What are Perps?

Traditional futures expire on a specific date — at expiry the contract settles to spot or rolls into the next month. Perps never expire. To keep the contract price tethered to spot, exchanges use a funding rate mechanism instead.

• Index price — a weighted average of spot prices across major exchanges. The "real" reference.
• Mark price — a smoothed version of the perp's current trading price, used for liquidations and unrealized PnL.

Liquidations trigger off mark price, not last trade — this prevents single-tick wicks from blowing out positions.

A periodic payment between longs and shorts (typically every 1, 4, or 8 hours):

• Perp trades above index → longs pay shorts (positive funding)
• Perp trades below index → shorts pay longs (negative funding)

This force pulls the perp back toward the index. On tickers.watch we annualize the rate so you can compare costs across exchanges and durations.

Total notional value of all open contracts on a venue.

• Rising OI + rising price → new money going long
• Rising OI + falling price → new money going short
• Falling OI → positions being closed (squeeze or de-risking)

The gap between perp price and index price, usually quoted in basis points (bps). Persistent positive basis signals bullish leverage; persistent negative basis signals bearish positioning. Sharp basis spikes often precede liquidation cascades.

Perps let you trade with leverage — often 5×–125× depending on the venue and the asset. If your position moves against you enough that the maintenance margin can't cover the loss, the exchange auto-closes ("liquidates") it. The price that triggers liquidation is the mark price, not the last trade.

The same asset can have meaningfully different prices, funding rates, and OI on different venues. Cross-venue divergence reveals:

• Where leveraged sentiment is concentrated
• Arbitrage opportunities (basis or funding differentials)
• Which venues lead vs. follow on price discovery

Most perps are crypto, but stock perps are a newer and growing category — perpetual contracts on traditional equities like NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, plus pre-IPO names like SpaceX and OpenAI. They trade on:

• Hyperliquid HIP-3 builders (TradeXYZ, Ventuals, MyStonks, etc.)
• Centralized exchanges — Bybit, Bitget, Gate, Kraken (xStocks), OKX

These let you trade US-stock exposure 24/7 with crypto-style leverage, no brokerage account required.

• Liquidation cascades — high leverage means small moves can wipe positions in seconds
• Funding drag — holding longs through extended positive funding compounds losses
• Thin index manipulation — sparsely traded reference markets can be pushed
• Counterparty risk — not all venues are equally regulated or solvent