[max_]

Is there a good resource on how perps actually work? i.e a technical specification on how to implement them?

[miohtama]

Yes!

If you want to get into the deepest detail there are several decentralised perpetual futures exchanges.

Here are some open source codebases on Github:

https://github.com/vegaprotocol/vega

https://github.com/dydxprotocol/v4-chain/

https://github.com/gmx-io/gmx-synthetics

https://github.com/0xOstium/smart-contracts-public/

Vega is a stalled project, but they have good documentation:

https://docs.vega.xyz/release/concepts/new-to-vega

[fullstackvraj]

https://github.com/drift-labs

you can go through the drift labs code to see implementation of perps

[wmf]

BitMEX and Hyperliquid have fairly detailed documentation about how they implement perps and there are probably open source projects out there.