Perpetual futures

Read this part first

Perpetual futures are where most new crypto traders lose money, and they lose it quickly. Everything below is here so that if you trade them, you do it knowing exactly what you signed up for.

What a perpetual is

A perpetual future is a contract whose price tracks an asset without you ever owning the asset. Buy a Bitcoin perpetual and you do not have any Bitcoin. You have an agreement whose value moves with Bitcoin’s price, settled in dollars or a stablecoin.

Two things make it different from just buying the coin:

You can go short. Sell a perpetual you do not own and you profit if the price falls. On spot, “selling” just means disposing of something you held; here a short is a real position that can gain or lose.

You can use leverage. Put up $100 of margin at 10x and you control $1,000 of exposure.

What leverage really does

Leverage does not multiply your returns. It multiplies your exposure, and the returns and losses follow.

$1,000 of Bitcoin exposure, funded with $100 of margin at 10x:

That last row is the one that matters. At 10x leverage, a 10% move against you wipes out your entire margin. At 25x it takes 4%. At 100x it takes 1%, which Bitcoin does several times a week.

Liquidation

You do not get to sit through that 10% move and hope. Before your margin reaches zero, the exchange force-closes your position to protect itself. That is a liquidation, and it is final: the position is gone and the margin with it. You do not get a second chance if price comes back an hour later.

Your liquidation price is the price at which that happens. Know it before you open the position, not after.

Funding

A perpetual never expires, so something has to keep its price tethered to the real asset. That mechanism is funding: every few hours, one side pays the other.

When more traders are long than short, the perpetual trades above spot, and longs pay shorts. When the crowd is short, shorts pay longs. The rate is usually tiny per payment and enormous when annualised: 0.01% every eight hours is about 11% a year, and crowded markets go many times higher.

Two consequences. Holding a position costs or earns money independently of whether you are right about the price. And funding is a live readout of crowd positioning, which is why the scanners below exist.

The honest summary

Perpetuals are a professional instrument. They are useful for hedging, for shorting, and for expressing a view with less capital tied up. They are also the fastest way to lose an account that has ever been invented, and the leverage sliders on every exchange go far past anything sensible.

If you trade them: use low leverage (2x to 5x is plenty), know your liquidation price before entering, and set your risk guardrails first. Practise on a testnet, which four of the five venues below provide free.

In Pairlens

A perpetual behaves like any other market: chart, order book, tape, and the same guarded order ticket. What changes is that size is counted in contracts, a position can be liquidated, and a short is a real position.

All five venues here trade linear perpetuals settled in a stablecoin or dollars. Inverse and dated futures are not supported.

Five venues

Regional notes: Binance and ByBit do not serve US accounts, ByBit routes EU accounts to its Dutch entity, and OKX uses whichever regional entity your account was registered on. KuCoin and Kraken futures need the desktop app, because their APIs refuse connections from web pages.

KuCoin runs no futures practice environment, so a paper credential there is refused with a clear message rather than quietly sent to production.

Connecting

Four of the five need nothing new. The key you already added for spot Binance, ByBit, OKX or KuCoin lights up the futures venue too: one entry in Accounts, two venues. Your Binance and KuCoin keys do need Futures permission enabled on the exchange’s side, or the venue rejects the first request for positions.

Kraken Futures is the exception, because Kraken issues futures keys separately from spot ones. Connect it under Accounts → Connect Account → Kraken Futures.

Either way the secret goes into your keychain and never to a Pairlens server. See connect an exchange.

Finding a contract

Perpetual keys have three parts rather than two. BTC-USDT-USDT is Bitcoin, quoted in USDT, settled in USDT. BTC-USD-USD is Kraken’s dollar-settled version.

That third part is what tells the terminal this is a contract and not the spot pair sharing its name, everywhere from the chart address to the risk check. A perpetual can never be mistaken for spot.

The pair picker grows a Futures tab. Contract lists come from each exchange’s own table, so the tab fills in as you connect venues.

The funding scanners

A perpetual desk does not shop by price. The same contract exists on five exchanges at effectively the same price and costs five different amounts to hold. That difference is the trade.

So the CEX Futures Discovery tab opens on carry rather than on a price scanner, with four panels:

Funding Matrix. Every asset against every connected exchange, one cell per contract. Rates are shown annualised, because exchanges settle on different clocks (Kraken hourly, most others every eight hours) and their raw per-interval numbers are not comparable. Click a cell to open exactly the contract that quoted it.

Sorting stays on asset ranking until you click an exchange column, deliberately: sorting by rate just puts whichever illiquid contract printed an outlier at the top on every refresh.

Basis Monitor. The gap between the perpetual and the spot price it tracks, in basis points. This panel does not annualise, because extrapolating a momentary 4 basis point discount produces a number like -196% a year, which is arithmetically true and completely useless. Measured carry is the matrix above.

Open Interest. How much money is in each contract and which way it moved today. Rising open interest with rising price means new money is coming in; rising price on falling open interest means people are closing shorts, which is a weaker move.

It is deliberately not summed across exchanges. Pairlens only sees the venues you connected, so a “total” would mean one exchange’s worth on a fresh install and five on a full one, under the same label.

Funding Extremes. The dearest and cheapest carry, with each rate ranked against that contract’s own 30-day range. A perpetual that funds at 40% a year every week is not news; one that has just tripled its usual rate is. Contracts under $1M of open interest are skipped so the list is not permanent dust.

None of these panels open a live stream. Funding moves once per settlement, so they read a cached snapshot and only the countdown ticks.

On a pair page, the Carry board adds a Funding Belt above the chart: the countdown to the next payment, the current and predicted rate, what the last 8 hours, 24 hours and 7 days paid or cost, and what holding is costing you. With a position open it prices your actual position.

The ticket

Select a perpetual and the order ticket changes.

A leverage row. Presets from 1x up to the exchange’s own ceiling. It applies per order, and it is never remembered between sessions or carried across a market switch. 25x inherited from last night is a decision nobody is making now.

Contracts, not amounts. Size is a contract count. There is no sell-percentage slider, because selling here opens a short rather than disposing of a holding.

Where an exchange’s contract is a fraction of the asset, a line under the field tells you what your count is worth. KuCoin’s Bitcoin contract is 0.001 BTC, so ten contracts is 0.01 BTC. Reading that as ten Bitcoin is a three-orders-of-magnitude mistake worth one line of text to prevent.

A reduce-only toggle. With it on, the exchange shrinks your open position and refuses to open the opposite side. This is what makes closing safe: a size larger than what is actually open cannot accidentally flip you short.

Funding at entry. One row: the current rate, which side pays, and the countdown. Entering a long four minutes before a +0.09% payment settles is a different trade from entering the same long an hour after, and nothing on a chart shows you that.

Exposure and an estimated liquidation price. Your exposure is what your risk guardrails measure. The liquidation figure is explicitly an estimate, because the real level depends on your whole margin balance, the exchange’s maintenance rules at your size, and funding paid since entry, none of which exist before the position does. Treat it as “roughly how close is this to the chart”, not as a level to plan against.

All five venues use cross margin. Isolated margin is not exposed yet.

Positions

The Futures Positions panel lists what you hold across every connected futures account: the contract, which way it leans, size, entry price, current mark, liquidation level, leverage, and unrealised profit or loss.

Every number comes from the exchange’s own record. The panel refreshes on a timer and when the window regains focus, which is the pace positions actually move at.

Each row has a Close button. It places a reduce-only market order for the full size, behind a confirmation, down the same guarded path as any other order. Reduce-only is what makes a stale row safe to act on.

Reading the risk

The Risk board pairs the chart with three panels.

Liquidation Map

A heatmap over time and price showing where positions were actually force-closed. Big clusters of liquidations mark prices where a lot of leverage was sitting, and those prices often act like magnets: cascades feed on themselves.

These are real prints, not a model. Binance and Bybit publish public liquidation streams; Pairlens holds those open and buckets what comes out. That distinction matters, because most liquidation heatmaps sold elsewhere are inferred from open interest and assumed leverage. A chart that looks like measured data but is not is the most confident kind of wrong.

Two honest caveats, and the panel states both:

Binance undercounts during cascades. Its own documentation says it publishes at most one liquidation per symbol per second, so exactly when hundreds arrive at once, it reports one. Bybit publishes everything. The two are labelled differently and should never be added into one number. Compare by dollar value, which survives the difference; do not compare counts, which do not.

Coverage is not universal. OKX, KuCoin and Kraken are not collected, so the panel reports them as uncovered and offers the collected venues as an explicit alternative rather than silently substituting one. History runs 72 hours, with chips for 1h, 6h, 24h and 72h.

Over the cells sit your own liquidation prices, taken straight from each exchange’s position record, drawn as dashed lines thickened by how much is at risk and labelled with the distance from the current price.

If you want the uncovered exchanges, the bundled Coinglass Liquidations plugin fills them in with your own Coinglass API key, with seven days of history. Three things to know: it needs the desktop app, it needs Coinglass’s Standard plan or above, and it shows liquidations above a size cutoff you set, so its counts are a lower bound. Where both can answer, the free collected feed wins.

Margin Health

One section per connected futures account, because a margin ratio is an account fact rather than a position fact. Cross margin pools every position against one balance, so a merged gauge across two exchanges would be a number neither of them would ever liquidate you on.

Risk Controls

Your daily loss cap, trade count, maximum position size and kill switch, editable beside the chart instead of behind Settings. It is not a second risk system: these write the same settings the order path reads, so a limit set here is live on the next order with no save button.

Guardrails still apply

Every futures order goes down the same guarded path as a spot order. One thing worth being explicit about: position caps measure exposure, not margin. A one-contract Bitcoin position is the same exposure at 1x and at 25x. Leverage changes how much margin the exchange holds against it, not how big it is.

The hold-to-confirm gesture, the paper badge and the vault behave exactly as they do on spot.

What is not here yet

Funding and mark price are panels rather than chart overlays. The liquidation map hosts its own chart rather than painting onto the main one, and hovering a cell gives no per-cell readout. Also missing: collected liquidations from OKX, KuCoin and Kraken without a vendor key, funding history as a series, isolated margin, per-position margin adjustment, inverse (coin-margined) contracts, dated futures, and running a bot on a perpetual. Bots refuse leverage by construction, so a strategy cannot be pointed at a futures venue in this release.

Next

• Risk guardrails, which you should set before your first perpetual order
• Connect an exchange for where credentials live
• Place an order for the rest of the ticket
• Paper trading to practise on a testnet first