A price of your own.
The venue generates its own settlement price out of the premiums market makers post. It consults no outside feed — which means no licensing entanglement underneath the product, and a reference price that is yours to publish.
Is the price you're looking for behind you — or ahead of you?
A conventional order book prices off the last trade. Microtick prices off what market makers charge to cover a fixed stretch of future time — a minute, an hour. That makes it steadier by design, not by smoothing after the fact: a price on a stretch of time weighs everything that could happen across it — instead of reacting and chasing after the last thing that did.
The last bar sets the price. It reports what just happened, and it is only ever as steady as the most recent trade to come through.
The stretch ahead sets the price. A market maker quoting a premium is pricing everywhere the market could get to before the clock runs out — so the price is formed over spans of time, across every duration on the board, rather than off the last trade to come through.
Cash settlement never depends on an outside price, or on licensing one.
The price recomputes on the exchange's clock, never on quote events.
Only the competitive inside slice of the book can move the price.
Price moves based on noise-filtered market imbalance measured across every duration.
Continuous price action, on a fixed interval.
Because the price recomputes on the exchange's clock rather than on quote events, it arrives as an even stream instead of a burst of activity followed by silence. That is what makes it usable as a reference: a consumer downstream never has to ask whether the gap since the last update means calm or means nobody is quoting.
Only the competitive inside slice of the book is allowed to move it, weighted by depth, so a single wide quote cannot drag the print. It is a manipulation-resistant fair value first, and a data product in its own right second.
A Microtick market next to a conventional order book absorbs flow that book would otherwise have to take at a worse price — a liquidity bolt-on, not a competitor.
Settlement never depends on an outside price, so there is no data contract sitting underneath the product you are selling.
Cash-against-the-implied-price is the default because it needs no outside price at all. Exercising into the underlying stays available where a venue supports it.
A better market microstructure for the information age.
Run it yourself.
The Evaluation Kit licenses a cloud-based multi-process venue with reference implementations for market makers and exchanges — let the mechanism prove itself under load. The mechanism is the settled part; a venue willing to publish a price of its own is the part still missing.