Going long on commas means holding a market’s synth token. The token is a funding-pegged synthetic: its price is pulled toward the oracle index by arbitrage and funding, not locked to it. You are buying exposure to the underlying’s price in SOL terms, with a soft peg.
Expect a basis of a few percent between the token price and the index. The funding mechanism narrows persistent gaps over time; it does not eliminate them block by block.

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Where you trade depends on market phase

Each market goes through two phases:
  1. Bootstrap: the token trades on a bonding curve. Buys draw tokens from the preminted curve allocation; sells return them to it.
  2. Live: after graduation, trading moves to the market’s internal AMM, a constant-product pool seeded from the curve raise.
Both phases charge a per-trade fee set in the market’s parameters (curve_fee_bps and amm_fee_bps).

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Buying on the curve

1

Check the market status

Fetch the Market account. status must be Bootstrap and frozen must be false.
2

Quote and set slippage

Compute the expected output from the curve’s virtual reserves, then pass a min_tokens_out you are willing to accept.
3

Send curve_buy

Your SOL goes to the market vault and the synth is transferred from the curve allocation to your associated token account (created automatically if needed).
You can exit during bootstrap with curveSell(tokensIn, minSolOut), which returns your tokens to the curve allocation and pays out SOL, minus the curve fee.

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Trading on the AMM

After graduation, use ammBuy and ammSell with the same slippage pattern. The AMM adds one extra account, the market’s pool token account:

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Reading premium and basis

Two fields on the Market account tell you where the token trades relative to the underlying: The premium is (mark_ema - index_twap) / index_twap. A positive premium means the token trades rich to the index; funding is then paying shorts to draw and sell, which pushes the price back down. A negative premium means the token trades cheap; shorts are being charged, which pushes them to buy back and repay. Remember the scale: 1,000,000 tokens represent one whole underlying unit (one floor NFT or one graded card), and the token has 6 decimals.
A frozen market (circuit breaker or admin action) rejects all trades until it is unfrozen. See circuit breaker. Positions and balances are untouched while frozen; only activity is paused.