How a basket works.

A basket is a token whose value follows five crypto markets at fixed weights and one leverage. Nothing is bought on an exchange. The program reads prices from Pyth, keeps the books, and settles every gain and loss in USDC against one shared vault.

One basket, start to finish

Round numbers, so the arithmetic is easy to follow. The desk does the same sums with live prices.

1. Ann ships $MAJORS: BTC 40%, ETH 25%, SOL 20%, HYPE 10%, ZEC 5%, all long, at 2x, with a cap of 3x. She becomes its manager.
2. Ben mints with $1,000. At 2x that opens about $2,000 of exposure: about $800 of BTC, $500 of ETH and so on. The open fee is 0.10% of that, about $2. Each leg is also entered at the far edge of Pyth's confidence band, a few basis points, and that cost comes off Ben's share count. He gets about 997 shares, each worth $1.
3. BTC rises 10%. The BTC leg is now worth $880. The basket made $80 on $998 of equity, so each share is worth about $1.08. The vault, which took the other side, is $80 down.
4. Carol mints with $500. Every leg grows by the same fraction, so Ben's exposure and share price do not move. Carol pays her own fee and band.
5. Then every market falls 15%. The basket's equity shrinks faster than its exposure, so it is now at about 2.3x, more than 10% over its 2x target. Anyone can call rebalance: every leg is closed at Pyth's mid and reopened at 2x on what is left. The only charge is 0.10% of what actually changed hands.
6. Ben redeems half. Half of every leg closes at the far edge of the band, he pays 0.10% of what closed, and the rest is his in USDC. If a feed had gone quiet he could still redeem, giving up 2% of that leg.

Prices

Every market reads one Pyth push account on Solana: the sponsored feed that Pyth itself keeps updated. A leg counts as fresh while its price is under two minutes old and its confidence band is narrower than 1%. Minting into a basket and rebalancing it need every leg fresh. Redeeming never waits. The sixteen listed markets are the ones whose feeds update every few seconds to every minute; feeds that go quiet for minutes at a time were left out.

The vault

Anyone can deposit USDC into the vault and take the other side of every basket. Longs and shorts cancel per market first, so the vault only carries the difference, and it is paid for that: the heavy side of each market pays funding of up to 0.05% an hour at full skew, and the vault keeps 80% of every fee. The vault's book may never be larger than a set share of its assets, so a withdrawal that would leave it too thin is refused, and so is a mint that would push it over.

If a basket gains more than the vault holds, the vault pays what it has and the shortfall is written down as bad debt, on chain, for anyone to see. The desk shows both numbers.

Rebalancing and liquidation

Prices move, so a basket drifts away from its weights and its leverage. Its manager can rebalance it at most once an hour. Anyone can rebalance it once any leg, or the leverage, is 10% away from target, or once a change has landed. That public rebalance is what keeps a losing basket from creeping toward liquidation on its own.

Liquidation is for a gap the rebalance could not catch: when a basket's equity falls under 7.5% of its exposure, anyone can close every leg to cash and is paid half of that margin. The shares survive and hold whatever is left; only the manager can lever the basket up again.

What a manager can change

Legs, weights, leverage, fee and the manager itself. Every one of those is proposed first, shown on the basket's page with a countdown, and can only land 24 hours later. Anyone may execute it once the time is up, within a week; after that it lapses. Lowering the basket's leverage cap is the one immediate change, because it can only make holders safer. A manager's fee is at most 2% a year and is paid in new shares, never out of the basket's margin.

Numbers the program enforces

What the admin can do

List a new market on a live Pyth feed, set how much open interest each market may carry, pause a market for new risk (redeeming, rebalancing down and liquidating stay open), and set fees and funding inside the ceilings above. The admin cannot touch a basket, change its legs, raise anyone's leverage, or move money out of the vault. The program is upgradeable until its upgrade authority is revoked. Today that key is DN4pXMLdHAyj3ofknPwhChNt1monLKDew391HM1dwhZR, the same key that set up the desk.