Miletus: Critical Mineral Price Index & Perpetual Swaps Protocol
Miletus is a protocol design for critical-mineral perpetual swaps, a market with no clean reference price.
Miletus is a protocol design for critical-mineral perpetual swaps, a market with no clean reference price. Design only, not deployed.
Rare earth and battery metals do not have liquid hedging instruments. Hedging happens through long-dated bilateral contracts when it happens at all. There is no honest public spot price feed for these assets and no derivatives market that references them.
Designed for Arbitrum. Synthetic exposure through a perpetual swap where the funding rate replaces physical delivery as the price-convergence mechanism. The oracle settles weekly against Fastmarkets CIP (the IOSCO-compliant published benchmark used in actual bilateral contracts) and composites intraday marks across Shanghai Metals, Asian Metals, and Argus (UK-based). Layering survives a transient outage of any single source.
Design-portfolio piece, not deployed. The oracle architecture has been walked past commodity traders at a US trading house and a metals desk and survived their critique. Next step, deprioritized in favor of OPick, is a testnet deployment with mock counterparties.
The two hardest problems in a critical-minerals derivatives market are not the market mechanism, which is reasonably well understood from crypto perpetuals, but the price signal and the settlement signal. The price signal must update intraday for funding-rate computation. The settlement signal must be defensible to regulated counterparties. These signals are not the same, and decomposing them into separate problems was the first useful design move.
Validation so far has been structural rather than empirical: the oracle design has been walked past commodity traders at a US trading house and a metals desk, and survived the round of critique. The next step, deprioritized in favor of OPick, would be a testnet deployment with mock counterparties.
Design in Solidity with Foundry as the contract toolchain, intended for Arbitrum. Three-layer architecture: a perpetual swap layer for synthetic exposure (funding rate replaces physical delivery as the price-convergence mechanism), an oracle layer that settles weekly against Fastmarkets CIP with intraday marks composited across Shanghai Metals, Asian Metals, and Argus (UK-based), and the physical market untouched at the bottom.
Take oracle problems more seriously than market-mechanism problems. Most onchain derivatives design conversations spend ninety percent of the time on the AMM and ten percent on the oracle. Actual production-readiness flips that ratio. The oracle is the work.