Market Integrity Policy

1. Why this policy exists

An order book is only useful if the prices on it are real. Every rule below exists to protect one thing: that a quote you see is a quote someone is willing to trade, and a print on the tape is a trade that actually transferred risk. Conduct that breaks that harms every honest participant, including the projects whose markets are being distorted.

This policy applies to every account: retail users, market makers, API traders and listed projects alike.

2. No wash trading

Do not trade with yourself. Wash trading is buying and selling the same asset with no change in beneficial ownership — matching your own orders, or matching against an account you control or coordinate with — in order to create volume, a price print, or activity that qualifies for a reward.

• Trading between accounts you control, whether or not the intent was to manipulate
• Coordinating with another party to trade back and forth at a set price
• Generating volume to influence a listing, a ranking, a campaign or a fee tier

3. No spoofing or layering

Do not place orders you do not intend to have filled. Spoofing is entering an order to create a false impression of supply or demand and pulling it once the market reacts. Layering is the same behaviour spread across several price levels.

• Placing large orders away from the touch to make depth look deeper than it is, then cancelling as price approaches
• Quoting one side to induce a move, then trading the other side
• Repeated place-and-cancel cycles with an order-to-trade ratio no genuine strategy would produce

Ordinary cancellation is not spoofing. Market makers cancel and re-quote constantly and that is exactly what they are supposed to do. The distinction is intent and pattern: an order that was never meant to trade.

4. No market manipulation

• Ramping or marking the close — trading to set a price at a particular moment, for a snapshot, a campaign, or an external contract
• Momentum ignition — a burst of activity intended to trigger other participants into moving the price
• Trading on the back of a false or misleading statement about an asset, a listing or the platform
• Exploiting a thin book, a pricing error, a stale quote or a system fault instead of reporting it
• Coordinated group activity — including organised buying campaigns — designed to move a price rather than to take a position

5. No abusive API behaviour

• Exceeding published rate limits, or working around them with multiple keys or accounts
• Order flow whose purpose or effect is to degrade the matching engine, the market data feed or the interface for others
• Sharing, reselling or transferring API credentials
• Using a key from an address it is not bound to, or attempting to
• Scraping or redistributing market data in breach of the terms of use

If you need higher limits for a legitimate strategy, ask through the market maker programme. Capacity is a conversation; working around a limit is a breach.

6. Monitoring

Order and trade activity is monitored for the patterns described above, including relationships between accounts, order-to-trade ratios, cancellation behaviour and activity clustered around snapshots and campaign deadlines. We also act on credible reports from users, projects and market makers.

7. Enforcement

Where a breach is identified, LF Labs may take any of the following, in proportion to what happened:

• Cancel open orders and restrict order entry on an account
• Reverse or withhold rewards, fee benefits or campaign eligibility obtained through the conduct
• Revoke API keys
• Suspend an account and hold withdrawals pending review
• Close an account
• Halt or delist an affected market
• Report the matter to a competent authority where required

8. Reporting suspicious activity

If you see conduct that looks like anything on this page, tell us. Email support@lflabs.fund with the market, the times, what you observed, and any order IDs or transaction hashes you have. Reports are treated confidentially and we do not disclose who reported what.

If you have found a defect that could be exploited, report it privately first rather than posting it publicly — that is a security report, not a trading complaint, and it goes to the same address.