11min

Insurance Fund

What is the Insurance Fund?
Drift's Insurance Fund is the first backstop to maintaining the solvency of the exchange in the event of any bankruptcies. Any user can stake into Drift's USDC Insurance Fund to earn liquidation fees and backstop the platform.
There are separate Insurance Funds for each asset that can be deposited on the platform - USDC, BTC, ETH and SOL. Since the USDC pool collects exchange fees from trading activity on spot and perpetual trading, the USDC pool will support liquidations from perpetual trading, while the other pools will backstop the respective asset-denominated liquidations from borrow and lend.
Anyone can provide passive liquidity by staking the corresponding asset into the Insurance Fund to further collateralise it in return for a portion of the liquidation and trading fees generated by the exchange. 
Why is the Insurance Fund necessary? 
An Insurance Fund is necessary to protect the platform against any levered losses sustained by users of the protocol. When markets are particularly volatile, accounts with insufficient margin may not be liquidated in time. 
In these instances, the balance of these accounts may fall below zero (i.e. they have more unrealised loss than available collateral margining the position) and the exchange is left to pay this 'bad debt'. 
The insurance fund exists as a safety net to prevent this from occurring. It offers a buffer zone that maintains the solvency of the protocol and assures users that even if levered losses occur, there are enough funds in the protocol to cover the bill and pay out profitable positions. 
When is the Insurance Fund used?
The Insurance Fund is used to pay off liabilities when an account is bankrupt.
By default the Insurance Fund will pay out any bankrupt user losses:
in full for bank balances; and
up to the market's set max insurance limit.
Drift Protocol has multiple asset pools. As a result: 
USDC balances in the Insurance Fund will only cover USDC-denominated liabilities. USDC fees will cover all perpetual liquidations and is likely to be the biggest vault given that all exchange fees are collected within USDC and pooled within the same USDC balance. 
BTC balances in the Insurance Fund will only cover BTC-denominated liabilities; 
﻿ETH balances in the Insurance Fund will only cover ETH-denominated liabilities; and
﻿SOL balances in the Insurance Fund will only cover SOL-denominated liabilities. 
How is the Insurance Fund funded? 
The Insurance Fund is funded via premiums collected from liquidation fees, trading fees and borrow & lend fees. Since exchange fees are collected in USDC, they will be pooled in the USDC pool. The USDC pool will backstop all perpetual liquidations.
What is Socialised Loss?
Socialised loss occurs where losses sustained on the platform are socialised across the deposits and positions of all users. 
This only occurs when the levered losses sustained within the particular market are greater than the token balance of that market in the Insurance Fund; i.e. where deleveraging was not sufficient to ease the bad debt. 
In that situation, the losses incurred will be socialised among participants: 
Perpetual Traders: paid for pro-rata (by base amount) by all open positions
Lenders: paid pro-rata (by token amount) by all lenders.