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A Perpetual Futures (“perps”) contract is a derivative that lets you speculate on an asset’s price movement with leverage, without owning the underlying asset. Unlike traditional futures, perps have no expiry date.

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Why trade perps instead of spot?

  1. Long or short: In the spot market, you can only profit when prices go up. With perps, you can also profit when prices fall by opening a short position.
  2. Leverage: With 10x leverage on BTC-PERP, you only need 3,000 USDC to control a 30,000 USDC position. This makes trading more capital efficient — but leverage amplifies losses equally, so manage your risk.
  3. Deeper liquidity: Futures markets have significantly higher volume than spot, allowing you to enter and exit with less price impact.

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Orderly USDC Perpetual Futures contracts

All perps on Orderly are USDC-based. Your collateral is in USDC, and all contracts are quoted and settled in USDC.

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Margin modes

Orderly supports two margin modes, both available simultaneously on every symbol:
  • Cross Margin (default): Your deposited USDC is shared across all cross-margin positions to calculate a single margin ratio. Profitable positions automatically offset losing ones.
  • Isolated Margin: Each position has its own dedicated margin. Losses are capped at the margin assigned to that position and do not affect the rest of your account.
You specify the margin mode when placing each order. For a detailed comparison, see Isolated Margin.

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Supported leverages

Integer values from 1x to 100x (1x, 2x, 3x, … 100x). The maximum leverage available depends on the specific market — see Margin, Leverage & PnL for per-market limits.

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Position mode

Orderly uses one-sided position mode within each margin mode. You cannot hold both a long and a short on the same contract in the same margin mode — opening the opposite direction will reduce or close your existing position. However, since Cross and Isolated are independent, you can hold a Cross position and an Isolated position on the same symbol at the same time (e.g., a Cross long and an Isolated short on ETH-PERP), each with independent margin and liquidation price.