Leveraged trackers

A tracker is an ERC-20 whose value follows a real market at a stated multiple. NVDAx5 moves five times as hard as Nvidia. TSLAx5S moves five times as hard, in the opposite direction. MSTRx2 moves twice as hard as Strategy.

They are what a bonded coin is paired to, and what turns its backing from idle dollars into a position.

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Reading the name

The symbol says everything about the terms: <TICKER>x<L>, with an S suffix for a short.

The number after the x is the multiple the creator chose at launch, and there is no other place the terms are recorded — the front, the hedge book and the keeper read them straight off the symbol (the vault's targetLeverageX() and isShort() say the same on chain). The token's name spells the same thing out, e.g. NVDA 5x or MSTR 2x Short.

Choosing the multiple

The creator picks the multiple when launching a coin, from 1× up to the market's cap. The cap is the lower of two numbers: the product ceiling, LTFactory.MAX_LEVERAGE = 5, and the leverage a position can actually hold on that market on the venue. LTFactory.maxLeverageFor(symbol) returns it, and getOrCreateSharedLt refuses anything above it, so a tracker never promises a multiple its hedge cannot hold.

What a position can hold is set just under the venue's own cap. Lighter publishes a minimum initial margin fraction per market, and the cap is its inverse — 50× on SPY, 30× on QQQ, 25× on gold and silver, 20× on the large caps (Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Micron, Sandisk), on EWY, WTI and Brent, and 10× on most single stocks. At exactly the cap a position has no margin to spare, and a tick of slippage or a funding payment would make the venue refuse the order, so the factory lists 90% of the cap, rounded down: 45×, 27×, 22×, 18× and 9×. The keeper sizes with the same 10% headroom. SPY trades at 50× on the venue and the cap is still 5×.

What backs a tracker

A perpetual position on Lighter, an order-book perpetuals exchange margined in USDC, held in the Lighter account of the protocol's hedge wallet. A smart contract cannot own a Lighter account, so the account belongs to that wallet — an ordinary wallet — and the tracker's vault records it as its hedgeFunder, the only address it can ever send hedge money to. Every tracker of the wallet shares its one cross-margin account (Lighter allows at most four sub-accounts per wallet), and the keeper keeps a per-tracker ledger of each one's cash and position inside it. LTFactory.venueRouting(lt) returns the Lighter market the tracker hedges on (its marketId, Lighter's integer market id — Nvidia is 110) and the hedge wallet.

The money moves in short, visible legs. The vault sends idle USDC to the hedge wallet (fundHedge, capped on chain by fundableUsdc() and impossible before the tracker bonds); the wallet sends exactly that amount, with a plain USDC transfer on Avalanche, to the deposit address Lighter issued for it, and Lighter credits the account within minutes; on the way back Lighter's fast withdrawal pays the wallet on Arbitrum, and the wallet bridges the USDC with Circle's CCTP naming the vault as recipient, so it is minted straight into the vault on Avalanche. Orders are signed by a separate API key that can only trade. The details, and what you have to trust, are in The hedge book.

The tracker's NAV is its backing — its share of the account's equity, plus the USDC in the vault, plus any USDC on its way between the two — divided by its supply, signed by the keeper and posted on chain, readable by anyone. Mint and redeem are open at NAV, which is what holds a tracker at its stated value: if the market price drifts from NAV, minting or redeeming at NAV is profitable, and the drift closes. A redeem is paid at once out of the vault's idle USDC; shared trackers keep no idle buffer on purpose (so the books never run ahead of the venue), so a redeem the vault cannot cover joins a first-in-first-out queue that the keeper fills by withdrawing from Lighter and bridging back from Arbitrum — 15 to 20 seconds for the fast withdrawal according to Lighter's docs, plus one Circle attestation (seconds to a few minutes according to Circle); neither measured on this route yet.

The markets you can launch against

Every market the factory owner has listed (LTFactory.underlying(symbol) → (marketId, maxLeverage, listed)): the 32 stocks, indices, metals and commodities in the catalogue, long or short, at any multiple up to that market's cap. One tracker exists per (market, direction, multiple) that has been launched on, and the first coin to pick a new combination creates it; the 5× long and short trackers of every market are created at deployment.

Lighter lists Brent as BRENTOIL; the trackers are still WTIx5 and BRENTx5. These figures are a snapshot of Lighter's market list (2026-09-22); the keeper re-reads the live one.

Order sizes. Lighter accepts no order below 10 USDC of notional and caps a single order's notional per market; the keeper rounds to the market's size and price steps, skips what is too small, and splits what is too large. Every coin on a tracker shares that tracker's position.

These markets trade around the clock, but stocks still have hours. Lighter keeps its stock, index and commodity perpetuals open 24/7 with no closed-market price band, so a tracker keeps marking through nights and weekends, and the mark can gap when the underlying market reopens. The keeper only sends immediate-or-cancel limit orders, priced off the venue's mark within 0.5%; an order that does not fill is simply tried again on the next pass. A market the venue halts cannot be traded at all, and a market it sets to reduce-only can be shrunk but not grown, until it resumes.

One tracker, many coins

Every coin bonded onto NVDAx5 puts its backing behind the same Nvidia exposure. They pool. A tracker carries one position, not one per coin, which is why the hedge book sums their backing before doing any arithmetic. A coin on NVDAx3 is on a different tracker with its own ledger entry and its own reference pool; the multiple is part of what a coin shares, not only the market and the direction.

That is worth understanding as a holder: your coin's floor moves with Nvidia at the multiple in its tracker's name, and so does every other coin bonded onto the same tracker. The concentration of the whole book is public, on the hedge book page.