DeepBook Margin: Leverage, Insights, and What’s Next

Main Takeaways

• DeepBook Margin adds borrow/lend mechanics alongside Sui’s native liquidity layer, enabling leveraged trading directly on DeepBook via shared margin pools.
• Advice for newer DeFi users: before touching leverage, understand where the yield is coming from, because that's the best way to evaluate what you're opting into.
• For onchain margin to reach more users, the borrowing and debt management flow needs to be clearly explained in-product or safely abstracted so people always know what's happening with their position.

Overview

DeepBook is the shared order book at the center of Sui’s DeFi ecosystem. Rather than each app building its own siloed liquidity, DeepBook provides a single, open layer that any protocol can plug into. DeepBook Margin is the first major extension built on top of that foundation. Margin introduces borrowing mechanics and shared margin pools, unlocking leveraged trading and broader composability across the ecosystem.

To walk through what Margin means in practice, those behind DeepBook hosted a livestream on X with product demos. The conversation was co-hosted by Amir, who leads DeepBook marketing, and Aslan, who oversees DeepBook development at Mysten Labs, the core contributor to Sui. They were joined by builders actively integrating Margin into their products: Cyrus from Abyss, a trading platform, and Chris from Pebble, a lending protocol, both utilizing DeepBook Margin to introduce leverage into their products.

Amir started the conversation with a clear explanation of DeepBook Margin: “DeepBook is not just an order book. It’s shared infrastructure. And DeepBook Margin is really the first extension of that, enabling leverage and capital efficiency directly at the protocol layer.”

From there, the livestream focused on two questions:

1. What does margin actually mean for users?
2. How are builders already using it to create new products on Sui?

Margin, Explained Simply

Aslan framed margin in the clearest possible way: most finance reduces to two primitives — trading and borrowing — and margin is what happens when you combine them. 

“Margin allows you to borrow from these margin pools to place leveraged orders on DeepBook”, said Aslan while discussing DeepBook at a high level. 

In short, DeepBook has pools of assets that users can borrow from. That borrowed capital lets users trade with more than they’ve deposited, which is what “leverage” means. Leverage is the most visible thing margin enables, but the bigger shift is structural. 

Before DeepBook Margin, if a team wanted to offer borrowing or leverage in their app, they’d have to build that plumbing themselves. Now, margin pools exist as shared infrastructure on DeepBook that any team can plug into. 

That means builders can focus on their own product experience rather than rebuilding the same underlying mechanisms from scratch, and users benefit from deeper, shared liquidity rather than fragmented pools spread across separate apps.

What Margin Changes for Sui DeFi

DeepBook already acts as a shared liquidity layer for the ecosystem. Margin adds a second shared layer — borrow/lend mechanics that connect to that liquidity — so teams can spend less time rebuilding foundations and more time on product and distribution.

Aslan put it like this, “It’s infrastructure . . . to make it so users and builders can permissionlessly leverage this composable infrastructure.” In practice, any builder on Sui can tap into DeepBook's margin system without permission.

Everyone builds on the same shared layer, so liquidity compounds across the ecosystem instead of sitting in silos, which means more products and deeper liquidity for users.

Start With Intent

One of the most practical parts of the livestream was about decision-making. When Amir asked what advice they’d give to newer DeFi users, the panel kept returning to the same idea: before you touch a more complex product, be clear about what you’re trying to do.

Chris reinforced that “getting the goal right” comes before picking a product — whether someone is optimizing for stable yield, directional exposure, or more active strategies. 

That matters more now that Margin is live, because it gives builders and users a wider set of tools on Sui. The same infrastructure can power very different experiences.

An Important Question: Where is the Yield Coming From?

As the conversation moved into yield-bearing margin pool tokens and how teams might integrate them, Aslan surfaced a principle that’s worth treating as a rule of thumb for anyone using DeFi:

“Where is the yield coming from is probably the most important question you can ask whenever you’re doing anything in DeFi,” said Aslan.

It’s a simple filter that helps users separate incentives-driven yield from yield driven by usage and fees. And it naturally forces the next questions: what activity generates it, what risks are involved, and what conditions could change it?

Making Onchain Margin Legible for Real Users

A key product takeaway from Cyrus was about abstraction. 

If onchain margin is going to feel approachable, users either need to clearly understand what’s happening, or the product needs to handle the complexity on their behalf. In plain terms, making the flow legible means reducing the “what just happened?” moments:

• What did I deposit vs what did I borrow?
• What do I owe, and how does that change over time?
• What triggers liquidation or forced actions?
• What happens when I close, unwind, or withdraw?

Perps platforms often hide most of this behind a single interface. 

Onchain margin is a powerful unlock as it’s open, composable and easy to inspect. But without thoughtful UX, that flexibility can feel like too many things to consider for new users. It is important that the product experience is designed to explain or simplify.

As Cyrus put it, “It’s finance, it’s people’s money . . . people feel way more confident when they really understand where everything is coming from.”

What’s Next for DeepBook Margin

Aslan framed margin as one extension that already unlocks multiple downstream uses: leverage trading (trading with borrowed capital), margin pools (where users supply liquidity and earn from borrowers), yield-bearing tokens (tokens representing pool deposits that grow in value over time), and integrations that reuse those primitives across DeFi. Looking forward, he pointed to two directions.

• Depth: scaling what’s already live (more markets, higher caps, and additional mechanics like cross-margin)
• Breadth: adding new protocol capabilities that can combine with existing building blocks in new ways

The underlying idea is the compounding effect of primitives: each new capability doesn’t just add one feature, it increases the number of things builders can assemble.

Getting Hands-On

If you’re a user, the clearest next step is to engage intentionally: start by learning the core primitives, then explore margin when you’re confident you understand the “where does the yield come from?” question, and the tradeoffs involved.

If you’re a builder, pick an angle and ship: a clearer margin UX, a new way to deploy margin pool tokens, or a strategy product that’s transparent about risk. The winning products will be the ones that make composable leverage feel understandable.

Amir closed by making the intent behind all of this clear: make it easier for builders and traders to engage confidently in Sui DeFi, through shared infrastructure, education, and tighter product feedback loops. 

Want to explore the demos and see exactly what everyone had to say? Watch the DeepBook Margin stream in full here.