Perpetual Futures Trading

A Perpetual Futures (Perps) contract is a derivative financial contract without an expiry date that allows traders to speculate on the underlying price movement with leverage, without owning that underlying.

Key advantages of perps trading vs spot trading

1. Possibility to long or short: if you hold a token in the spot market, you can benefit only from its potential price appreciation. On the other hand, Perpetual Futures contracts allow you to profit from price movements in either direction: you can bet that the price of BTC will fall by entering a short BTC-PERP position and profit from its downtrend.
2. Leverage: if BTC price is at 30,000 USDC, on the spot market, you can only afford to buy 1 BTC if you have 30,000 USDC in your balance. However, with a 10x leverage on the BTC-PERP contract, you can open 1 BTC-PERP contract on WHAT with only 3,000 USDC as collateral. Perpetuals make trading more capital efficient.
3. Liquidity: Futures market volume surpasses by far spot trading volume, allowing users to access deeper liquidity and trade with a minimal price impact

WHAT USDC Perpetual Futures contracts

WHAT offers USDC-based Perpetual Futures contracts. Collateral is in USDC and all perpetual contracts are quoted and settled in USDC.

Cross-margin

WHAT currently offers only cross-margin mode. As a trader, you can deposit USDC collateral and it will be shared across all open positions to calculate the margin ratio.

Supported leverages

WHAT will enable the following leverages: 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 10x, and 20x.

Position mode

WHAT currently allows only one-sided mode: traders cannot hold both long and short positions for a single Perpetual Futures contract.