What are perpetual futures?

A perp gives you long or short exposure to an asset without owning it and without a settlement day. A normal future expires on a fixed date, and that date is what drags its price back to spot. Take the date away and you need another anchor. That anchor is the funding rate.

When the perp trades above the index, longs pay shorts, which makes holding a long more expensive and pulls the price back down. When it trades below, shorts pay longs. BitMEX made the design popular when it launched its XBTUSD perpetual on May 13, 2016. Today perps carry most crypto derivatives volume, on centralized exchanges and on-chain venues alike.

Say you post $1,000 of margin and open a 5x ETH long, so you hold $5,000 of exposure. If ETH rises 4 percent you make about $200, a 20 percent return on margin. The same 4 percent down costs you $200. Much further and you hit your liquidation price, with funding charged or paid on top for every interval the position stays open.

So perps are good for hedging and for being short. They are a clumsy way to simply hold a coin, though. Funding keeps ticking and the liquidation price never goes away.

Also called: perps, perpetual swaps, perpetual contracts.

On a board, Hyperliquid's perp markets show up in Funding rates, which can sort them by open interest to find where the leverage sits. Hyperliquid markets also ranks them by 24h move and lists the HIP-3 markets builders deploy. Perps risk zooms out to BTC, ETH and SOL across several perp DEXs. And Perps positions follows one real Hyperliquid account from nothing but its public address: entry, mark, unrealized PnL and the distance to liquidation.

• Funding rates
• Hyperliquid markets
• Perps risk
• Perps positions

• Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

• Funding rate
• Open interest
• Leverage
• Liquidation price
• Perp DEX