Risks

The asset

• A token is not a share. You hold a claim on an issuer, not the stock. You do not vote, and your rights are whatever the issuer's terms say.
• Issuer risk. If the issuer or its custodian fails, is sanctioned, or stops redeeming, the token may lose its link to the share.
• Issuer control. The issuer can pause a token, freeze an account, and move or burn any balance. opcode cannot stop or reverse that.
• Tracking. A token can trade above or below the share, most of all when the underlying market is shut or on-chain liquidity is thin.
• Eligibility. If you hold a token you were not entitled to hold, the issuer may act against that balance.
• Stablecoin risk. Every price is in USDC. OPmode assumes one USDC equals one dollar; it stops new quotes when an independent USDC price leaves $0.99 to $1.01 or is more than 60 seconds old, but that check never changes the price. If USDC loses its peg or is frozen, that affects you independently of the stock.

The market

• Off-hours prices are uncertain. Outside New York's regular session the share trades thinly or not at all, OPmode accepts a wider Pyth confidence interval (50 bps rather than 25), and news can move the share before it next trades.
• Gaps. A share can open far from where it closed. OPmode gives no new quotes while the US market is closed, at weekends and on exchange holidays, but a token bought on Friday evening still carries the whole weekend, and Quick can still trade it at whatever price its route finds.
• Basis. OPmode prices from the underlying share. A verified share price does not mean the token trades at that price elsewhere; a gap between the two can persist.
• Two kinds of counterparty. On OPmode you trade against opcode's own pool, within small per-order limits; if a pool is paused or short of inventory, or no fresh verified price is available, OPmode is unavailable on that market. On Quick you trade against whatever liquidity Jupiter finds, which can be thin. You can always move your tokens and trade them elsewhere.
• Quotes can be refused. A signed quote is not a guaranteed fill. If conditions change before your transaction lands, the program rejects it.
• Providing liquidity. A pool's inventory is not hedged or rebalanced elsewhere. Providers carry its price moves and its trading gains or losses, and there is no guaranteed withdrawal value.
• Leveraged products. Tokens that track leveraged ETFs, such as TQQQx, decay over time and can lose most of their value quickly.

The technology

• Smart contract risk. The settlement program may contain errors despite testing and an internal review. It has not had an independent third-party audit. An error could cause loss.
• Upgrade risk. The program is upgradeable. Its upgrade authority is opcode's owner wallet, a single key with no multisig or timelock, so an upgrade can change how the program behaves.
• Network risk. Solana can be congested or halted. During a halt nothing can be traded or paused on chain. A failed transaction still costs its network fee.
• Key risk, yours. Whoever has your seed phrase has your tokens. No one can recover a lost phrase or reverse a transfer you signed.
• Key risk, opcode's. opcode's keys could be compromised. On-chain limits bound what a stolen quote key could cost the pools; they do not make it impossible, and they do not bound the owner wallet.
• Data risk. OPmode's price comes from Pyth. The program verifies each Pyth report on chain and checks its age, session, publisher count and confidence, but a wrong price that Pyth signs and that passes every check would produce a wrong quote. OPmode also depends on Pyth's feeds and verifier staying available, and on the assumption that one USDC is worth one dollar. The market list and the chart use a separate public reference from Jupiter, which stops when the token and its underlying share disagree. Quick's amounts come from the route Jupiter finds.
• Wallet and browser risk. Malicious extensions and fake sites exist. Check the address bar, and check every transaction in your wallet before approving it.

Legal and tax

• The treatment of tokenized securities differs by country and is changing. A product available to you today may not be tomorrow.
• Swaps are likely to be taxable events where you live. Keeping records is your responsibility; every swap has a transaction you can look up on chain.
• opcode is a software interface to a program on a public blockchain. It is not a broker, a custodian, an exchange in the regulated sense, or your adviser.

What opcode does about these

It reduces the ones it can and names the ones it cannot. Swaps settle directly from your wallet. It stops quoting rather than guess. It bounds its quote key on chain and has the program verify every OPmode reference. It shows the price, the fee and, on OPmode, the distance from the reference before you sign. The details are in Risk controls. None of that removes the risks above.