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This page covers known technical limits and edge cases in the protocol so you know exactly how the system behaves under extreme conditions.

1. Short buyback limits on heavily skewed curves

On the primary vAMM rail:
  • If longs buy up almost all of the virtual tokens on the curve, a short trying to buy back and close can hit a temporary PriceImpactTooHigh error until longs reduce their positions.
  • This is an inherent property of constant-product math (x⋅y=kx \cdot y = k). No money can be stolen, but short exits can be delayed if long open interest is overwhelming the curve.

2. Zero liquidator bounty on deep gap moves

Liquidator rewards are paid out of a liquidated trader’s remaining equity:
  • If a position gaps through maintenance margin straight into negative equity, the liquidator bounty drops to zero.
  • Because Priest runs dedicated protocol keeper bots, insolvent positions are closed regardless of fee bounties. However, independent third-party bots might skip liquidations that pay zero reward.

3. 60-second oracle staleness window

On graduated markets:
  • Pricing relies on fresh oracle ticks from Uniswap.
  • If network congestion or bot downtime delays updates past 60 seconds, new position opens and liquidations pause automatically until the price stream catches back up.

4. Permissionless listings and concentrated depth

Anyone can list an existing coin with at least $25,000 in Uniswap depth:
  • On Uniswap v4, concentrated liquidity can sometimes make a pool look deeper in-range than its real total reserves.
  • Because of this, newly listed coins are not backed by Counterflow by default until the team verifies that pool depth is authentic and well-distributed.

5. Bid wall delays during graduation

When a coin graduates:
  • If someone parks a massive USDC bid wall on the Uniswap v4 pool right before graduation, the engine’s price correction swap can revert with PoolPriceMismatch.
  • If this happens, the protocol can re-route graduation to a different pool fee tier (a fresh pool key) to complete the graduation cleanly.

See also