Product and risk documentation

Overview

Shade is an independent application. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Robinhood Markets, Inc., Lighter, Chainlink, or any index operator.

Shade separates three capabilities, and each one reports its own status:

• Read-only market intelligence — reference prices, reference-market sessions, feed freshness and historical candles for every instrument in the catalog. Works without a wallet.
• Wallet and on-chain account information — USDG balance and allowance read from Robinhood Chain, plus collateral and open positions read from your account on the execution venue.
• Executable perpetual trading — order entry against a verified venue. This is currently unavailable for every Shade instrument; the reasons are listed under Integration readiness and measured live on the Status page.

How perpetual positions work

A perpetual future is a derivative contract with no expiry. A long position gains when the contract’s price rises and a short position gains when it falls. You post collateral, choose leverage within the market’s limits, and the venue marks your position against its mark price continuously.

A perpetual position is not ownership. Holding a long EUR/USD perpetual does not give you euros, and holding a long S&P 500 perpetual does not give you shares, dividends or voting rights. Settlement is in the collateral currency only.

FX instruments are labelled with their real market pair. EUR/USD, GBP/USD, AUD/USD, NZD/USD are quoted as currency-per-dollar pairs with the currency as the base, so a long position is long that currency. The other 60 pairs are quoted as USD/CCY, so a long position is long the US dollar against that currency.

Collateral and USDG settlement

Shade is designed around USDG (Global Dollar) as the single collateral and settlement asset. On Robinhood Chain USDG is an ERC-20 with 6 decimals; Shade reads decimals() from the contract and disables amount entry if the chain ever reports a different value, rather than converting with an assumed scale.

The execution venue Shade targets is the Robinhood Chain Lighter Domain — per Robinhood’s documentation, a dedicated Lighter instance with its own contracts, sequencer and liquidity, where USDG is asset index 3. Depositing calls deposit(address,uint16,uint8,uint256) on the venue contract; the venue creates the account on first deposit. See Robinhood’s Lighter Domains page.

The presence of USDG on the chain does not by itself mean a perpetual venue accepts it, and a venue accepting USDG does not mean it lists a given market. Shade verifies both separately.

Deposits through Shade are enabled in this deployment. When enabled, approvals default to the exact deposit amount; Shade never requests an unlimited allowance, and every transaction is simulated before your wallet is asked to sign.

Funding and liquidation

Funding keeps a perpetual’s price anchored to its index. When the rate is positive, longs pay shorts; when negative, shorts pay longs. On Lighter, funding is settled every hour; the rate for an hour is derived from the time-weighted premium of the mark price over the index, clamped and divided by eight. Shade displays the venue’s own reported rate per one-hour interval and never computes a rate itself. Source: Lighter funding documentation.

Liquidation is determined by the venue’s margin engine across your whole cross-margin account: if account value falls to the maintenance-margin requirement, the venue begins reducing positions and charges its liquidation fee. Because that depends on every position you hold, Shade does not approximate a liquidation price with a generic formula before a trade. For open positions it shows the liquidation price the venue reports.

Trading hours and stale prices

Three things are reported separately for every market, because they are different facts:

• Reference-market session — whether the underlying market is in its regular hours. FX follows the interbank week (Sunday 17:00 to Friday 17:00 New York). Each index follows its exchange’s cash session in the exchange’s own time zone. Holidays and half-days are not modelled.
• Price-feed freshness — the age of the last print, judged against that market’s own policy. Majors are expected to print about every minute and go stale after 15 minutes; emerging pairs after 90 minutes; frontier pairs, which print a few indicative rates a day, after 36 hours; index levels after 45 minutes in session.
• Protocol trading availability — whether a venue lists the market and Shade can execute on it. This is independent of both of the above.

On weekends, holidays or when a feed stops, Shade keeps showing the last print with its timestamp and age. It never generates a fresh-looking price. While a reference price is stale or unavailable, Shade blocks opening or increasing exposure. Reducing or closing remains possible only where the venue itself supports it.

Shade does not advertise 24/7 execution. A market could only be described that way if its venue and oracle policy actually support continuous trading.

Fees

Shade charges no fee of its own. Trading fees are set per market by the venue and read from its API; the order ticket multiplies the position value by the published taker or maker rate and rounds up. Where a venue publishes no rate for an instrument, the ticket shows “Unavailable” instead of a guess. Network gas for on-chain transactions is paid in ETH on Robinhood Chain.

Data sources

• Reference prices and candles — Yahoo Finance public chart endpoints. Key-free, unofficial, no service-level agreement; many index levels arrive 15–20 minutes behind the exchange. Charts are labelled as reference-price candles and are never presented as protocol mark-price candles.
• Execution-venue markets and accounts — Robinhood Chain Lighter Domain public REST API. Used for the live market list, mark and index prices, funding, open interest, fees, margin limits and address-keyed account data.
• External context — Lighter Core (external venue). A separate Lighter domain. Not on Robinhood Chain, not collateralised in USDG, and not executable through Shade. Values from it carry an EXT tag everywhere they appear.
• On-chain state — Robinhood Chain JSON-RPC through Shade’s read-only relay: bytecode checks, USDG decimals, balances, allowances and the Chainlink USDG / USD feed.
• Oracle coverage — Chainlink’s reference data directory for Robinhood Chain, counted by asset class to establish whether FX or index feeds exist.

Usage rights: the public Yahoo endpoints carry no redistribution licence. They are suitable for an independent read-only tool, not for a production venue that settles against them. Index names are trademarks of their operators; Shade is not sponsored, endorsed or licensed by any of them, and an index perpetual in production requires the operator’s licence.

Instrument identity is verified, not assumed: a venue listing only counts when the venue’s index price sits within 3% of the reference price. This stops a look-alike ticker — Lighter’s “SPX” is a token, not the S&P 500 — from being mistaken for the instrument.

Networks and markets

Modes never mix: one deployment runs in exactly one mode, shown in the navigation on every screen. No execution venue is published for testnet or local mode, so those run read-only unless one is configured.

The catalog is a coverage target: 64 currencies quoted against the US dollar (13 majors, 23 emerging, 28 frontier) and 31 benchmark equity indices (8 Americas, 11 Europe, 10 Asia-Pacific, 2 Middle East & Africa). Being in the catalog does not make an instrument tradable. The live count of listed and tradable markets is on the Markets page.

Contracts and explorer links

Shade deploys no contracts of its own. Addresses come from the publishers named above, and the Status page re-checks each one for deployed bytecode and cross-checks the venue contract against the address the venue’s API reports.

$SHADE token

The only $SHADE contract Shade has published is 0xEafB27af86Dfbf6f47eD2183d6efc9bD11953190 on Robinhood Chain. Its name, symbol, decimals and total supply are read from the contract and shown on the home page.

$SHADE is not required to read markets or use the terminal, and it is not collateral — perpetual positions are designed to settle in USDG. Shade makes no statement about its price, supply schedule or returns. A token with the same name on a different address or chain is not $SHADE.

Risk disclosure

• Leverage — magnifies losses as well as gains. A small adverse move can liquidate a leveraged position and you can lose all posted collateral.
• Funding — is paid or received every hour while a position is open and can materially change the result of a trade held for days.
• Gaps — FX reopens on Sunday and indices reopen each morning at prices that can differ sharply from the previous close. A perpetual that trades while its reference market is closed can diverge from it.
• Oracle and venue risk — a venue depends on its price feeds, sequencer, matching engine and smart contracts. Any of them can fail or be paused.
• Stablecoin risk — USDG is a stablecoin issued by a third party. It can lose its peg; the Status page shows the on-chain USDG / USD feed.
• Smart-contract and wallet risk — on-chain transactions are irreversible. Verify every address and every wallet prompt.
• Jurisdiction — leveraged derivatives are restricted or prohibited in many places. You are responsible for knowing whether you may use them.

Nothing on Shade is investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation.

Known limitations

• No execution — no Shade instrument can currently be traded through Shade.
• Unlicensed reference data — delayed and without an SLA; occasional gaps appear as “Unavailable” or “Stale”.
• No holiday calendar — a session can read “open” on a market holiday; freshness will then read stale.
• No venue history — order and fill history require venue authentication that Shade does not have.
• Injected wallets only — browser-extension wallets are supported; WalletConnect and embedded wallets are not.
• Process-local rate limiting — API rate limits and caches live in each server instance, not in a shared store.

Integration readiness

What must exist before Shade can enable execution. Each item is an external dependency; none is worked around with a mock.

1. 1

   FX and index markets on a Robinhood Chain venue

   The only perpetual venue documented on Robinhood Chain (its Lighter domain) currently lists crypto, equity, ETF and metals perpetuals. Shade checks the live market list on every load and will show a market as listed the moment the venue adds it.
2. 2

   FX and index oracle feeds on Robinhood Chain

   Chainlink’s published feed directory for Robinhood Chain contains crypto and tokenized-equity feeds. A venue listing FX or index perpetuals needs price feeds for those instruments.
3. 3

   Venue order signing in the browser

   Lighter orders are L2 transactions signed by an API key registered to the account. The official signers are Go and Python; a browser signer (or a user-authorised signing service) must be integrated behind the OrderGateway interface.
4. 4

   Licensed market data for production

   Reference prices come from public Yahoo Finance endpoints with no SLA or redistribution licence. A production launch needs a licensed FX and index feed, and index perpetuals need licences from the index operators.

Live measurements of all of the above are on the Status page.