What Is a Perpetual Futures Contract? The Four Moving Parts
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A perpetual futures contract is an agreement to take the profit and loss of a price without taking delivery of the asset, carried on margin and carrying no settlement date. Asked plainly, what is a perpetual futures contract: an open position that funding keeps tethered to spot, and that ends when you close it or a liquidation does.
- 01Funding stands in for a settlement day: EVEDEX computes a funding rate once every eight hours per trading pair and settles one eighth of it every hour, by its documentation, checked 18 September 2026.
- 02EVEDEX documents a 200x cap on bitcoin that holds to $50,000 of notional; at that multiple the margin behind a position is gone on a move of half a percent, against two and a half percent at the 40x cap Hyperliquid publishes.
- 03Maintenance margin closes a position before the margin is spent: Lighter publishes 2% initial and 1.2% maintenance on its bitcoin contract, with a close-out mark at 0.8%.
- 04A liquidation is an order like any other: in this capture cycle the bitcoin books read here held between $29.2 million and $728.00 within ten basis points of the mid.
What is a perpetual futures contract, line by line
Four parts, and every argument about one venue against another is an argument about one of them.
| Part | What it decides | Where its value is published |
|---|---|---|
| Notional | the size profit and loss is computed on, and the size the fee is charged against | the order itself |
| Margin | the collateral the position is carried against, and the most a close-out can take | the venue's margin schedule |
| Mark price | the value put on the position between trades, and the number the close-out test reads | the venue's index and mark price pages |
| Funding | the recurring payment that passes from one holder of the contract to the other | the venue's funding page |
Nothing in that list involves delivery. A trader long one bitcoin contract never receives a bitcoin: the position is a claim on the difference between the price it opened at and the price it closes at, denominated in whatever the venue accepts as collateral. That is what makes the contract perpetual rather than merely long-dated. There is no delivery day to arrive at, so nothing on a calendar forces the contract price and the spot price back together.
Something has to force them together anyway, or the contract drifts into a market of its own and stops tracking the thing it is named after. That job belongs to funding, and it is the part of the design most readers meet last.
Funding, the payment that stands in for a settlement day
Funding is a transfer between the holders of the contract, not a charge collected by the venue. When the contract trades above the index of spot prices it tracks, the long side pays the short side; when it trades below, the payment runs the other way. The amount rises with the gap, which is what pulls the two prices back toward each other.
The clock is a venue decision, and it is published. EVEDEX computes a funding rate once every eight hours for each trading pair and settles one eighth of that rate every hour, according to its documentation, checked 18 September 2026. Paradex publishes an eight-hour funding period on each market in its markets endpoint, read on the same day. dYdX carries a next funding rate on every market its indexer lists, beside the oracle price and the margin fractions.
Two consequences follow, and neither of them appears in a fee schedule. A position carried for a week pays or receives funding at every interval inside it, 168 times on an hourly clock, so on anything held rather than traded it is usually the largest line on the statement. And because the payment tracks the gap rather than the direction of the market, a trader can be right about where the price goes and still pay for the privilege of holding the view.
Mark price, and why the last trade is not it
A perpetual carries two prices at once. Trades happen at whatever the book pairs them at; the position is valued at the mark price, and only the mark price decides whether the margin behind it is still enough. Venues build the mark from an index of outside spot venues rather than from the last trade printed on their own book, so that one thin print does not revalue every account on the venue.
The reason is mechanical. If the last trade set the valuation, a single market order into an empty book would mark thousands of accounts below their maintenance requirement and close them, and whoever placed that order would be standing on the other side of the closes. Marking to an outside index takes the arithmetic away from that.
What the index costs instead is a dependency. When the feed is wrong, the closes computed from it are wrong with it, and the record is not theoretical. The dYdX chain halted on 10 October 2025 and prices were stale when it restarted; $462,097.79 of trader losses were proposed for compensation, and we did not confirm the proposal passed. Paradex rolled its own chain back on 19 January 2026 after corrupted state produced closes that should not have happened, refunding $650,000 to 200 accounts.
Liquidation, and the distance a position has
A venue asks for initial margin to open a position and a smaller maintenance margin to keep it open. The gap between the two is the room the position has to be wrong in. Divide one by the documented leverage cap and the first number falls out: the move against the position that equals the whole margin behind it.
| Venue | Documented bitcoin cap | Move that equals the margin |
|---|---|---|
| EVEDEX | 200x to $50,000 | 0.5% |
| Aster, order book mode | 200x to 400 USDT | 0.5% |
| edgeX | 100x to $1 million | 1% |
| dYdX | 50x, 2% margin | 2% |
| Extended | 50x to $4 million | 2% |
| Lighter | 50x, 2% margin | 2% |
| Paradex | 50x, 300 BTC limit | 2% |
| Hyperliquid | 40x to $150 million | 2.5% |
Caps are each venue's own, read in its documentation, trading rules or public interface on 18 September 2026; every one of them steps down as the position grows, and the middle column says where it stops. The right-hand column is arithmetic on the middle one, before fees and before funding.
Maintenance margin brings the close-out nearer than that column suggests. Lighter publishes 2% initial and 1.2% maintenance on its bitcoin contract with a close-out mark at 0.8%; Extended publishes 2% and 1% on the same asset; Hyperliquid sets maintenance at half of its initial margin at the cap. A position opened at the cap is therefore closed after losing between two fifths and half of its margin, not all of it.
The close itself is an order. It reaches the same book every other order reaches, at whatever that book holds in the second it arrives: the bitcoin books read here ran from $29.2 million resting inside ten basis points down to $728.00, where a $100,000 order would have moved the price 158.11 bps. Cross margin widens what one bad position can reach, because the collateral is shared across the account: EVEDEX states that its platform operates in cross margin mode, and edgeX, Extended, Aster, dYdX and Paradex document the same default.
What the mechanics do not cover
The four parts describe a contract, not a counterparty. Each venue named above documents limits of its own, and they belong beside the arithmetic.
- EVEDEX. Position data is written to Arbitrum once enough of it has accumulated rather than on every fill, which leaves the on-chain record behind the engine that produced it (EVEDEX documentation, logged 18 September 2026). CertiK Skynet listed no bounty programme for it on the same day, and the contract list stops at 52 against 578 at Aster.
- Hyperliquid. Its community vault absorbed about $4 million in March 2025, and a further $4.9 million in the November 2025 POPCAT episode, both venue-run positions rather than trader ones. Of the 324 markets it lists, 146 come from third-party deployers the venue does not vet.
- Paradex. The January 2026 rollback above closed positions that should have stayed open. We also measured the thinnest bitcoin book of this set there, a median $728.00 within ten basis points of the mid.
- dYdX. Beyond the October 2025 halt, the chain throttles withdrawals for 50 blocks once an outage passes five minutes, which is the window a trader most wants them open. None of this is investment advice, and no venue named here is a recommendation.
Where the numbers on this page come from
- The scored sheet — one formula applied to seven of the order-book venues on this site, with the marks behind each score.
- Bitcoin books, measured — the depth a close-out would actually meet, read every ten minutes.
- Fees compared — the published half of the bill, and what the book took on top of it.
- How we rate — the six criteria, their weights and the rubric behind each mark.
Do perpetual futures ever expire?
No. A perpetual contract has no settlement day written into it, so it stays open until the holder closes it or a liquidation closes it. In place of convergence on a settlement day, a recurring funding payment between the two sides keeps the contract price near the index it tracks.
How is a funding rate worked out?
From the gap between the contract price and an index of spot prices, measured over an interval the venue publishes. A wider gap produces a larger payment in the direction that closes it. EVEDEX computes the rate once every eight hours per trading pair and settles one eighth of it every hour.
Who pays the funding, the exchange or the other trader?
The other trader. Funding moves between the long and short holders of the same contract, and the venue records the transfer rather than receiving it. That is why it never appears in a fee schedule, and why a position held for days can owe more funding than it ever owes in fees.
What is a mark price?
The price a venue uses to value an open position between trades, and the only price its close-out test reads. It is built from an index of outside spot venues rather than from the last trade, so a single order into a thin book cannot mark every account on the venue below its requirement.
At what price is a perpetual position liquidated?
At the mark price where account equity falls to the maintenance requirement, which sits below the initial margin rather than at zero. Lighter publishes 2% initial and 1.2% maintenance on bitcoin, so a position opened at that cap is closed after losing about two fifths of the margin behind it.
What is the difference between initial margin and maintenance margin?
Initial margin is what a venue requires to open the position; maintenance margin is the smaller amount it requires to keep it open. The gap between them is the room the position has to be wrong in. Extended publishes 2% and 1% on bitcoin and Lighter 2% and 1.2%, read on 18 September 2026.
Can you lose more than your margin on a perpetual contract?
On the venues named here the position is closed before the collateral runs out, so the documented loss stops at the margin. Two things widen that. Cross margin draws on the collateral behind every other position in the account, and a gap through the close-out level leaves the fill worse than the level.
How long can you hold a perpetual futures position?
As long as the margin holds and the funding is paid. There is no calendar limit, which is the whole point of the design, but the cost accrues: EVEDEX settles funding every hour, so a position carried there for a month passes through roughly seven hundred of those settlements.
Updated: | Console View operations | corrections to readout@wp-monero-miner.com