Spot Block Trades vs. Tokenized Forwards in Canopy

Spot Block Trades

A spot offer settles atomically at the moment of execution. The seller deposits the asset into escrow when creating the offer. When a buyer fills it — partially or in full — the protocol executes a single atomic exchange:

The escrowed asset is released to the buyer.
The buyer’s quote token payment is delivered directly to the seller.
Any protocol fee is transferred from the buyer to the fee recipient.
The transaction either completes entirely or reverts entirely — there is no partial state.

Because the exchange is atomic and the price is fixed at offer creation, spot fills carry no slippage. A buyer filling 100,000 TECH at a specific price per unit receives exactly 100,000 TECH and pays exactly the quoted amount — regardless of what else is happening in the market at that moment. The protocol never holds the buyer’s quote tokens; they move directly from buyer to seller within the same transaction.

Tokenized Forwards

A forward offer defers delivery. The seller still escrows the underlying asset up front — the collateralization guarantee is identical to a spot offer — but when a buyer fills the offer, they do not receive the asset immediately. Instead, they receive ERC-20 claim tokens that represent a fully collateralized right to redeem the underlying asset once the offer’s unlock time is reached. The underlying assets remain locked in escrow for the entire duration. After the unlock time:

The claim token holder calls the redemption function.
Their claim tokens are burned.
The corresponding escrowed assets are released directly to them on a strict 1:1 basis.

Redemption is permissionless — no administrator needs to approve it, and no broker is involved. Whoever holds the claim tokens at the unlock time receives the underlying assets. Ownership of the position and ownership of the eventual payout are always identical.

Comparison: Spot vs. Tokenized Forward

Property	Spot Block Trade	Tokenized Forward
Settlement timing	Immediate — atomic at fill time	Deferred — at or after unlock time
What buyer receives	Underlying asset	ERC-20 claim tokens
Collateral location	Released to buyer at fill	Remains in escrow until redemption
Transferability	N/A — settled immediately	Fully transferable at any time before redemption
Usable as DeFi collateral	Asset is in your wallet	Yes — claim tokens work in any ERC-20-compatible protocol
Counterparty risk	None — atomic settlement	None — assets in escrow, redemption is permissionless
Typical use cases	Large spot purchases, treasury deployments, institutional OTC blocks	Locked token sales, vesting markets, deferred treasury allocations, structured products

Unlock Time and Expiry

Every tokenized forward has two important timestamps:

Expiry — the deadline after which the offer can no longer be filled. The offer stops accepting new fills once block.timestamp >= expiry.
Unlock time — the earliest point at which claim tokens can be redeemed for the underlying collateral. Before the unlock time, the claim tokens are fully transferable and composable, but redemption is not available.

Both timestamps are set by the seller at the time the offer is created and are enforced by the smart contract. They cannot be changed after the offer is live. The protocol requires expiry <= unlockTime for deferred offers, meaning an offer always stops accepting fills before its claims become redeemable.