The Seven-Stage Lifecycle: every contract sits in one act of the play
FireFutures places every listed perpetual contract into the same seven-act play: decline, accumulation, shakeout, ignition, markup, distribution, aftermath. What each act means in plain language, and what this lens can and cannot do.
The one-line conclusion: FireFutures does not predict price. It answers a more basic question first — which act of the play is this contract in right now?
Why a "play" at all
Small-cap perpetuals follow an eerily similar rhythm: a long ignored bleed-out, quiet position building, repeated shake-outs, one sudden high-volume launch, a markup phase where the operator sells in batches, then silence. Details differ per coin; the order of acts rarely does. Every five minutes the engine scans the whole market and assigns each listed contract to one act. That is description, not prediction.
The seven acts in plain language
| Act | Plain meaning | What you see on the chart |
|---|---|---|
| decline | falling, unattended | grinding down or flat, sparse volume, nobody talks about it |
| accumulation | someone seems to be quietly buying | price stops falling, low-level turnover quietly builds while the surface looks calm |
| shakeout | jumping around, testing | sudden wicks that snap back, shaking out weak hands, often right before ignition |
| ignition | just ignited | a volume breakout, confirmed by the engine's dual-track rules |
| markup | rising | the smoothest trend and the hottest sentiment |
| distribution | the operator seems to be selling | price may still look fine, but funding, open interest and upper wicks start to confess |
| aftermath | the rally is over | the cool-down after distribution; volatility and attention fade together |
What this lens is good for
- One shared vocabulary: hundreds of coins live in the same state machine, so you can compare across the market and subscribe to stage-change alerts.
- A risk baseline: a checkup report's long/short risk scores start from the baseline of the current act (see How to read a checkup report).
- Avoiding the classic wounds: the most common retail injuries are longing into distribution and shorting into ignition. Know the act first, then talk about position size.
What it cannot do
- It does not predict the next act. Stage history is description only: how long a coin sat in accumulation says nothing about how much longer it will sit there. "Stage duration has no predictive power" is one of our written capability boundaries (see The system's capability boundaries).
- It does not give orders. Pages say "this coin is in distribution, long risk is this many points" — never "sell now". Issuing instructions is neither our tone nor our business.
See it live: open the radar for the current stage distribution, or run a quick check on any coin.