Imperial: Solana perps router — best venue, Prime leverage, bot API

Imperial: a perpetual futures router on Solana — one CEX-like terminal that compares underlying perp venues in real time and sends each order where the all-in deal is best.

Product: imperial.space · Trade UI: app.imperial.space · Docs: docs.imperial.space (llms.txt) · API: Trading API docs · X: @ImperialPerps.

Related on DevRels: Jupiter · Flash Trade · Phoenix.

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Why a perps router exists

Solana already has multiple perpetual venues — different fees, max leverage, liquidity, funding, and liquidation rules. Shopping them by hand is what professional desks do with custom systems. Imperial’s pitch is the Jupiter-style move applied to perps: one order UX, multi-venue comparison under the hood, execution on a single chosen venue (not a synthetic split fill across books).

Docs currently list routing targets including Jupiter, Flash Trade, Phoenix, GMTrade (routing copy also references GMX-class venues in the broader set). Venue availability is live-filtered — paused markets, thin books, and unsupported assets drop out of the candidate set.

How routing decides

For each open/close, Imperial estimates the total round-trip cost per eligible venue from:

• Asset, direction (long/short), size, leverage
• Open and close fees
• Price impact / slippage for that size
• Borrow and funding (side-aware where venues differ)
• Liquidation risk at the chosen leverage (more forgiving mechanics score better)

Lowest estimated all-in cost wins. The UI exposes the reason (“lowest fees” vs “tighter pricing”). Quotes are guidance; final price is whatever lands on-chain.

Sticky venue: if you already hold a position on an asset, new size for that asset stays on the same venue so you don’t fragment one logical position across books.

Auto-route is default; traders can override from a side-by-side venue table. The router only switches when a challenger is meaningfully cheaper — avoiding flicker on near ties.

Imperial Prime (lending boost)

Imperial Prime is a lending layer that can attach extra collateral to a trade so effective leverage exceeds a venue’s native cap, or so liquidation sits on Imperial’s more protective trigger when that trade-off is worth the borrow cost.

Docs example shape:

Wanted:  $5,000 notional with $100 of your collateral
Venue max: 10x → only $1,000 notional on your $100 alone
Prime:     lends $400 collateral
Venue sees: $500 collateral × 10x = $5,000 position
            (one venue, one position — not split)

Prime only underwrites its loan (can we liquidate before loaned capital is at risk?), not the whole venue’s market risk. It is capital efficiency, not free leverage — liquidations and funding still apply. If the pool is paused or can’t safely back the size, routing continues without a loan.

Fees

• Imperial: 10 bps (0.10%) on collateral, charged on open and again on close. Partner / referral path: 5 bps.
• Because the fee is on collateral, not notional, high leverage doesn’t multiply the Imperial take (e.g. $1,000 collateral → $1 open fee at 10x or 25x).
• Venue fees (open/close, funding/borrow, impact) pass through with no Imperial markup.

Pairs markets

Beyond single-asset perps, Imperial lists pairs markets (first headline: SOL/BTC). You trade relative performance — long = SOL outperforms BTC — with USDC collateral, leverage, TP/SL, funding, liquidations. Price is a beta-weighted synthetic index, not TradingView’s raw SOLBTC ratio: legs are scaled by volatility (docs: ~41.7% SOL / 58.3% BTC from ~1.40 SOL–BTC beta) so the book is closer to market-neutral relative performance than a SOL-dominated 1:1 ratio.

Trust model (read before one-click)

Per Imperial’s security docs:

• Stack = frontend terminal + backend order infra + program that is position owner so bots can manage trades for the user.
• Contracts are described as authorizing Imperial bots to trade on the user’s behalf — not to deposit/withdraw funds.
• One-click / mobile uses JWTs (month expiry, user-revocable). A leaked JWT can place bad trades; it should not unlock withdrawals. Still treat JWT storage like a session secret.

Integrators should re-read current security pages and program deployments before production size — this article tracks public docs, not an audit report.

Product surface

• Trade — markets, order book, positions (e.g. SOL-PERP with mark/index, OI, volume)
• Earn — liquidity / earn flows in the app nav
• Points / referrals / leaderboard — Season 1 style growth loop (trading, referrals, clans in docs)
• Docs + legal — ToS / privacy on GitBook

Bot / integrator API

The Imperial Trading API (api.imperial.space) is the HTTP surface for bots: auth, orders, balances, deposits, venue market data, funding, points, partner registration, etc. OpenAPI lists dozens of paths under /api/v1/….

Auth pattern (from OpenAPI description):

1. POST /api/v1/mobile/connect — sign message imperial:mobile-connect:{wallet}:{nonce} where nonce is a current Unix timestamp (seconds or ms), not a random string; rejected if too old/skewed.
2. Receive JWT; send on trading endpoints.
3. revoke when done or compromised.

# Interactive OpenAPI / Scalar UI
open https://api.imperial.space/api/v1/docs

# Machine-readable schema
curl -s https://api.imperial.space/api/v1/openapi.json | head

# Public-ish market data examples (no JWT) — confirm live paths in OpenAPI
curl -s https://api.imperial.space/api/v1/mark-prices
curl -s https://api.imperial.space/api/v1/funding-rates

Order endpoints live under /api/v1/mobile/orders (including batch, cancel, update, collateral). Always pin against the live OpenAPI — path shapes move.

Builder takeaways

• Product builders: Imperial is a distribution + execution layer over existing Solana perps liquidity. Embed or deep-link when users want one ticket across venues rather than native Flash/Jup UI only.
• Venue teams: being a route target means competing on all-in cost and leverage caps, not just brand — router math is the shelf placement.
• Bot desks: JWT + OpenAPI is enough to automate; still model venue-specific funding and Imperial’s sticky-venue rule so you don’t fight the router.
• Risk: perps + optional Prime leverage are high risk; fee simplicity does not reduce liquidation probability.

Resources

• Overview · Routing · Imperial Prime · Fees · Pairs markets · Security & trust
• Trading API
• Imperial on DevRels

Bottom line

Imperial is Solana’s perps meta-layer: smart-route to Jupiter / Flash / Phoenix / GMTrade-class venues, optional Prime collateral for leverage beyond a single venue’s cap, pairs indices for relative bets, simple collateral-based Imperial fees, and a JWT Trading API for bots. Use it when you want one terminal and venue-agnostic execution math — and read the trust model before turning on one-click session keys.