A stock token has two prices, and keeping them straight is the whole game.
The two prices
- The oracle reference. A Chainlink feed publishes the underlying equity’s price on-chain, multiplier-adjusted, during US market hours. This is “what the stock is worth.”
- The pool price. The token trades in a Uniswap v4 pool 24/7. Its price there is whatever buyers and sellers set it to — “what the token is trading at.”
Most of the time these track closely. When they diverge, you have a dislocation.
Why two prices exist at all
It would seem simpler to just peg the token to the oracle. But a peg needs someone standing ready to arbitrage it — to buy when the pool is cheap and sell when it is rich — and that arbitrage is exactly what keeps the two prices close. When arbitrage is thin (small pools) or impossible (the oracle is frozen), the pool price wanders.
That wandering is not a bug; it is the price discovery of a 24/7 market running against an intermittently-published reference. Measuring it — cleanly, against both the oracle and a live perp — is what the radar does.