Position limits

No single account may hold an unbounded share of one market. The limit applies to your position plus your open orders on one side, and once you are at it, new orders that would increase that side are rejected. Closing is never restricted. The limit constrains how much risk you can accumulate, not your ability to get out of it.

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Why concentration is the risk

A market where one account holds most of the open interest has a specific failure mode. When that position is liquidated, there is no one on the other side large enough to absorb it — the book cannot take it, the insurance fund is drained, and the shortfall reaches auto-deleveraging, which closes profitable positions belonging to traders who did nothing wrong. The limit is what keeps one account’s failure from becoming everyone’s.

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How the cap is computed

$$\text{limit} = \max\!\left(\text{market OI} \times \theta,\; \text{base limit}\right)$$ Two components, and the larger wins. The share threshold ties your cap to the market’s actual size. A market with more open interest can absorb a larger position, so it permits one. The base limit is a fixed floor. Without it, a newly listed market with almost no open interest would have a near-zero cap — meaning nobody could take a position, so open interest would never grow. The floor is what lets a market bootstrap. Both terms are per-market configuration, and the base limit is scaled to each market’s depth — deeper markets carry a higher floor. Writing $B$ for the base limit and $\theta$ for the share threshold, the crossover sits where market open interest reaches $B / \theta$: So on a young market your cap is flat and generous relative to the book; on a mature one it tracks the market’s own size.

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How many orders you may have resting

Position size is capped, and so is order count. The limit is per account and moves with you: $$\text{max open orders} = \min\!\left(50 + \frac{\text{balance}}{50},\; 1{,}000 + \frac{\text{cumulative volume}}{5{,}000{,}000},\; 5{,}000\right)$$ Both terms are in USD. A new account with 1,000 USDC and no history gets 70; the balance term governs early, the volume term takes over as you trade, and 5,000 is the hard ceiling regardless. One further rule catches people running automated strategies: once you already hold 1,000 resting orders, order types classified as restricted — reduce-only and conditional orders among them — are refused with a distinct rejection, while ordinary orders continue to be accepted up to your limit. The intent is that a book-filling strategy cannot exhaust the capacity that closing a position depends on.

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What counts

Position and open orders together. Resting orders that would increase your position count against the limit, because a limit that ignored them could be circumvented by placing orders and waiting. Per side. Long and short exposure are measured separately. Across sub-accounts. Sub-accounts under one owner are aggregated. Splitting a position across sub-accounts does not raise the cap — from the market’s perspective the concentration is the same, and it is concentration the limit exists to prevent. Total market open interest counts both sides. The denominator is the whole market, not one side of it.

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What happens at the limit

Orders that would push you past the cap are rejected at submission with a clear reason. Orders that reduce exposure are always accepted. Your cap is not fixed. As the market’s open interest grows, it rises; if open interest contracts sharply, an existing position can end up above a cap that has fallen. Nothing is force-closed for this — you simply cannot add until you are back under.

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Reading the live values

Every figure on this page is on-chain per-market configuration, not a constant of the protocol. The parameters that drive it: They are published in each contract specification and readable from the chain. An integration that hard-codes them will eventually compute a number the network is not applying — see Developers.

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Where to go next