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Mark price is the single source of truth for:
  • Unrealized PnL
  • Maintenance margin checks
  • Funding rate TWAP inputs
It is not directly the oracle price, and it is not directly the last trade price. It’s the last trade price clamped to the oracle within ±10%.

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Formula

mark_price=clamp ⁣(last_trade_price,  oracle×0.9,  oracle×1.1)\text{mark\_price} = \text{clamp}\!\left(\text{last\_trade\_price},\; \text{oracle} \times 0.9,\; \text{oracle} \times 1.1\right) If there has been no trade yet, last_trade_price defaults to the oracle price.

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Why clamped?

Without the clamp, a thinly-traded market could be manipulated, one fill at +50% would make every long position look wildly profitable, passing margin checks they shouldn’t. The 10% clamp window:
  • Tight enough that adversarial trades can’t push users into insolvency via mark alone.
  • Wide enough that legitimate price discovery during a volatile hour still moves mark organically (versus just pinning it to oracle).
Liquidations bypass mark entirely, they run at oracle price, which has its own confidence and staleness bounds.

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What updates mark

  • Every fill updates orderbook.last_trade_price and last_trade_ts.
  • update_funding_rate reads the current mark into the mark TWAP.
  • Admin param changes never rewrite mark directly.

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TWAPs

Two 1-hour exponential moving averages are maintained on the Market account:
  • mark_twap, 1-hour EMA of mark price
  • oracle_twap, 1-hour EMA of oracle price
They feed the funding rate formula. See funding rate for how they’re combined.

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Reading mark price off-chain

const orderbook = await fetchOrderbook(rpc, orderbookPda);
const oracle = await fetchOracle(rpc, market.oracle);

const mark = clamp(
  orderbook.lastTradePrice,
  oracle.price * 0.9,
  oracle.price * 1.1,
);
Or, simpler: the frontend renders math::get_mark_price(market, oracle) server-side via a Codama-generated helper.