the type of user you are - trader, looper, farmer - you'll always find a use case to trade on Contango.
Here's a 1-min explainer:
Contango builds positions on top of spot and money markets. By aggregating the +$20B liquidity of spot markets and tapping into the +$40B liquidity of money markets, Contango can facilitate large trades with minimal impact on both rates and price.
Funding rates (shown as APY on Contango) are determined by the difference between the lending and borrowing rates on the money markets. This mechanism offers the best funding rates in the industry, around 3x cheaper and less volatile than market leaders, like Binance and dYdX (full study). These APY values can be positive or negative, offering traders a chance to collect them via arbitrage.
Contango is composable by design. It can offer a trading pair on any chain as long as there is a spot and a lending market for that. Currently you can choose among 6 chains, 13 money markets and more than +200 trading pairs. The ability to trade the same instrument on different markets and chains is great for diversification purposes too. Don't see a money market or an asset you'd love to trade? Just tell us.
By design, almost all rewards, incentives or points offered by the underlying money markets will be accrued by traders on Contango. Contango already offers point-farming pairs on Ethena, Etherfi, Renzo, EigenLayer, Aave Merit rewards. Airdrop criteria from underlying protocols also apply to Contango traders, like the SPK airdrop from Spark (see this section for more details). That’s the beauty of DeFi composability.