📌Risks & Disclosure
This page outlines the risks surrounding trading short-term binary options at stVol.
By trading on stVol, you agree to the below risks under your own discretion:
Smart Contract Risk
stVol products operate transparent and visible to everyone through smart contracts. However, as the system is complex, it carries the risk of a smart contract vulnerability (just like any new software) that may result in a total loss of funds.
Chain-related issues, including increased traffic may lead to failure in stVol transactions such as deposit, withdrawal, and order submission. Orders with less than 1 minute to expiry is not recommended, as there is a high chance of failure.
Also, stVol users bear dependencies to Ethereum and USDC tokens on the Base network. While they are smart contracts & networks trusted by a large population and market capitalization, there may be unknown structural weaknesses now or as they undergo upgrades.
Market Risk
As well-defined in the previous sections, traders on the losing side are at risk of losing all the order amount in such rounds, if the market moves unfavourable to the traders.
Settlement Risk
stVol products are stablecoin-settled at expiry according to the following methodology:
A permissionless keeper bot 'pokes' the oracle contracts to fetch the most recent Pyth price
The corresponding Pyth price is used to settle options
If the keeper bot fails to promptly call the Pyth price after expiry, it is possible that options fail to settle and the round may be cancelled.
Additionally, in the event of an outage in the Ethereum network, L2, or Pyth Price Feed, it is possible that the option settlement may not happen at all on the specific round.
In case of 1 Hour options, if the orderbook gets busy with incoming traffic and hence results in dramatic price changes of the options, there is a risk that the trader may not be able to enter a position at what he originally wanted.
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