因why continuous-time, why solana
discrete settlement is a leftover from blockchains that couldn't afford to tick. solana's block time and parallel runtime make it cheap enough that there is no excuse left.
the discrete tax
Most onchain financial primitives settle on a coarse cron. Funding rates clear every hour. Options expire at fixed timestamps. Vesting unlocks once a day. This is not because finance prefers discrete settlement — it is because the chain could not afford to tick more often.
Discrete settlement creates a spike risk: the value of the position changes in a single block, every cycle. Sophisticated actors race to be on the right side of that spike. LPs are systematically front-run by anyone watching the cron. Retail eats the slippage.
what changes with solana
Solana's slot time is approximately 400ms. The agave 3.1 runtime parallelizes non-conflicting writes, so the marginal cost of an additional small instruction per block is near zero. You can afford to settle everything every block.
That changes the design space. Funding accrues continuously. Options price continuously. Liquidation guards run before the cex even sees the wick. The math is the same — you just stop sampling it.
1// classical (discrete, hourly):2if now >= last_funding + 3600 {3 settle_funding();4 last_funding = now;5}6 7// kagura (continuous):8let elapsed_ms = kagura_core::record_tick(...)?.elapsed_ms;9let accrued = principal * rate_bps * elapsed_ms / (10_000 * 31_536_000_000);10treasury -> principal: accrued;why not other chains
Continuous-time settlement on EVM is theoretically possible but economically broken. Each tick is a transaction; each transaction costs gas; on a chain that averages 12-second blocks and $0.50 mainnet gas, ticking every block on every protocol bankrupts the operator before lunch.
Solana's combination of (a) sub-second blocks, (b) parallel scheduling, and (c) sub-cent fees makes the operator economics work. The same primitive on EVM would cost ~600x more per accrual cycle.
what this document is not
This is not a manifesto. It is the prose answer to the question why does this exist on solana specifically. If you wanted whitepaper math, jump to share math. If you wanted runnable code, jump to quickstart. If you wanted a list of risks, threat model.