The liquidity pool
The pool is the other side of every Stratos trade. It sells convexity to longs, buys it from shorts, collects funding and trading fees, and hedges what it holds on Derive. Anyone can deposit into it.
What you get
A deposit mints shares at the current share price (pool value ÷ shares). The share price moves with the pool's P&L: up as funding and fees come in, down when traders win more than the hedge recovers. Your value is shares × share price.
What it earns
- Funding from longs (minus what it pays shorts), net of the cost of its own hedge.
- 35% of the protocol's fee revenue (trading, liquidation, knock-out profit share and fast-move fees), paid into the pool every hour.
- The insurance fund that protects the pool fills from a share of fees, half of each liquidation fee, the knock-out buffer and, while it's under target, a small share of winning trades' profit.
What it risks
The pool loses when traders win big and the hedge doesn't fully cover it: tracking error between the exact payoff users get and the options strip plus perp the pool holds. The protections are described under Safety: a gap stress cap on every open, an insurance fund targeted at 2% of open interest, and a capped haircut on winners as the last resort. The pool can lose money; it is not a savings account.
Withdrawals
Two ways out:
- At the weekly roll, free. Queued withdrawals are paid Fridays 08:00 UTC at that moment's share price. The roll lines up with the weekly options expiry the pool hedges with.
- Early, in a daily window, for a 0.25% fee. Every day except the roll day (08:00 UTC), early withdrawals are paid from the pool's spare capital: at most 10% of the pool a day, never past its cash, and never so much that the pool couldn't cover a sudden move on the trades it holds. If more is asked than fits, everyone is paid pro rata and the rest waits for the next window or the roll (free). The fee stays in the pool for the LPs who stay.
Your queued withdrawal, its estimated value and when it pays are on the Pool page.
Capital tiers
The pool's size sets how much leverage traders may take (5x / 50x below $250k, 10x / 75x to $1M, 20x / 100x after) and the open-interest caps per coin, which grow with the pool (up to 3× each coin's share of it) and step up by stage as the system earns it.