ElementPrice integrity
How Element sources, validates, and fails closed on price, and where price risk remains.
Why price is the safety property
Element is oracle-priced and pool-backed: there is no order book, so every open, close, and liquidation happens at the protocol mark against the shared vault. That makes the integrity of the mark the single most important safety property on the venue. The mark is validated before it is published and checked again on-chain before any trade can execute against it.
The protocol mark
Every market has a single protocol mark, an on-chain oracle price kept continuously up to date. All 16 markets use this one mark for every open, close, and liquidation; there is no order book and no second price.
A third-party chart may enrich what you see, but it never replaces Element's mark for execution, PnL, margin, liquidation, or position value. One number settles the venue.
Fail-closed freshness
Every mark carries a timestamp. If the newest mark is older than the 120-second staleness window, the oracle reverts: the market freezes and both opens and liquidations are rejected until a fresh price is written. Outages freeze the venue; they never let the mark drift.
- No last-known-price fallback: a stale feed stops the market, it does not coast
- No mock or placeholder prices in production
- A missing mark disables price-dependent controls in the app rather than guessing
- Freezing on a suspect price is the intended outcome, not a failure
Sessions and off-hours
During regular U.S. hours the mark tracks the live equity market. Off-hours and on weekends it keeps updating continuously and can deviate from where the underlying would open next. All 16 markets stay available around the clock, and off-hours open-interest caps are tighter to contain that risk.