What Is Nado DEX | How to Use It, Airdrop and Unified Margin

Nado is an order-book exchange (CLOB DEX) on Ink, the Kraken-backed L2. It pulls spot, perpetual futures (perps) and lending into a single account, and it accepts tokenized US equities and gold as collateral. Anyone can open an account in the current public beta, and Nado has not issued a token of its own.

Nado is not a service run by Kraken itself. The terms of use (August 26, 2026 version) name Spira Arc Inc. as the operator, and the scope of protection differs from Kraken's own regulated products.

Image: screenshot of the Nado official site, captured September 9, 2026

The official landing page introduces the team as "the team that built Kraken and launched INK," but in substance this is the Vertex Protocol team and trading stack that moved to the Ink Foundation on July 8, 2025. Vertex retired the VRTX token, and holders were allocated 1% of the total INK supply (distributed after TGE). According to The Block, VRTX had fallen 98% between its November 2023 listing and the migration announcement, so this was not a combination made from a position of strength.

Latest Updates and Recent Moves

The $INK TGE had not taken place as of September 9, 2026, and recent moves center on added cash rewards and expanded collateral.

Unified margin means spot balances, perp positions, borrowings and unrealized P&L are all calculated in a single account, which reduces the margin you have to post. If you are long spot, the margin required for a short perp position falls by that much.

Image: from the Nado official documentation, retrieved September 9, 2026

Order matching is handled by the operator's off-chain sequencer in 5 to 15 milliseconds, and fills settle together on Ink. The sequencer takes no custody of assets, and collateral stays in the smart contract.

Four crypto assets can be posted as collateral: USDT0, USDC, wETH and kBTC. Gold in the form of XAUT0 and tokenized US equities are added on top (of the nine listed equity tokens, wAMZNx and wMSFTx carry a weight of 0 and do not count as collateral). You can hold crypto positions with your equities still posted, without selling them.

The equity tokens themselves come from the xStocks framework. Ondo Perps put forward the same collateral design in July 2026.

Assets left sitting in the account earn interest as they are: on September 9, 2026 the deposit rate was 0.80% a year for USDC and 0.40% for USDT0.

There is also a vault called NLP that moves you to the liquidity-providing side of the book. Deposit USDT0 and you receive a share that takes on the P&L of market making and liquidations, and that share also counts as collateral. The APR displayed the same day was about 6.4%.

The default fees are 0.035% for takers and 0.01% for makers. Tiers step up as 30-day volume grows, and in the top tier makers are paid rather than charged.

The tier thresholds are excerpted from an image table in the official documentation (retrieved September 9, 2026), and they conflict with the worked example in the body of that same document, which puts the top tier at $5 billion.

When you are liquidated, 1 USDT0 goes to the liquidator, and funding accrues for as long as you hold the position.

Image: screenshot of the Nado app (trading screen), captured September 9, 2026

Leverage caps differ by market. In the official API on September 9, 2026, BTC-PERP and ETH-PERP were 50x, SOL and the major pairs 40x, most altcoins 10x, and the lowest was 2x. For spot, the official documentation puts the cap at 5x.

The body of the official documentation still states a cap of "up to 20x." What the live app and the official API return is 50x. At 50x the margin is 2% of the position, so if you size the distance to liquidation on a 20x assumption, your real cushion is less than half of that.

👉 Check the fee tiers and per-market leverage caps in the official app

Can You Use It from Japan?

The restricted territories in the terms of use are the United States, Canada and the Republic of Panama, plus sanctioned countries such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, and Japan is not on that list. That said, nowhere does the company state that Japan is eligible; Japan is simply absent from the list.

What You Cannot Verify from Outside

As of September 9, 2026, no third-party smart contract audit report can be found in the official documentation or on the official GitHub. Nor is there any official statement on whether KYC is required.

There are four reward programs you can take part in. Among them, Nado Points are not a token of Nado's own, and no official document says they will convert into $INK.

Image: screenshot of the Nado app (Rewards), captured September 9, 2026

$50,000 opens unconditionally at the start of each week. The remaining $50,000 unlocks linearly on eligible weekly volume above $1.05 billion and reaches the full amount at $2.45 billion. The week that began on September 7 stood at $425 million on the 9th, or 17% of the full-amount threshold, short of even the starting point. The only thing open is the unconditional $50,000.

The weekly points pool is volume-linked as well: against a floor of 300,000 and a ceiling of 950,000 points, the projection from the 7-day average volume was about 326,000 points, just above the floor. If your activity is judged to be wash trading, your allocation is cut or zeroed.

The official rewards API has an endpoint for querying the Ink airdrop by address. That is as far as the confirmed link to $INK goes: neither a conversion ratio nor a distribution date has been published.

Cumulative users number 104,390, but on September 9, 2026 only 1,572 of them traded, or 1.5% of the cumulative figure. Twenty-four-hour volume that day was about $252 million, of which spot accounted for roughly $270,000.

On January 31, 2026 the figures were 35,899 cumulative users and 4,488 on the day. The cumulative count has almost tripled, while the number of people trading on the day has actually fallen.

The figures are aligned on CoinGecko's derivatives data. In scale, Nado is an order of magnitude away from Hyperliquid, Lighter and edgeX.

Image: screenshot of the Nado app (Markets / Spot), captured September 9, 2026

The book on the flagship markets, however, is not thin. On the same day, BTC-PERP had more than $10 million of orders on each side within 0.5% of the mid price, and a $10,000 market order slipped by less than 0.1 basis points.

On the numbers so far, you can foresee the losses but not the rewards. Losses are set on the spot by the leverage you choose and the size you take. Rewards depend on your share of a weekly pool and on $INK, for which neither a conversion ratio nor a distribution date has been published.

Rewards also grow in total as volume grows, but the crowd splitting them grows too. As for the everything-in-one-account design, with only $270,000 moving through the spot book in 24 hours, the practical use right now leans toward opening perp positions while leaving your equities posted as collateral. Anyone can measure the speed of the book and the breadth of the collateral, but no audit report can be found, and the treatment of eligible regions remains contradictory across the company's own materials.

You do not need an invite code to open an account.

Depositing to Nado | Moving Funds to Ink and Connecting a Wallet

1. Get a wallet that supports Ink (Kraken's L2) and fund it with ETH for gas. Figure on 0.01 ETH or more (the official FAQ notes that ETH withdrawals from Kraken to Ink carry no fee).
2. Move USDT0, the base asset, over to Ink. The bridges listed in the official FAQ are the USDT0 Native Bridge, Superbridge, Bungee and Relay. Native ETH cannot be deposited directly, so it has to be wrapped into wETH or similar.
3. Connect your wallet at app.nado.xyz and deposit into your account. Deposits carry no fee.

Placing Orders on Nado | Checking Leverage and Max Slippage

Before you send an order, check the leverage multiplier and the default max slippage in the order panel. The minimum order size is set in notional terms ($100 equivalent for BTC-PERP), and orders below it are still charged the fee for the minimum size.

Withdrawing from Nado | Fees and Fast Withdrawal

The standard withdrawal fee is fixed per asset.

1. If you are in a hurry you can choose fast withdrawal, but on top of the 1 USDT0 it costs the greater of 5 USDT0 or 0.1% of the amount, which is expensive on small sums.
2. NLP shares cannot be burned for four days after minting, and redeeming them costs the greater of 1 USDT0 or 0.1% of the amount on top of the 1 USDT0 fee (effectively 2 USDT0 below 1,000 USDT0).

Nado Referral Codes | Locked for 365 Days, No Changes

1. Decide on your referral code before you apply it. It is valid for 365 days by default and cannot be changed afterward.
2. As the referrer you set the rebate rate per code with a slider, and you can claim your commission balance from the Referrals page.

👉 Check the eligible regions and reward terms on the official site

Nado is a unified-margin order-book exchange on Ink that takes tokenized US equities and gold as collateral. As of September 9, 2026 the book that is actually moving is almost entirely perps, and 1.5% of cumulative users traded. The variable portion of the weekly USDT0 rewards has yet to open. What to hold off on is the relationship with $INK. The next thing to check is whether volume and user counts hold up in a week when rewards thin out after TGE.

• Nado official site
• Nado Terms of Use (August 26, 2026 version)
• Official documentation | Order-book architecture
• Official documentation | Fees and rebates
• Official documentation | NLP
• Official documentation | Season 2 points
• Official documentation | xPoints
• Official documentation | Referral program
• Official documentation | Restricted territories
• Official documentation | Ink airdrop query API
• Nado app | Rewards
• CoinTrust | Nado begins accepting US equity tokens as collateral (June 9, 2026)
• PR Newswire | Vertex team joins the Ink Foundation (July 8, 2025)
• The Block | Vertex sunsets VRTX and migrates to Ink
• Ondo Perps announces perps with tokenized equity collateral
• CoinGecko | Nado exchange page