Rocket lists a Gold (XAU) perpetual future — continuous, USDC-settled exposure to the Gold price, with no expiry to roll and no futures account required.
What makes it different is how orders match. Rocket does not run a continuous, first-come-first-served book. Every block is a micro auction that clears at one fair price for everyone in it, so no trader can win by being faster than another, and every fill happens at its limit price or better.
Nearly every exchange, onchain or off, matches orders continuously and in the order they arrive. That design pays whoever gets there first, which is why trading firms spend fortunes on colocation, microwave links and priority gas — none of which produces a better price for anyone. Rocket replaces it. Each block on the Rocket chain is an independent auction lasting roughly 100 milliseconds. Orders arriving during the block are treated as simultaneous, aggregate supply and demand are built at block close, and one uniform clearing price is chosen to maximise the volume that can trade.
Because there is no first order inside a block, there is nothing to front-run. Latency arbitrage and transaction-reordering MEV have no surface to attack. What decides whether your XAU order fills, and at what price, is the price and size you were willing to show — not how close your machine sits to a matching engine.
It still feels instant. Blocks are short enough that placing an order and seeing a fill is indistinguishable from a continuous book. The difference is that the incentives underneath reward better pricing rather than faster wires.
Getting exposure to Gold conventionally means a futures account with a margin agreement, contract months to roll, and a minimum contract size that puts it out of reach for most people. A XAU perpetual removes all three. It tracks the Gold price, never expires, settles in USDC, and can be sized to whatever you actually want to risk.
Because there is no expiry there is no roll. Anyone who has held a commodity futures position through a roll knows the cost of moving between contract months, particularly in a market in contango. A perpetual holds the exposure continuously and prices the cost of carry through funding instead, which is transparent and paid between traders rather than lost in a spread.
This makes Gold usable as a diversifier or hedge inside a crypto portfolio without leaving self-custody or opening an account with a commodities broker.
Rocket charges one flat maker and taker fee across every volume tier. There is no schedule that quietly charges a first-time trader several times what a large desk pays for the identical trade. This follows from the same principle as the matching engine: the platform should not sort traders into classes and price them differently for the same service.
Funding on XAU is exchanged peer-to-peer between long and short holders. The protocol does not take a share of it. Combined with uniform clearing, this means the visible cost of a trade is the actual cost of the trade.
Market, limit, and TWAP orders are supported, with post-only and reduce-only flags, plus take-profit and stop-loss triggers that can execute at market or at a limit. TWAP splits a larger order across a window so it participates in many consecutive auctions rather than landing in one.
Every filled order executes at its limit price or better, never worse. The clearing price is uniform for everyone in the auction, so when buy and sell interest overlaps the clearing happens inside the spread: buyers pay less than their limit and sellers receive more than theirs. That surplus stays with the traders instead of being captured by whoever was fastest.
Collateral is USDC. You can fund an account from Arbitrum directly, or bridge in from Ethereum or Base through rhino.fi on desktop, and you trade from your own wallet throughout — the protocol margins and settles positions onchain rather than taking custody of your balance.
Connect a self-custody wallet, deposit USDC as collateral, and open the XAU market. Choose long or short, set your size and leverage, and review the liquidation price before submitting. Your order joins the current block's auction and, if it clears, fills at your limit price or better. Collateral stays in your control and settlement happens onchain.
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.
Not on Rocket. Because there is no time priority within a block, speed does not improve your fill. Competition happens on price and size only, so a trader with a microsecond edge and a trader on a home connection are treated identically inside the same auction window.
No. Rocket charges a flat maker and taker fee across every volume tier, so a first-time trader pays the same rate as the largest desk on the platform. Funding is exchanged peer-to-peer between traders with no cut taken by the protocol.
USDC. You can deposit from Arbitrum directly, or bridge in from Ethereum or Base through rhino.fi on desktop. Positions are margined and settled in USDC, so profit and loss is denominated in a stable unit whichever direction you are positioned.
Yes. A perpetual is a leveraged position, and if your margin falls below the maintenance requirement the position is liquidated. The order ticket shows the liquidation price before you submit, and you can reduce leverage or add collateral to move it. This is the main risk difference between a perpetual and buying an option, where a buyer's loss is capped at the premium paid.
No. You trade from your own wallet and the protocol margins and settles positions onchain, so you keep control of your keys and collateral throughout. This is the structural difference from a centralised venue, where you must deposit into the exchange's own wallets before you can trade at all.