Before you create a market

Anyone can deploy a market from a Precept factory, because the factory has no allowlist. Most of what you choose becomes permanent the moment the market leaves setup, so treat the configuration as final. To have Templar's CI deploy your market and hand it to you, follow Create a market with a pull request.

What you choose

At deployment:

• Admin: the account that administers the market. It can be handed over later with propose_admin and accept_admin.
• Name and salt.
• Oracle: fixed for the market's life. Choose its admin carefully, because a compromised oracle admin key puts user funds at risk. It must report 7 decimals, or the market cannot leave setup.
• Backstop take rate: must be 0.
• Maximum positions: how many positions one account can hold. Allow for every pairing of reserves, including a liquidation auction's lot and bid.
• Minimum collateral: the smallest effective collateral a borrower can hold. Set it to 0 to rely on each reserve's min_position instead.

During setup, the admin adds reserves and sets their parameters. A queued change takes effect at once during setup.

What cannot change after activation

• Any parameter of a live reserve, including its collateral factor, interest curve and supply cap.
• The list of reserves. You cannot add one.
• The oracle address, take rate, position limit and collateral minimum, because update_pool is switched off.
• The contract code, which has no upgrade path.

To change any of these, you deploy a new market and move users to it. Templar's own markets have done this once: they were redeployed on 2026-10-28 to change min_collateral.

What you can still do

• Change status: 0 active, 2 on-ice and 3 permissionless on-ice.
• Freeze the market with status 4. This is permanent. Only withdrawals, repayments and auction fills continue.
• Switch a reserve off. The change waits one week, then anyone can apply it. It cannot be reversed.

Risks gives the exact bounds of each one.

The backstop you still need

A market cannot become active unless its backstop passes the activation threshold, even though the backstop provides no protection. Templar's markets meet it with their own activation stack: a dedicated factory, a Comet pool, an emissions-disabled backstop and placeholder tokens with no value. See The disabled backstop.

What you are signing up to run

• Price refreshes. Prices must stay within each asset's maximum age, or liquidations stop. If your market has its own proxy oracle, you must run your own keeper. Liquidators also update prices when they need to liquidate, but do not rely on them to keep prices fresh.
• Ledger entries. Someone has to extend the oracle, market and backstop instances so they are not evicted.
• Liquidators. Nothing obliges anyone to fill auctions. Check that independent operators cover your collateral asset before you launch.

Create a market with a pull request gives the steps and a template.