What Is a Perpetual Futures Contract?

Perps vs. dated futures vs. spot

Buying spot means owning the asset. A perpetual contract is a bet on price direction settled against an index of the spot market — you can go long or short, use leverage, and never take delivery of the coin.

Dated futures (the kind on traditional exchanges) expire on a set date, which forces rolling positions and creates predictable price distortions near expiry. Perpetuals remove the expiry entirely: open a position, manage your risk, and close whenever you want.

What keeps a perpetual tethered to spot

Without an expiry to anchor price, a perp needs another mechanism to stay near the underlying index: funding. When the perpetual trades above spot, longs pay shorts a periodic funding fee; when it trades below spot, shorts pay longs.

That payment incentivizes traders to trade against the deviation, which is what pulls the contract back toward the index. On BULK, funding settles hourly.

Leverage, margin and liquidation

Perps let you control a position larger than your collateral through leverage. That amplifies both gains and losses, so the exchange continuously marks your position to the current price and liquidates you if your margin drops below the maintenance requirement.

Exchanges differ in how they treat your whole book. BULK uses true portfolio margining, where every position hedges and offsets the others, so margin requirements are calculated across the entire account rather than per-market in isolation.

• Long: you profit when price rises. Short: you profit when price falls.
• Mark price (derived from the index) is used for liquidations, not the last traded print, to reduce manipulation.
• A liquidation cascade can happen when many leveraged positions are forced to close at once — watch open interest and funding for early warning signs.

Why traders use perpetuals

Perps are the most capital-efficient way to express a directional view on crypto: no expiry to manage, both directions available, and leverage that lets small accounts size like large ones. They also dominate liquidity — the deepest books in crypto are perpetual order books, not spot.

Because all orders on BULK execute on one deterministic order book at the same best bid and offer, perp traders get exchange-grade execution without the conflicts of internalized venues.