Idle margin is a market-structure problem

In listed futures, posted margin is already a claim on a clearinghouse with its own credit and investment rules. In crypto perps, margin is usually just the account equity that keeps the position under the maintenance line. It earns funding if you are on the right side of the payment, and otherwise it sits.

That idle stock is why ‘capital efficiency’ keeps returning as a design brief. It is not an invitation to mint a token from this website. It is the observation that a live position is a bundle: market exposure plus a locked inventory of collateral. Venues that cannot unbundle those two things force traders to overfund or to close, even when the directional bet is still the bet they want.

The hard parts are the same as everywhere else in this blog: oracles, liquidation, and who is short the residual when you let collateral do a second job. If the second job can gap the first, you have not created efficiency. You have created a new liquidation path with a friendlier name.

We keep protocol studies on Selected work. Here we only need the market fact: on-chain trading still treats open-position collateral as dead inventory more often than TradFi clearing does. Anyone building trading infrastructure will hit that wall. Pretending it is already solved is how you get another wrapper with the same risk.