Rocket is a fully onchain derivatives exchange — crypto options and perpetual futures — built on its own Layer 1 and matched by micro auctions rather than a continuous order book. Every block clears at a single fair price, so no trader can gain an edge over another by being faster.
That one design decision is the whole argument. It is what removes front-running, latency arbitrage and reordering MEV from the venue, and it is why a trader on a home connection and a firm with colocated hardware are treated identically inside the same auction window.
Continuous matching sorts orders by arrival time. That single rule creates the entire speed industry around modern markets: colocation, microwave towers between data centres, kernel bypass networking, and onchain, priority gas auctions and validator relationships. None of it improves the price anyone gets. It is pure expenditure to be earlier than someone else, and the cost is ultimately paid by the traders who cannot compete on speed.
The same asymmetry shows up in pricing. Volume-tiered fee schedules charge a first-time trader several times what the largest desk pays for the identical trade. Order flow is sold, routed and internalised in ways most users never see. On many onchain venues, transactions sit in a public mempool long enough to be sandwiched before they settle. Each of these is a channel through which someone with more resources extracts value from someone with fewer, for no service rendered.
None of this is a bug in any one venue. It follows from matching continuously and rewarding whoever arrives first. Fix that and most of the extraction disappears with it.
Rocket makes every block an independent auction lasting roughly 100 milliseconds. Orders arriving during the block are treated as simultaneous. At the close, the protocol builds aggregate supply and demand curves, chooses the single price that maximises the volume able to trade, and fills every eligible order at that one price, allocating pro-rata where supply and demand meet at the margin.
Three things follow. There is no first order in a block, so there is nothing to front-run and no latency edge worth paying for. Every fill happens at the trader's limit price or better, never worse, and where buy and sell interest overlaps the clearing lands inside the spread — the surplus stays with the two traders rather than the fastest intermediary. And market makers, no longer exposed to being picked off the instant fair value moves, can quote tighter and show real size.
It does not feel different to use. Blocks are short enough that submitting an order and seeing a fill is indistinguishable from a continuous book. What changes is who the venue rewards: the trader with the better price rather than the trader with the shorter cable.
Onchain options on BTC and ETH, with full chains of calls and puts across a ladder of strikes and expiries, live Greeks and payoff plotting for multi-leg structures. Perpetual futures on a broader list of underlyings: major crypto assets, tokenised equities including Nvidia, Google, Coinbase and Strategy, and commodities including gold, silver, WTI crude and uranium — all USDC-settled, with no expiry to roll and no brokerage or futures account required.
Alongside the markets, the Rocket Liquidity Provider vault lets depositors back the protocol's market making and liquidation activity, and the funding rate tool compares rates across Rocket, Extended and Hyperliquid so a delta-neutral position can be opened on both legs at once.
Collateral is USDC, and nothing else. From Arbitrum the deposit is a direct transfer into Rocket's bridge contract — one approval on first use, then credited without a third-party bridge fee. From Ethereum or Base, on desktop, the same deposit modal bridges through rhino.fi onto Arbitrum first, quoting the cost and estimated arrival before you confirm. Withdrawals reverse those rails, signed by your own wallet, with a $100,000 daily limit.
This is deposit-rail infrastructure for funding a trading account. It is not a general-purpose swap, and chains beyond those three are not supported. Mobile deposits are Arbitrum-only.
You trade from your own wallet. Positions are margined and settled onchain rather than held in an operator's account. Perps, options and vault balances all sit in the same USDC account.
Fees are flat across every volume tier — the same maker and taker rate for a first trade as for the largest desk on the platform. Funding on perpetuals is exchanged directly between long and short holders with no protocol cut. The intent is that the visible cost of a trade is the actual cost of the trade.
Rocket runs on RocketChain, a purpose-built Layer 1 rather than a rollup, using RocketBFT consensus and the RocketEngine auction matcher. Because settlement is onchain, anyone can verify blocks and trades independently on the Rocketberg explorer instead of trusting what an operator publishes.
Fairness in an exchange is a property of its matching engine, not its branding. Almost every venue matches continuously and in arrival order, which pays whoever is fastest. Rocket matches in micro auctions instead: each block is a short auction where all orders are treated as simultaneous and clear at one uniform price. There is no time priority to buy, so speed cannot produce a better fill, and fees are flat across every volume tier rather than discounted for the largest traders.
Every block on Rocket is a short auction, roughly 100 milliseconds long. Orders arriving during the block are treated as simultaneous rather than queued in time order. At block close the protocol builds aggregate supply and demand, picks the single clearing price that maximises tradable volume, and fills all eligible orders at that same price, allocating pro-rata at the margin. No order has priority for arriving earlier.
No. Front-running requires a first transaction to get ahead of, and inside an auction block there is no first — every order in that block clears together at one price. That removes the latency arbitrage and transaction-reordering MEV that continuous order books, including onchain ones, expose traders to.
Onchain options on BTC and ETH, with full chains of calls and puts across strikes and expiries; and perpetual futures on a wider list of underlyings that includes major crypto assets, tokenised equities such as Nvidia, Google, Coinbase and Strategy, and commodities such as gold, silver, WTI crude and uranium. There is also a protocol-run liquidity vault and a cross-venue funding rate arbitrage tool.
Yes. You connect your own wallet and the protocol margins and settles positions onchain. Collateral is never deposited into an operator-controlled account the way a centralised venue requires. Trading from a device uses a delegated signing key you authorise once, which you can scope to a session or revoke.
USDC. You can deposit directly from Arbitrum, or bridge in from Ethereum or Base through rhino.fi on desktop. Positions across perps, options and the vault are margined and settled in USDC from one account.
No. Rocket charges a flat maker and taker fee at every size. There is no volume-tier ladder that charges a first-time trader several times what a large desk pays for an identical trade. Funding on perpetuals is exchanged peer-to-peer between traders, with no cut taken by the protocol.
No. Rocket is not available to U.S. users pending regulatory clarity.