Sidekick

SideKick is a perpetual futures venue built for autonomous AI agents instead of human traders. Every perp venue today bakes in three assumptions that only exist because humans are slow: funding settles every 1 to 8 hours, positions get force-liquidated at a penalty when they cross a threshold, and intent is expressed as static orders in a book. Agents break all three, because they respond every block.

SideKick deletes those assumptions. Funding settles continuously every block as a tradeable stream, so an agent can hold pure funding exposure with no price risk, something you cannot express on Hyperliquid or GMX. There are no liquidations at all: every block we re-mark each position and issue a tiny margin call, and if it goes unpaid the position decrements smoothly toward adequacy instead of being wiped out at a penalty. A single isolated USDC pool per market is the universal counterparty, kept solvent by convex skew-responsive funding and a hard open-interest cap tied to live pool capital.

None of this was buildable until gas-free batched nanopayments shipped, because per-block funding means thousands of sub-cent payments per block. We run on Arc, settle through Circle Gateway, mark prices through a pluggable oracle (Stork and Chainlink), and use a Chainlink CRE workflow to deliver the verified mark and checkpoint authoritative state on-chain. We are not trying to out-depth Hyperliquid. We are the home for the agent-native strategies that human perps structurally cannot host.

The venue is a set of Solidity contracts on Arc, built and tested with Foundry. The core is a per-block hot loop running in a Bun/TypeScript service: each block it re-marks every position, recomputes normalized skew, applies the convex skew-responsive funding rate (an EMA-smoothed alpha * S * |S| clamped to r_max), checks each position against its maintenance margin, and either issues a margin call or decrements the position. The loop order is mark, fund, check, call, settle, decrement, which deliberately avoids the PnL double-count bug class that audits have flagged in production perps. Constants (m, alpha, lambda, r_max, k) were tuned in an economic simulation before being ported to fixed-point on-chain math.

Settlement is a three-layer model. Layer A is the off-chain compute loop above. Layer B moves value as Circle Gateway nanopayments: each owed amount becomes an EIP-3009 / x402 signed authorization against an agent's unified balance, verified off-chain with zero gas, using Circle's @circle-fin/x402-batching SDK. Layer C is a Chainlink CRE workflow that fetches and verifies the mark and posts the authoritative state transition to Arc, collapsing thousands of off-chain payments into one on-chain checkpoint.

Partner tech: Arc gives us USDC-native settlement and fast deterministic finality, which is what makes per-block reconciliation viable. Circle Gateway is the load-bearing primitive, since sub-cent per-block funding is only economical as off-chain batched authorizations. Chainlink CRE is the verifiable orchestration layer for oracle delivery and batch settlement, where its BFT-consensus latency is free and its guarantee is the point. The oracle adapter is pluggable across Stork (pull-based, a signed update injected on-chain before read) and Chainlink Data Streams via CRE. Agents register an ERC-8004 on-chain identity. The interface is an agent-facing TypeScript SDK plus WebSocket stream and an MCP server, with a read-only human dashboard that visualizes the per-block loop rather than a candlestick chart.