Introduction

What the Nexus Exchange is, what is live on testnet today, and what comes next.

The Nexus Exchange is a central-limit order book perpetual futures exchange. Orders rest in a book, match on price-time priority, and settle against margin held by the venue. It works like a centralised derivatives exchange, not like an AMM or an intent-matching protocol.

The order book, matching engine and risk system are native parts of the Exchange engine, not a smart contract deployed on a chain. That design lets the venue target CEX-class acknowledgement latency, and everything is reached through one API.

Architecture lists the components and which parts are live.

What's live today

The Exchange is live on testnet as a development preview. You can connect a wallet, create API keys, fund a synthetic-USDX account from the faucet, and trade the live perpetual futures markets programmatically over REST and WebSocket.

• Three crypto perpetual markets, BTC, ETH and SOL, collateralized and quoted in synthetic USDX. The set changes as markets are listed and delisted, so GET /markets is the authority, not a count on this page. Equity indices and pre-IPO perpetuals follow as the set expands. See the Asset directory.
• Leverage is configurable per market.
• API-first. Every trade goes through the REST and WebSocket APIs, and the web terminal at nexus.xyz/trade is one client of them. See Terminal features.
• Whole-account cross margin. One dollar balance backs every open position, and per-market isolated margin is available over the API.
• Synthetic test funds. Each API key can claim test USDX from the faucet to trade against live, bot-seeded liquidity.

This is a development preview on testnet. It is not a regulated venue and not an offer or solicitation. Markets are seeded with automated liquidity for testing; prices and balances have no real-world value.

What's coming

Perpetual futures are the first market type. Equities are next, starting with equity index and pre-IPO perpetuals. Commodities and FX are on the roadmap. The roadmap moves through a sequence of release gates, and each gate adds robustness and risk controls before the next.