How Collateral Value Is Calculated
USDC is the primary collateral and always counts at full value. Every other accepted asset is a secondary collateral type that counts toward your account at a collateral credit below 100%. The credit reflects the asset’s liquidity and price volatility — a buffer that protects the exchange if the asset has to be liquidated to cover losses.Under the hood, collateral credit is stored as a haircut in basis points. A 90% credit is a 10% haircut (1,000 bps) — the two are the same number expressed from opposite ends.
Accepted Collateral
Additional secondary assets are under active consideration, and Decibel’s collateral framework is built to add them as market conditions and liquidity support it. Each new asset would carry its own collateral credit set by its liquidity and volatility.
DLP Shares as Collateral
If you’ve contributed to the DLP Vault, you can post your vault shares as collateral instead of leaving that capital idle — keeping your DLP exposure while trading perps.- Priced at NAV. DLP shares are valued using the vault’s net asset value, updated from an on-chain oracle. Your collateral tracks the vault’s real-time value.
- 90% credit. Each dollar of DLP (at NAV) contributes $0.90 of collateral. The 10% buffer absorbs NAV movement between updates and any slippage if shares must be unwound.
- Redeemed on liquidation. If your account is liquidated while holding DLP collateral, the shares are redeemed against the vault directly (burned) rather than sold on the open market. Because the DLP Vault is itself the backstop liquidity provider, this keeps liquidation self-contained.
- Deposit caps. A per-asset notional cap can limit how much DLP the system accepts as collateral. If a deposit would push total DLP collateral past the cap, it’s rejected.
Depositing and Withdrawing
Depositing
Deposit USDC or DLP shares directly to your Trading Account — no manual conversion required. Depositing DLP is not enough on its own: open the Collateral tab, toggle Enable as Collateral on your DLP balance, and acknowledge the risk disclosure. Only then does the 90%-credited value flow into your margin, and only up to any notional cap. DLP shares still inside the vault’s lockup cannot be pledged as collateral until they unlock.Withdrawing
You can withdraw secondary collateral as long as your remaining account value still covers your margin requirements. Withdrawals that would drop you below your initial margin — or below the buffer for unrealized losses — are blocked. See Margin for how withdrawable balance is computed.Cross-Margin
All collateral, primary and secondary, is pooled under Decibel’s cross-margin model. USDC and the credited value of your DLP shares are combined into a single account value that backs every open position. Profits on one position can offset losses on another regardless of which collateral type you deposited.What’s Next
Decibel plans to extend collateral into borrow-lend based portfolio margining, letting a broader set of assets serve as margin with risk assessed across your whole portfolio rather than asset by asset. Details and timing will follow — check the Trader Overview for the latest.Existing USDC-only accounts continue to work unchanged. Adding DLP collateral is optional — deposit it whenever you want to put idle vault shares to work.
Related
DLP Vault
The protocol vault whose shares can be posted as collateral
Margin
How cross-margin, equity, and withdrawable balance work
Liquidations
What happens when equity falls below maintenance margin
Vaults
Contributing to vaults and earning a share of returns