SportsPerp 101

A plain-English introduction for readers who are new to crypto, perpetual futures, or both.

What is SportsPerp, in one sentence?

SportsPerp is a trading venue where you can go long (you think a team or player is getting better) or short (you think they’re getting worse) on the performance of Premier League teams and players — priced continuously, settled in stablecoins, and running entirely on the Solana blockchain.

How is this different from sports betting?

Sportsbooks pay fixed odds on a discrete event: will Arsenal win on Saturday? You stake money, the match happens, you win or lose.

SportsPerp tracks a number called the OBV Index for each team and player. That number moves up and down over time, like a stock price. You can open a leveraged position against it at any moment, hold for minutes or months, add or remove collateral, and close whenever you want. There’s no “match outcome” to wait for. You’re trading a continuous view of performance, not a discrete bet on an outcome.

Think of it as: sportsbooks are Vegas; SportsPerp is NASDAQ for football performance.

What is the OBV Index?

OBV stands for On-Ball Value — an industry-standard football analytics methodology that assigns a numerical value to every action in a match (every pass, shot, dribble, tackle). Good actions add value; bad actions subtract it. Summed across a match or season, OBV is one of the most accurate measures of how well a team or player has actually been playing. SportsPerp consumes OBV-style event data from an institutional football-data partner (vendor not disclosed publicly for competitive reasons).

SportsPerp takes that OBV signal, mixes in recent form and match results (for teams) or minutes played (for players), normalizes it across the league, and rescales it to a tradable number between 100 and 900. That’s the index you trade against.

More detail in What is On-Ball Value.

What is a “perpetual future”?

A perpetual future (or “perp”) is a contract that lets you take a leveraged position on a price without ever expiring. Three ingredients make it work:

1. Collateral. You deposit USDC (a dollar-pegged stablecoin) as margin.
2. Leverage. You can control a position worth several times your collateral. If the price moves in your favor, gains are magnified; if it moves against you, so are losses.
3. Funding. Every 8 hours, traders on the over-weighted side pay a small fee to traders on the under-weighted side. This keeps the perp price anchored to the underlying index over time.

Perps are the dominant instrument on crypto exchanges like Binance and Bybit, and onchain protocols like Hyperliquid and dYdX. SportsPerp is the first to apply the format to sports performance indices.

Can I lose more than I deposit?

No. SportsPerp uses a three-layer liquidation system designed to guarantee the protocol never accrues bad debt:

1. If your margin drops to the partial-liquidation threshold, 20% of your position is closed automatically to free up collateral.
2. If you’re still underwater after that, the protocol’s insurance fund absorbs the remaining position at mark price and gradually unwinds it.
3. If the insurance fund is depleted, opposing profitable positions are auto-deleveraged (ADL) — ranked by PnL × leverage.

Your worst case is losing your deposited collateral. You cannot owe the protocol money.

Where does the price come from?

Every five minutes, an off-chain service called the oracle crank pulls the latest match data from our institutional data partner, computes each market’s OBV Index, and pushes it to the Solana blockchain via the update_oracle instruction. The on-chain mark price used for liquidation eligibility is a blend of this oracle price and the internal vAMM price, weighted dynamically (50/50 during live matches, 30/70 between matches) and smoothed with a 150-second-half-life EMA. This composite resists manipulation from any single source.

In live matches, the index updates in near-real-time as events (goals, key passes, defensive actions) come in through the partner’s live event feed. Post-match, the live estimate converges to the partner’s official OBV via a 4-hour EMA blend.

Do I need to know football to trade here?

No — but it helps. You can trade SportsPerp the way people trade any index: pick a market, form a view, manage risk. Football context (injuries, fixtures, form, tactics) is the fundamental analysis; OBV-derived event data is the technical signal. Both approaches work, and can be combined.

Why blockchain?

Three reasons:

1. Trustless settlement. All positions, liquidations, and funding payments execute through open-source smart contracts. No one can freeze your account or refuse to pay a winning position.
2. Always open. Unlike centralized exchanges, SportsPerp never closes for maintenance windows and has no KYC gate. You trade directly from a self-custody wallet.
3. Composability. The SDK and WebSocket feed let other builders compose SportsPerp into their own products — vaults, structured products, AI trading agents, hedged parlay strategies.

What’s next?

• Read What is On-Ball Value for the statistical primitive that powers the protocol.
• Read Your First Trade for a step-by-step walkthrough.
• Read $SPERP Token → Overview for how trading activity will be rewarded.