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Review · By · Updated 2026-09-11

Pacifica Review 2026: Solana Perps, Unified Margin

Facts verified against Pacifica's official documentation and the Terms of Use on 2026-09-11. Where the docs are silent — a token, a KYC statement, an insurance fund (the liquidation page describes a backstop liquidator instead) — this page says so rather than filling the gap. Where two official pages disagree, both are quoted.

SolanaOff-chain matchingUnified marginVolume-tiered feesEquities, FX, commoditiesPoints, no token

Verdict

The most capital-efficient margin model on this site, on the exchange that gates itself most tightly. Pacifica lets you post spot assets as collateral, borrow USDC implicitly against them and net a spot-perp carry in one account, with fees that start at 0.040% taker and fall to 0.028% at the top tier. It publishes its liquidation tiers, funding formula and hot/cold custody design in unusual detail. Against that: matching is off-chain, the market list and restricted-country list are stated differently on different official pages, deposits and withdrawals are still capped as a "Closed Beta", and the Terms shut out the US, UK and Canada. No token, and a points formula that is "opaque by design".

What Pacifica is

The About page calls Pacifica "the largest decentralized perpetuals exchange on Solana", founded in January 2025 with mainnet in June 2025, and claims "over $220 billion in cumulative perp volume" with "approximately $1 billion daily volume" — self-reported figures as of the page read on 2026-09-11. Matching happens off-chain; custody is on Solana. The fund-security page describes a hot wallet "managed by the matching engine, which can execute withdrawals up to the programmatic spending limit", refilled from a cold vault "secured by a multi-signature smart contract governed by a decentralized council", built on Squads Protocol with time-locked upgrades. The audits page links one report, by BlockSec, on the perp contracts. The Terms are provided by SkyLake Global Corp, "a company incorporated under the laws of the Republic of Panama", governed by Singapore law. The team is described as self-funded with backgrounds at Binance, FTX, Coinbase, Jane Street and others; no names are given.

Markets: how many, and what kind

The official pages do not agree on a count. The About page says "65+ perpetual pairs"; the trading overview says "over thirty-five perpetual markets"; the contract-specification tables list 68 markets, and the public market-info endpoint returned 77 on 2026-09-11. This site's own cross-venue snapshot (taken 2026-09-02) joins Pacifica on 75 assets. The shelf spans crypto majors and alts, a "special" Backpack-priced pair, and an equity, FX and commodity section: single stocks (NVDA, TSLA, PLTR, HOOD, CRCL, MSTR, SAMSUNG, SKHYNIX and a pre-IPO ticker, SPCX), the S&P 500, one ETF (URNM), EURUSD and USDJPY, and six commodities (CL, COPPER, NATGAS, PLATINUM, XAG, XAU). Pre-markets use Pacifica's own mark price as oracle with a ±30% price band and strict open-interest caps. Spot markets quote against USDC; the spot-assets endpoint listed one asset, SOL, on the verification date.

Fees at a glance

Eight tiers by 30-day rolling volume, updated daily and shared across sub-accounts. Tier 1 pays 0.015% maker and 0.040% taker; the maker fee steps down to 0.003% at $50M and to 0% from $100M, while the taker fee falls to 0.032% at $50M and to 0.028% at $500M (VIP 3). Spot trades follow the same schedule, deducted from the received asset. Traders can carry a 30-day tier across from another exchange for 30 days by verifying their volume with the team. Referred users get a 5% points bonus rather than a fee discount. The fees page has the table; the fee comparison places Pacifica beside eleven venues.

Unified margin, spot collateral and the money market

Cross margin is the default and is "unified with spot collateral": account equity is USDC plus unrealised PnL from cross perps, minus pending interest, plus spot collateral value. Each spot asset counts at a loan-to-value ratio — "typical values: 0.90 (BTC, ETH), 0.80 (majors)" — up to a default cap of $10,000 of market value per user per asset, with a bonus for the portion hedged by a cross short in the same asset. When non-spot equity goes negative the account "is treated as a borrower" from a single USDC money market shared by all cross accounts; interest accrues until the debt is repaid, borrowing is blocked for new orders above 90% pool utilisation, and accounts with idle USDC of at least 1,000 can lend automatically. Isolated positions sit outside this model: margin is assigned per position and spot holdings do not back them. Margin mode is chosen per pair and cannot change while a position is open; leverage can be raised but not lowered on an open position.

Leverage, orders and accounts

The overview states "3x to 50x on perpetuals, depending on market". Reading the spec tables: BTC and ETH sit at 50x alongside EUR/USD and USD/JPY; BNB, DOGE, HYPE, SOL, XRP and the S&P 500 at 20x; single stocks and commodities at 10x; most alts at 10x with a 5x and 3x tail. Maintenance margin is half the initial requirement on every market. Order types are Market, Limit, Stop Market, Stop Limit, TWAP and Scale, plus a "strategies" group — Chase, Conditional Market and Limit, OCO, Trailing Stop, Swarm, Trigger Swarm and Atomic — with GTC, IOC, ALO and TOB time-in-force. Self-trade prevention cancels the resting order. Sub-accounts are margined independently and share the master's fee tier. The API documents an MCP server for AI clients whose tools include order placement and withdrawals, covered on this site's AI-agent guide.

Vaults

Any user can deploy a vault: depositors put in USDC (minimum 10 USDC) and receive LP shares at the vault's net asset value; a manager trades the pooled balance within a symbol whitelist, blacklist and per-symbol leverage caps. The manager takes a performance fee only on profit above a high-water mark, at a rate set at creation (zero if unset). Withdrawals can be gated by a minimum lock-up and by windows anchored to the Unix epoch, and if the manager's own share of the vault falls below a configured floor, "the engine halts trading and liquidates open positions". A vault is "a real Pacifica trading account", so its depositors carry the manager's trading risk in full.

Points and referrals

The points programme "launched on Thursday, September 4th at 00:00 UTC" with snapshots every Thursday and "10,000,000 points distributed weekly among eligible Pacifica users" for organic trading via GUI or API; self-trading and sybil activity earn nothing, and the formula "is dynamic and opaque by design". No token is named. Referral links unlock at $10,000 of own volume; referrers "receive 10% of the points generated by their referred users" and referees a 5% points bonus. Affiliates are selected by the team and earn "fee share incentives of up to 40%". A market-maker programme distributes 12% of the fees collected from market makers' counterparties by a MakerScore.

Risks

  • Closed-beta caps. The deposits page still limits accounts to "$500,000 account equity during Closed Beta" and withdrawals to $500,000 per 24 hours, with an exchange-wide withdrawal cap on top. Spot deposits are capped at $50,000 a day per asset.
  • Off-chain matching. The order book and engine are not on Solana; the hot wallet the engine controls is the exposure if its key is compromised, bounded by the spending limit the docs describe.
  • Three-tier liquidation. Market liquidation deducts at least 0.75% of the liquidated value; below two-thirds of maintenance margin the whole account moves to a backstop liquidator; below zero equity with a position still open ("caused by prior tiers having insufficient liquidity"), auto-deleveraging closes profitable traders. The backstop does not take positions in the equity, FX, commodity and a few named crypto markets, so those go straight to ADL.
  • Spot deleveraging. Borrowers can have spot sold on their behalf at the account level, or pool-wide from the largest borrowers first when money-market utilisation reaches 95%.
  • Two restricted lists. The docs name seven jurisdictions; the Terms name twelve plus sanctioned territories and forbid VPN use. Confirm eligibility against the Terms before depositing.
  • Unclear market count. Four official figures on the verification date, from "over thirty-five" to 77.
  • Self-reported volume. The $220 billion cumulative and $1 billion daily figures come from Pacifica's own About page and are not verified here.

Who Pacifica suits — and who it doesn't

It suits a Solana-native trader outside the restricted list who wants to margin perps with spot holdings, run carry trades in one account, or trade stocks, FX and commodities as perps at 10x to 50x with a documented liquidation ladder. It does not suit anyone in the US, UK or Canada, anyone who needs an on-chain order book to verify execution, or a trader who wants a token or a transparent points formula.

Getting started

  • How to start on Pacifica — Solana wallet, USDC on Solana only, the closed-beta caps, cross vs isolated per pair, leverage per market, a first order, and the $1 withdrawal fee.
  • Fees explained — the eight-tier maker/taker ladder, VIP tier transfer, referral and points terms, funding caps, money-market interest and the liquidation charge.

How Pacifica compares

vs Hyperliquidvs Lightervs Aster

FAQ

Is Pacifica available in my country?
Two lists exist and they differ. The docs overview prohibits access to trading from "the United States of America, Cuba, the Crimean Peninsula (including Sevastopol), Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and North Korea", "but not limited to". The Terms of Use on the app go further and name the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and the Philippines plus sanctioned jurisdictions, enforced by IP geoblocking with an explicit ban on VPN circumvention. Treat the Terms as authoritative. This site does not cover access workarounds.
Does Pacifica have a token?
No. The docs describe a points programme that "launched on Thursday, September 4th" (no year is given) and distributes 10,000,000 points a week to organic traders, with a formula that is "dynamic and opaque by design". No page read on the verification date names a token, a conversion or a date; the Terms reserve the right to run airdrops and say programme rewards "have no cash value unless explicitly stated otherwise". The tracker keeps the row dated.
How does unified margin work?
USDC, unrealised PnL from cross positions and spot holdings are margined together. Spot assets count at a per-asset loan-to-value ratio (the docs give 0.90 for BTC and ETH and 0.80 for majors as typical values) up to a per-user cap that defaults to $10,000 of market value per asset. If losses take the non-spot equity below zero, the account borrows USDC implicitly from a shared money market and pays interest until the debt is repaid or spot is sold.
Who runs Pacifica and where are the funds?
The interface is provided by SkyLake Global Corp, a Panama company, under Singapore law with arbitration in Singapore; the docs describe the team as ex-Binance, FTX, Coinbase and Jane Street among others, self-funded with no external capital. User funds sit in a hot wallet capped by a programmatic spending limit and a cold vault governed by a Squads multisig, with one linked BlockSec audit of the perp contracts.
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official site — no referral relationship · methodology