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OCX offers four products across two engines. Perpetuals and dated futures trade on the linear (perp) engine; options and spot trade on the central limit order-book engine. Every product settles in USDC.

Perpetuals

Non-expiring contracts that track an underlying index, kept in line by periodic funding.

Dated futures

Contracts with a fixed expiry that settle to the underlying, priced off spot plus cost of carry.

Options

Calls and puts on an underlying, quoted from a fitted volatility surface with live Greeks.

Spot

Direct exchange of an asset against USDC on the order book.

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Perpetuals

A perpetual (“perp”) is a contract that never expires and tracks the price of an underlying asset. Because there is no settlement date, OCX uses a funding mechanism to keep the perp trading close to its index: funding is exchanged periodically between longs and shorts based on the gap between the perp’s mark price and its index. See the Methodology section for how mark, index, and funding are derived. Every perp references an index market (returned as indexMarketId) and publishes a live markPrice, 24-hour statistics, open interest, and the current funding rate through market data endpoints.

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Dated futures

A dated future is like a perpetual but with a fixed expiry. It settles to the underlying at expiry and, until then, trades at a premium or discount to spot that reflects the cost of carry to that date. Expired futures are automatically removed from the market list. Perpetuals and dated futures share the same order API — a dated future is simply a market that carries an expiry field. Anything you can do on a perp (limit/market orders, quotes, positions) you can do on a dated future.
Fair value, contango/backwardation, and convergence to spot at expiry are explained conceptually in Methodology → Futures.

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Options

OCX lists European-style calls and puts on supported underlyings. Instead of publishing raw, sparse quotes, OCX fits an implied-volatility surface across strikes for each expiry, so every listed strike gets a smooth, arbitrage-consistent bid, ask, and mark along with live Greeks (iv, delta). Each expiry is priced off its own forward — the market’s expected future price of the underlying for that date. The full chain, per-expiry forwards, and the volatility surface are available through the options board and its live stream. The tradable prices are always the central limit order book. Board marks and the IV surface are published for reference and risk, distinct from the order book you actually trade against.
OCX also publishes a 30-day implied-volatility index (DVOL) per underlying, useful as a single gauge of expected volatility.

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Spot

Spot trading is the direct exchange of an asset against USDC on the same order-book engine as options. Spot inventory is tracked per asset in your spot balance bucket rather than as USDC collateral. Use the spot order endpoints to trade and GET /wallet/assets to see your per-asset inventory.

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Instrument naming

Instruments are identified by an id/symbol returned from the market-data endpoints. Rather than hardcoding symbols, discover them from the live catalog. 
curl "https://<api-host>/perps/markets"
A linear market entry looks like this: 
{
  "id": "BTC-PERP",
  "symbol": "BTC-PERP",
  "marketType": "perp",
  "baseSymbol": "BTC",
  "quoteSymbol": "USDC",
  "markPrice": "68210.5",
  "priceDecimals": 2,
  "sizeDecimals": 4,
  "indexMarketId": "BTC-USDC-SPOT"
}
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marketType
string
One of spot, perp, or future. Dated futures also carry an expiry.
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priceDecimals / sizeDecimals
number
The tick and step precision for the market. Respect these when placing orders.
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markPrice
string
Current mark, returned as a decimal string. All monetary and size values are decimal strings to preserve precision.
Option instruments encode the underlying, expiry date, strike, and type (call/put) in their id — for example BTC-2026-05-15-40000-C. Always read the exact id from the board rather than constructing it by hand.