Why this conversation
The gap between a price and a reference rate is where settlement disputes live, and it is invisible to product until the first angry customer. A lead's job is to turn "the price" into a named source, a fixing time and a fallback before launch, in a way the product manager can own.
Dialogue
Camille: Resolution is simple: the ETH price at 16:00 UTC. What's the engineering concern?
Jay: Not an engineering concern, a customer one. At 16:00 there are about forty ETH prices, one per exchange, and on a normal day they differ by a few dollars. On a bad day one venue prints a wick that's 5 percent off for eleven seconds. Whichever number we pick, the customer on the losing side will point at another one.
Camille: So we pick the biggest exchange.
Jay: We could, and then our settlement depends on one company's uptime and one company's wash trading. The alternative is a reference rate: a benchmark administrator takes a vetted set of venues, throws out outliers by a published rule, aggregates over a window, and publishes one number with a methodology behind it. Kaiko does this under EU benchmark regulation, and it's available on-chain through an oracle. It costs us a licence and a day of integration.
Camille: A day, and a licence fee, for a number that's almost the same.
Jay: Almost the same on the days nobody complains. The licence buys us the sentence "we settled on a regulated benchmark, here's the methodology" on the day somebody does. Without it, the sentence is "we settled on Binance," and then we are the ones defending Binance's print.
Camille: Fine. What do you need from me?
Jay: Three lines in the spec, and they're yours to write, not mine: the source by name, the fixing time to the second, and what happens if the source is down at 16:00. I'll propose the fallback; you decide it.
Camille: Send me the fallback options today.
Key expressions
| Expression | 뜻 · 쓰이는 자리 |
|---|---|
| resolves on | ~로 정산된다(결과가 결정된다) |
| a customer concern | 고객 쪽 우려 |
| prints a wick | 꼬리(순간 급변)를 찍다 |
| point at another one | 다른 것을 가리키다(반박하다) |
| a vetted set of venues | 심사된 거래소 집합 |
| by a published rule | 공개된 규칙으로 |
| almost the same on the days nobody complains | 아무도 불평 안 하는 날엔 거의 같다 |
| buys us the sentence | 그 문장을 살 수 있게 해준다 |
| defending someone's print | 남의 체결가를 방어하다 |
| to the second | 초 단위로 |
| yours to write, not mine | 내가 아니라 당신이 쓸 것 |