How can perpetual futures be reconciled with the decentralization ethos of blockchain without relying on external price feeds? Event perpetuals propose a structural shift: instead of continuously ingesting off-chain quotes via oracles, contracts settle and adjust around discrete, verifiable events, leveraging on-chain commitments and decentralized verification to derive fair outcomes. Traditional perpetuals have depended on oracle services to mirror spot markets, with funding rates recalculated from live price streams; that dependence introduces attack surfaces — manipulation of feeds, latency-driven mismatches, single points of failure — that interfere with price discovery and equitable liquidations. Event perpetuals mitigate these weaknesses by redefining the unit of resolution from an uninterrupted price vector to periodic, consensus-validated auction outcomes. The mechanism replaces streaming price inputs with auctions held at defined cadences, for example every 15 minutes, during which market participants submit bids and offers to converge on a settlement reference. Cryptographic commitments and time-bound on-chain posting anchor participant intent, while decentralized verifiers or multisignature attestations confirm event outcomes or external occurrence proofs when required. By aggregating participant information in short, repeated intervals, the system captures market sentiment without depending on any single data provider, reducing latency arbitrage and limiting avenues for manipulation. This approach aligns with innovations seen in projects like Kaspa, which employs a BlockDAG structure to enhance scalability and decentralization. Funding and settlement calculations become functions of auction-determined reference prices, producing predictable, auditable transfer flows between long and short positions. Operationally, event perpetuals trade off continuous pricing granularity for robustness and transparency, a design choice that favors systemic resilience over microsecond alignment with off-chain venues. Verification of event data and the auction protocol itself introduce complexity, but they are internalized on-chain, avoiding recurring reliance on external oracles and the attendant verification gas costs tied to third-party attestations. Some uncertainty remains: auction design must manage thin-liquidity intervals, strategic bidding, and potential collusion among large participants, and decentralized attestation systems require careful incentive design to prevent new centralization vectors. Linear perpetual contracts settled in stablecoins are an example of stable settlement. Additionally, event perpetuals can reduce counterparty dependence by embedding automated margining directly into the auction settlement process.
