Cross-collateral deposits

By default, markets are quoted in USD and P&L is settled in USDT. All tokens deposited within the protocol can earn yield via Borrow/Lend. Until unrealised P&L is settled into your Balances, it will not earn (if profits) or be charged (if losses) the deposit/borrow interest respectively.

Below is a table of assets supported by Velocity.

Each asset counts towards margin for derivatives trading and has a weight applied to account for their respective volatilities.

For instance, depositing USDT gives users a 1:1 margin for derivatives trading, but depositing SOL (80% initial asset weight) means that 80% of the value of your SOL at the opening of your position will be available as margin for perpetual futures trading.

Margin Parameters

Main Pool Asset Weights

Every asset carries two asset weights, not one, plus an IMF factor that can shrink both. The table above is the authoritative source for live values. The worked examples below use SOL’s reference figures (80% initial, 90% maintenance, IMF factor 0.00125) so the arithmetic is easy to follow.

Which weight applies when

The protocol picks a weight based on what it is about to decide:

The maintenance weight is always the more generous of the two. That gap is deliberate: you need a larger cushion to take on new risk than to keep risk you already have. Between the two sits a band where you cannot add to your position but are not yet liquidatable.

The Fill weight lands inside that band. It applies only to perpetual fills: after a fill, each side is checked, and the side whose position is increasing is measured against the Fill weight, while a side whose position is shrinking or closing is measured against the maintenance weight instead. Liquidation fills skip the check entirely.

The effect is that filling into more risk is held to a stricter standard than merely staying above liquidation, but a looser one than opening a fresh position. Note that unsettled P&L is the exception: during a fill it is weighted at the full initial strictness rather than the midpoint, so paper profit does not get easier to spend as your order fills.

Initial asset weight

The initial asset weight is the haircut applied when the protocol asks how much new risk you may take on.

Deposit 1,000 SOL at $200, a face value of $200,000. At an 80% initial asset weight you get $160,000 of collateral for opening positions. At a 10% initial margin ratio on SOL-PERP, that supports up to $1.6M of notional.

The initial weight also shrinks as a market fills up, which the maintenance weight never does. Once total deposits in a spot market pass its scale_initial_asset_weight_start threshold, the weight decays:

scaled initial asset weight = initial asset weight * scale start / total deposit value

Two things to note about this. It scales on the market’s total deposits, not yours, so it affects every depositor in that market equally. And it decays linearly with no floor: double the deposits above the threshold and the weight halves.

For example, if the SOL market’s scale start were $50M and the market held $100M of SOL deposits, everyone’s initial asset weight would become 0.80 * 50/100 = 0.40. Your 1,000 SOL would give $80,000 of buying power instead of $160,000, without you doing anything. Because the Fill weight averages the scaled initial weight, this carries into fills as well.

You can read the current scale factor from the UI, or from SpotMarket::get_scaled_initial_asset_weight on-chain.

Maintenance asset weight

The maintenance asset weight is used in the liquidation check, and nowhere else. It ignores deposit-size scaling entirely, so it holds steady while the initial weight moves underneath it.

For the same 1,000 SOL at $200, your maintenance collateral is 200,000 * 0.90, or $180,000. That is the figure compared against your maintenance margin requirement.

The IMF factor

IMF stands for initial margin fraction. The IMF factor penalises concentration: a single account holding a very large amount of one asset is riskier per unit than a small one, because unwinding it moves the market.

For deposits it works as a ceiling on your asset weight:

discount = 1.1 / (1 + sqrt(size) * imf factor)

weight = min(base weight, discount)

Worked out for SOL at an IMF factor of 0.00125:

Two consequences fall out of that table:

• The IMF factor reaches maintenance before it reaches initial. Because the ceiling is shared and the maintenance weight starts higher, maintenance begins shrinking at roughly 31,600 SOL while the initial weight is untouched until 90,000. A large holder’s liquidation buffer erodes first.
• Past the initial knee, the two weights converge. Above roughly 90,000 SOL both weights are pinned to the same ceiling, so the band between “cannot open more” and “liquidatable” collapses to nothing.

The mirror image for liabilities

The same IMF factor applies to borrows as a premium rather than a discount:

weight = max(base weight, 0.8 * base weight + sqrt(size) * imf factor)

Borrow 1,000 units of an asset whose initial liability weight is 1.10, at an IMF factor of 0.01: 0.8 * 1.10 = 0.88, plus sqrt(1000) * 0.01 = 0.3162, giving 1.1962. Your $1,000 debt counts as $1,196 against you.

An asset’s liability weight can be converted into an LTV ratio using:

ltv = 1 / liability weight

Perpetual markets use the IMF factor differently

Perpetual markets have no asset weight. Each perp market has its own IMF factor, which raises your required margin ratio using the liability formula above. The effect is to cut your maximum leverage as your position grows, rather than to discount collateral. See Margin Requirements for the per-market ratios and Market Specs for the parameter definitions.

Unsettled perp P&L is the one part of a perp position that does carry asset weights, with its own separate IMF factor. Negative unsettled P&L always counts in full and is never discounted. See Unsettled P&L.

Worked example, end to end

You deposit 1,000 SOL at $200. The IMF discount is inactive at this size, so the base weights apply.

Opening. Your initial collateral is 200,000 * 0.80, or $160,000. At a 10% initial margin ratio you can open $1.6M of SOL-PERP long.

SOL then falls 10%, to $180.

$2,000 is below $43,200, so the account is liquidatable.

This is the compounding effect specific to backing a position with a correlated asset: the price drop shrinks your weighted collateral and creates the loss at the same time, and both land on the same side of the inequality. For how this reads in the app, see Account Health Breakdown.

Main Pool LTVs