Exchange · derivatives-venue

LN Markets

What it is. A Bitcoin derivatives venue built on Lightning — perpetual futures with leverage, and a swap between BTC and a synthetic USD balance. Deposits and withdrawals move over Lightning or on-chain, which is what makes it interesting here: an agent can fund a position, hold it, and pull the proceeds back to its own node without a bank anywhere in the loop.

Agent access. A documented REST API at api.lnmarkets.com/v3/, with official TypeScript and Python SDKs and a signet endpoint for testing against fake money first. Private endpoints are authenticated with signed requests using API keys created in the account profile, and keys carry scoped permissions — Read (balances, positions, history), Trade (open, modify, close), and Withdraw — issued separately. That separation is the useful part for delegation: an agent can be given trade rights and no withdrawal rights.

Sign-in and identity. Registration is email and password with email verification. LNURL-auth is supported as an additional sign-in method — passwordless proof of wallet ownership, with multiple wallets linkable so losing one doesn’t lock you out — and TOTP 2FA can be required for withdrawals. Note the shape carefully: LNURL-auth sits alongside the email account rather than replacing it, so a Lightning key is a credential here, not a way to skip onboarding.

How an agent uses it. Fund the trading balance by paying a Lightning invoice from its own wallet, authenticate to the v3 API with a scoped key, open and manage positions programmatically, then withdraw over Lightning back to a self-custody node. Test the whole loop on signet before it costs anything.

Custody. Funds sit with LN Markets while they are on the platform. The venue’s own framing is that it minimises custody risk rather than eliminating it — instant Lightning deposits and withdrawals, no mandatory holding periods, withdraw at any time — with the explicit advice to deposit only what you are trading and take profits off promptly. That is an honest description of a custodial venue with a short duration of exposure, and it should be read as exactly that: the exposure is short, not absent.

Gotchas. Leveraged derivatives can be liquidated, and an autonomous agent running a strategy unattended will be liquidated faster than a human who is watching. The synthetic USD balance is a venue-internal position, not a stablecoin an agent can spend anywhere else. Withdraw permission on an API key is the whole balance — scope keys down and keep withdrawal rights away from anything running unsupervised. Jurisdictional eligibility and any identity-verification requirements are not documented in the public API docs and are not stated here; check the venue directly before assuming access.

Links. lnmarkets.com · API docs docs.lnmarkets.com/en/api · SDKs: TypeScript, Python.