Perpetual contracts

Perpetual contracts are the core venue on 1024EX: leveraged, USDC-margined exposure to an asset with no expiry date. You can hold a position for a minute or a year; instead of rolling contracts, longs and shorts exchange a funding payment every 8 hours that keeps the contract tethered to the underlying's price.

What is listed

218 perpetual markets, all quoted and margined in USDC, all following the <ASSET>-USDC naming:

Everything settles in USDC — holding a perp on AAPL never involves owning AAPL, a broker, or a stock transfer.

Leverage

Leverage is set per market and per position, and every market carries its own ceiling:

Two ceilings are published for every market: the structural maximum, and the maximum currently in force. Risk conditions can lower the live ceiling below the structural one; when that happens the market also publishes the reason. If you do not set a leverage on an order, the exchange uses your saved preference for that market, falls back to 20x, and then clamps to the live ceiling — the order receipt always reports the leverage that actually applied.

Higher leverage does not change your exposure; it changes how much margin that exposure locks and how little adverse movement it takes to be liquidated.

Margin

Because MM is half of IM, a position is liquidated after losing roughly half the margin that opened it. At 10x, that is about a 5% adverse move; at 100x, about 0.5%.

Cross margin shares your account balance across positions — more capital efficiency, and a loss in one position can pull margin from the others. Isolated margin ring-fences each position: it can be liquidated on its own, and the damage stops there. In isolated mode each position publishes a liquidation price; in cross mode it does not, because there is no per-position liquidation price — the account is what gets liquidated.

Details of what happens at and after liquidation are in Margin, liquidation and ADL.

Funding

Funding settles every 8 hours. When the rate is positive, longs pay shorts; when it is negative, shorts pay longs. The rate tracks the premium of the contract over its index, with a small interest component:

rate = premium + clamp(interest_rate − premium, ±0.005%)

clamped to ±0.25% per 8-hour period. A sustained positive rate means the market is paying to be long — which is information about positioning as much as it is a cost.

Funding is paid on the position's notional, not on your margin, so at high leverage it is proportionally a much larger drag on the capital you committed. Rates move at minute granularity; the rate you see now is a prediction of the next settlement, not a promise.

Prices

Three prices matter and they are not interchangeable:

Liquidations are computed against mark, never last trade. This is deliberate: it makes a thin book far harder to use to push someone into liquidation.

Limit orders more than 15% away from mark are rejected as a fat-finger guard.

Equity and commodity markets outside US hours

Equity-linked perps keep trading when the US market is closed, but during a degraded session — no live underlying feed — the exchange tightens admission for new exposure:

• maximum leverage on a new position: 2x
• maximum notional per order: $1,000
• reduce-only orders are exempt — you can always cut risk

This is the same condition market makers widen their quotes into, so expect wider spreads alongside the caps. Positions opened before the close are not force-reduced; only new exposure is constrained.

Fees

The default schedule is 2 bps maker, 5 bps taker on notional. VIP tiers and market-maker status change these. Fees are charged on execution, not on placement, so resting and cancelling costs nothing.

Orders

Market and limit orders with GTC/IOC/FOK/post-only, plus reduce-only and slippage bounds, are covered in Basic order types. Server-side algorithms — TWAP, VWAP, POV, scale, iceberg, pegged — and trigger structures — conditional, OCO, bracket, trailing stop, sniper — are in Advanced order types. Every position can also carry a take-profit and a stop-loss that the exchange monitors for you.

Programmatic access: Perpetuals: market data and Perpetuals: trading.