Clearing V1
Admin
Admin is the protocol’s governance role, and it is deliberately narrow. It lists tickers and sets their risk parameters, holds a few failsafes for stress, and sets where fees route. Everything it can change touches only options minted afterward, never the terms of one already open. The aim is minimal intervention, not control.
Listing a ticker
A ticker is created, not deployed. createTicker is admin-only and writes the whole per-ticker config in one call: the perp with its strike and expiry, the SVI smile that prices the floor, the minimum rope, the carry rate, the collateral token, the mint and exercise fees, the finder fee, and the auction’s opening discount. Nearly all of it is frozen for the ticker’s life, its identity and its economics alike, so a writer knows the exact terms a market will hold them to before they write. The only forward changes are the two failsafes below, halting new mints and shifting the smile, and both reach only new mints, never an option already open.
The intervention levers
Beyond listing, admin holds a small set of forward controls for a ticker under stress:
- Halt new mints on a ticker. Admin reaches for this when a ticker is under stress, its auctions failing to clear, a sign the IV was set too low, and it stops only new writes. Recollateralizing the shorts already open, buying them back or novating them through the auction, stays open, which is exactly what should keep happening on a stressed ticker.
- Raise the implied vol. Retune the smile’s parameters, or set a per-ticker IV override that supersedes the smile’s output directly (force 100% where the smile prices 60%, without touching the curve), so new bonds price more conservatively when realized volatility runs ahead of the model.
- Tune the resolution economics: the auction’s per-block ascent (
setResolutionParams), the address a cut of fees routes to (setInsuranceVault), and the excess split, how each auction’s leftover divides among the DAO, the force-closed writer, and insurance.
These exist for the correlated tail, a fast move force-closing many covers at once, not for day-to-day tuning. The goal is minimal intervention: the levers are there so the protocol has a response, not so it is steered.
New mints only
Intervention is safe because every position snapshots the parameters it was written under: its floor IV and its rope minimum are stored on the position at mint (floorIVSnap, minRopeSnap). So when admin changes a ticker’s smile or its rope floor, the change applies only to options minted after it. Open positions keep the exact terms they were written under, and no admin action can reprice, recollateralize, or invalidate an option that already exists.
What admin cannot do
The role is bounded as much by what it cannot reach:
- It cannot alter an open position’s terms, only the forward parameters for new mints.
- It cannot set a writer’s leverage on Hyperliquid. It only caps the leverage a ticker will accept, through the rope minimum.
- It cannot move or seize a writer’s cover. The cover lives on the writer’s own HyperCore account, not in the protocol.
- It cannot reach the insurance protocol’s reserves. Insurance is external; admin can only set the address a fee cut routes to, never touch the funds it holds or how it deploys them.
The role is meant to be held by governance, a DAO or a timelock, as the protocol decentralizes. See Governance.