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What is Contango?
Contango is a unique decentralized market offering cPerps (Contango perps).
Contango builds perps by automating a looping strategy, also known as recursive borrowing and lending. This is achieved using spot and money markets.
Looping has always been the DeFi-native way of longing or shorting assets on-chain. Since the early days of DeFi, users have been manually borrowing, swapping, lending multiple times on money markets to achieve a leverage exposure to an asset or farm rewards.
These multiple loops were soon automated via flashloans by popular dapps.
DeFi, however, never treated manual or automated loops as future positions, tradable via a professional trading interface.
Contango automates looping and provides a sleek trading UI that welcomes traders, loopers, farmers and allows them to trade with leverage on top of a professional interface with detailed indicators and simple automation tools.
Here's a 1-min explainer from Defi Dad:
Contango builds perps on top of spot and money markets. By aggregating the +$7B liquidity of spot markets and tapping into the +$13B liquidity of money markets, Contango offers traders a minimal price impact. See more details on How it works.
Funding rates (aka APR on Contango) are determined by the difference between the lending and borrowing rates on the money markets. This mechanism offers the least volatile funding rates in the industry, 20x less volatile than market leaders, like Binance and dYdX. These APR values can be positive or negative, offering traders a chance to collect them with a basis trade.
By design, any reward or incentive offered on the underlying money markets will be earned by traders on Contango. That’s the beauty of DeFi composability.
An earlier version of the protocol was built on fixed-rate markets and offered expirable instruments. This v1 can be accessed here, and its docs here.
Last modified 1mo ago