During sharp market moves, prices on an exchange can briefly disconnect from an asset's broader market price. A liquidation executed into that dislocation would sell more of your collateral than a fair price would require. The Market Anomaly Guard (MAG) is the safeguard Nolus built to prevent exactly that.
The problem MAG solves
In turbulent markets, arbitrage takes time to pull exchange quotes back in line with global prices. If a margin position crosses its liquidation threshold at that moment, a naive protocol would sell collateral immediately at the temporarily broken price. The user loses more than a fair liquidation would take, and the protocol converts a momentary anomaly into permanent damage.
How MAG works
MAG is built into the liquidation logic itself and adds three checks:
Smoothed trigger price. Liquidations trigger on a smoothed moving-average oracle price rather than a single spot tick, so a momentary wick doesn't start a liquidation by itself.
A minimum acceptable outcome. Before any collateral is sold, the protocol derives the least it will accept for the sale from its own oracle price and attaches it to the trade. If the market cannot return at least that amount, the sale does not happen. This is not a slippage setting that anyone can loosen for convenience.
A hold, not a forced sale. If the market cannot meet that minimum, the liquidation is held rather than executed at a bad price, and it is resumed once conditions allow.
While a liquidation is held, the position stays open and shows Market Anomaly: Watch Mode Active in the app.
How a held liquidation resumes
A held liquidation is paused and the Nolus team resumes it once conditions allow. It is not something you clear yourself, and your position remains open and manageable meanwhile.
A liquidation also travels between Nolus and Solana over the protocol's transfer channel, so it can take a while to complete even when nothing is being held.
How this differs from typical DeFi liquidations
Most protocols trigger on the spot price and execute immediately, with no validation of the outcome and no way back once triggered. On Nolus, the trigger uses a smoothed price, the execution has to clear a minimum acceptable outcome, and a recovering position escapes liquidation altogether.
What it means for you
You keep the same responsibility to manage your position's health, and MAG does not remove liquidation risk from a genuine adverse move. What it does remove is the risk of losing collateral to flash crashes and thin-liquidity moments. Together with partial-by-design liquidations, MAG makes volatility survivable rather than fatal.
For the full picture of when liquidations happen and how to avoid them, see Liquidations Explained.