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MIP-1 — Spot token standard + market deployment

info

Implemented. Ships as the spotDeploy action family; see the note on numbering below.

MIP-1 is MetaFlux's native spot token standard and the mechanism for deploying a spot market for a token through an on-chain gas auction. It is the spot counterpart to MIP-3's permissionless perp deployment — the analogous primitive on established on-chain venues is a separate proposal from the perp one, and MetaFlux mirrors that split.

Why this exists​

Spot listing, like perp listing, is part of the protocol rather than a curated team decision. Anyone can register a token symbol and stand up a spot market by winning the relevant gas auction and supplying seed parameters — no allow-list, no review committee.

Flow​

Spot deployment is the spotDeploy action, dispatched by a SpotDeployKind sub-variant covering the full pair lifecycle:

  1. RegisterToken — register a fresh spot token; allocates an AssetId.
  2. SetPair — register a (base, quote) trading pair (e.g. (BTC, USDC)); allocates the pair's AssetId.
  3. SetFee — set the per-pair fee tier.
  4. ActivatePair — flip the pair active (open to trading).
  5. DeactivatePair — flip the pair inactive (close to new orders).

Winning a deployment slot goes through the shared gas auction: a builder calls submitGasAuctionBid against the register_token_gas_auction stream (to claim a token symbol) or the spot_pair_deploy_gas_auction stream (to deploy a pair). Each bid escrows a USDC amount (refunded on loss minus a small fee) and carries the market spec. Auction parameters (decay, refund window, slot interval) are governance-configurable and shared with the MIP-3 machinery.

What you pay in​

The auction floor is always governed and quoted in USDC, and the descending clock runs in USDC cents whichever currency settles.

Governance selects the settlement currency: USDC today, MTF once the MTF spot pair is deep enough to price against. Under MTF the amount is derived from the USDC ask at charge time. Nothing about how you bid changes — only which balance is debited.

warning

Every way the quote can fail is a REJECTION, never a free listing. Under MTF settlement a deploy is refused when there is no governed reference price, when the reference and the last print disagree beyond the band, or when the amount would round to zero base units. The price comes from a band-clamped anchor, not from the live book, so lifting the pair for a block does not buy a cheap listing.

The floor also has an absolute lower bound below which no vote can set it, so the clock can never descend to free.

Note on numbering​

The spotDeploy actions were historically labelled "MIP-3" because they shipped alongside perpDeploy. Per the MIP registry spot deployment is properly MIP-1 and perp deployment is MIP-3, mirroring the spot-versus-perp split on established venues.

That realignment is more than a label. The two lanes share no governance switch. Turning off MIP-3 leaves MIP-1 spot deployment running, and turning off MIP-1 leaves permissionless perp deployment running.