What Are Perpetual Futures? A Beginner's Guide to Trading Without Expiry Dates
You Wanted to Short Crypto. It Got Complicated.
Picture this: it's Sunday evening. A major exchange just announced a hack. You're convinced Ethereum is going to dump hard when Asian markets open — and you want to profit from that drop. But you don't own any ETH to sell. You could buy a put option but options on crypto are clunky and expensive. You feel stuck.
Now imagine instead you just open an app, tap "Short ETH," pick your size, and you're in — right now, any time, no expiry, no waiting for anything.
That's what perpetual futures give you. The ability to trade prices going up or down, on crypto assets, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ever actually owning the underlying coin.
On Everything, you can trade perps on crypto with up to 1000x leverage. But before we get to the exciting (and dangerous) part, let's build the foundation.
The Core Idea: You're Trading Price, Not the Asset
A perpetual future is a contract, not an asset. When you trade ETH perps, you don't own a single unit of Ethereum. You're making an agreement about what its price will do.
Go long → you profit if the price goes up
Go short → you profit if the price goes down
And unlike options or traditional futures contracts, there's no expiry date stamped on the contract. It doesn't "expire" on a Friday. It lives on indefinitely, until you decide to close it. That's the "perpetual" part.
Why Does No Expiry Date Matter?
Traditional futures contracts were invented for physical commodities — a wheat farmer locking in a price months before harvest. They have expiry dates because someone, eventually, has to actually deliver wheat.
With crypto, no one's delivering anything. The expiry date was just a leftover convention. Perpetual futures dropped it entirely. You hold the position as long as you want. You close when you're ready.
A "What If" Walkthrough: Ethereum Drops, You Win
Let's say Ethereum is trading at $3,000 and you think it's about to pull back.
You open a short position on ETH perps worth $1,000 notional on Everything.
A week later, ETH drops 5% to $2,850. You close the position.
Without leverage, you'd have made roughly $50 on that move — 5% of $1,000.
That's a fine return for a week. But your actual account capital? Maybe you only put up $100 as margin. In that case, you made $50 on $100 committed — a 50% return on your actual stake.
That's leverage doing its job. But leverage is a multiplier on both sides, which brings us to the most important thing to understand.
Leverage: It's a Risk-Sizing Tool, Not a Get-Rich Button
Most beginners think about leverage backwards. They see "1000x available" and think "I should use as much as possible." That's how people get liquidated in minutes.
Here's the smarter frame: leverage is how you control position size relative to your account.
Say you have $500 in your account and you want to trade Bitcoin perps. Bitcoin is at $60,000. If you used no leverage, you could only afford 0.008 BTC worth of exposure — barely enough to matter.
With 10x leverage, that $500 of margin controls $5,000 of Bitcoin exposure. Now a 2% Bitcoin move means a 20% gain (or loss) on your margin.
The question isn't "how much leverage can I use?" — it's "how much of my account am I willing to lose if this trade goes wrong?" Work backwards from that. Use leverage to get the exposure you want without tying up all your capital.
Everything offers up to 1000x leverage on crypto. For most retail traders, positions between 5x–50x are where disciplined sizing happens. Higher leverage is available, but it dramatically compresses your margin for error.
Funding Rates: The Mechanism That Keeps Everything Honest
Here's something that confuses a lot of new perp traders: if there's no expiry date, what stops the price of a perpetual contract from drifting completely away from the real-world spot price?
The answer is the funding rate.
Why It Has to Exist
Think about what happens when everyone wants to be long on Bitcoin. Demand for long positions surges. If left unchecked, the perp price would trade significantly higher than actual Bitcoin spot price — because everyone's buying the contract, not actual BTC.
That creates a broken market. The whole point of trading perps is to have price exposure that tracks the real asset.
So the funding rate is a correction mechanism. When longs outnumber shorts, longs pay shorts a small fee periodically. This makes being long slightly more expensive, which dampens demand until the perp price snaps back toward spot. When shorts dominate, it flips: shorts pay longs.
How It Works in Practice
On Everything, the funding rate settles every hour. The rate itself is variable — it fluctuates based on market conditions.
If you're long and the funding rate is positive:
You pay a small fee every hour to the shorts in the pool
If you're holding a large leveraged position for days, those hourly payments add up
If you're long and the funding rate is negative:
You receive hourly payments
This is one of the less-discussed perks of being on the "right side" of sentiment
Practical takeaway: Check the funding rate before holding a position overnight or across multiple days. A strongly positive rate can slowly drain an otherwise good trade.
Liquidation: Why It Exists and How to Stay Ahead of It
No one likes hearing the word liquidation. But it helps to understand it from the exchange's perspective.
When you open a leveraged position, you're borrowing against your margin. The exchange is extending credit. If the trade moves against you and keeps moving, at some point your losses exceed your margin — and the exchange would be left holding the bag.
Liquidation is the exchange's way of closing your position before you go into debt. It's automatic, it's mechanical, and it kicks in when your margin falls below a threshold called the maintenance margin.
How to Avoid It
Don't max out your leverage. Higher leverage = liquidation price closer to entry. A 100x leveraged position gets liquidated on a 1% adverse move.
Set a stop-loss before you enter. Decide where you're wrong before the trade opens. If Bitcoin drops to $55,000, you're out. Don't wait for the market to decide for you.
Don't add to losing positions. "Averaging down" on a leveraged position just moves your liquidation price closer while compounding your exposure.
Size positions so a loss doesn't destroy your account. Losing one trade should sting, not end your trading.
Why Trade Perps on Everything?
Telegram-native: Everything runs directly in Telegram. No new apps to download, no separate exchange account to maintain.
Up to 1000x leverage on crypto
Hourly funding rate settlements — transparent and frequent
Long or short, any time: Crypto markets are open 24/7. React to any news, any time.
Start Trading Perpetual Futures on Everything
Ready to put this into practice? Everything is live on Telegram. Click the link below to start trading crypto perps with up to 1000x leverage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I need to own Bitcoin or any crypto to trade perpetual futures?
No. Perpetual futures are contracts — you're trading price exposure, not the underlying asset itself. You never hold actual Bitcoin or Ethereum. You hold a position that profits (or loses) based on price movement.
Q: What happens if I hold a long position and the funding rate is positive for weeks?
You'll pay hourly funding fees to the short side. On Everything, funding settles every hour. On a large leveraged position, this adds up. It won't cause liquidation on its own, but it erodes your P&L. If you expect to hold long-term, factor funding costs into your plan.
Q: Is there a minimum position size on Everything?
Check Everything's current limits directly in the Telegram bot, as minimums may vary by asset. Generally, perps are accessible with small amounts of capital, especially compared to traditional futures which often have large contract sizes.
Q: What's the difference between a paper loss and liquidation?
A paper loss means your position is underwater but still open — the price is against you but hasn't hit your liquidation threshold. You could still recover. Liquidation is when the exchange automatically closes your position because your margin dropped below maintenance level. Once liquidated, the loss is realized and the position is gone.
Q: Which crypto assets can I trade perps on at Everything?
Everything currently offers perpetual futures on crypto assets including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and more. Check the app for the full list of available markets.
You Wanted to Short Crypto. It Got Complicated.
Picture this: it's Sunday evening. A major exchange just announced a hack. You're convinced Ethereum is going to dump hard when Asian markets open — and you want to profit from that drop. But you don't own any ETH to sell. You could buy a put option but options on crypto are clunky and expensive. You feel stuck.
Now imagine instead you just open an app, tap "Short ETH," pick your size, and you're in — right now, any time, no expiry, no waiting for anything.
That's what perpetual futures give you. The ability to trade prices going up or down, on crypto assets, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ever actually owning the underlying coin.
On Everything, you can trade perps on crypto with up to 1000x leverage. But before we get to the exciting (and dangerous) part, let's build the foundation.
The Core Idea: You're Trading Price, Not the Asset
A perpetual future is a contract, not an asset. When you trade ETH perps, you don't own a single unit of Ethereum. You're making an agreement about what its price will do.
Go long → you profit if the price goes up
Go short → you profit if the price goes down
And unlike options or traditional futures contracts, there's no expiry date stamped on the contract. It doesn't "expire" on a Friday. It lives on indefinitely, until you decide to close it. That's the "perpetual" part.
Why Does No Expiry Date Matter?
Traditional futures contracts were invented for physical commodities — a wheat farmer locking in a price months before harvest. They have expiry dates because someone, eventually, has to actually deliver wheat.
With crypto, no one's delivering anything. The expiry date was just a leftover convention. Perpetual futures dropped it entirely. You hold the position as long as you want. You close when you're ready.
A "What If" Walkthrough: Ethereum Drops, You Win
Let's say Ethereum is trading at $3,000 and you think it's about to pull back.
You open a short position on ETH perps worth $1,000 notional on Everything.
A week later, ETH drops 5% to $2,850. You close the position.
Without leverage, you'd have made roughly $50 on that move — 5% of $1,000.
That's a fine return for a week. But your actual account capital? Maybe you only put up $100 as margin. In that case, you made $50 on $100 committed — a 50% return on your actual stake.
That's leverage doing its job. But leverage is a multiplier on both sides, which brings us to the most important thing to understand.
Leverage: It's a Risk-Sizing Tool, Not a Get-Rich Button
Most beginners think about leverage backwards. They see "1000x available" and think "I should use as much as possible." That's how people get liquidated in minutes.
Here's the smarter frame: leverage is how you control position size relative to your account.
Say you have $500 in your account and you want to trade Bitcoin perps. Bitcoin is at $60,000. If you used no leverage, you could only afford 0.008 BTC worth of exposure — barely enough to matter.
With 10x leverage, that $500 of margin controls $5,000 of Bitcoin exposure. Now a 2% Bitcoin move means a 20% gain (or loss) on your margin.
The question isn't "how much leverage can I use?" — it's "how much of my account am I willing to lose if this trade goes wrong?" Work backwards from that. Use leverage to get the exposure you want without tying up all your capital.
Everything offers up to 1000x leverage on crypto. For most retail traders, positions between 5x–50x are where disciplined sizing happens. Higher leverage is available, but it dramatically compresses your margin for error.
Funding Rates: The Mechanism That Keeps Everything Honest
Here's something that confuses a lot of new perp traders: if there's no expiry date, what stops the price of a perpetual contract from drifting completely away from the real-world spot price?
The answer is the funding rate.
Why It Has to Exist
Think about what happens when everyone wants to be long on Bitcoin. Demand for long positions surges. If left unchecked, the perp price would trade significantly higher than actual Bitcoin spot price — because everyone's buying the contract, not actual BTC.
That creates a broken market. The whole point of trading perps is to have price exposure that tracks the real asset.
So the funding rate is a correction mechanism. When longs outnumber shorts, longs pay shorts a small fee periodically. This makes being long slightly more expensive, which dampens demand until the perp price snaps back toward spot. When shorts dominate, it flips: shorts pay longs.
How It Works in Practice
On Everything, the funding rate settles every hour. The rate itself is variable — it fluctuates based on market conditions.
If you're long and the funding rate is positive:
You pay a small fee every hour to the shorts in the pool
If you're holding a large leveraged position for days, those hourly payments add up
If you're long and the funding rate is negative:
You receive hourly payments
This is one of the less-discussed perks of being on the "right side" of sentiment
Practical takeaway: Check the funding rate before holding a position overnight or across multiple days. A strongly positive rate can slowly drain an otherwise good trade.
Liquidation: Why It Exists and How to Stay Ahead of It
No one likes hearing the word liquidation. But it helps to understand it from the exchange's perspective.
When you open a leveraged position, you're borrowing against your margin. The exchange is extending credit. If the trade moves against you and keeps moving, at some point your losses exceed your margin — and the exchange would be left holding the bag.
Liquidation is the exchange's way of closing your position before you go into debt. It's automatic, it's mechanical, and it kicks in when your margin falls below a threshold called the maintenance margin.
How to Avoid It
Don't max out your leverage. Higher leverage = liquidation price closer to entry. A 100x leveraged position gets liquidated on a 1% adverse move.
Set a stop-loss before you enter. Decide where you're wrong before the trade opens. If Bitcoin drops to $55,000, you're out. Don't wait for the market to decide for you.
Don't add to losing positions. "Averaging down" on a leveraged position just moves your liquidation price closer while compounding your exposure.
Size positions so a loss doesn't destroy your account. Losing one trade should sting, not end your trading.
Why Trade Perps on Everything?
Telegram-native: Everything runs directly in Telegram. No new apps to download, no separate exchange account to maintain.
Up to 1000x leverage on crypto
Hourly funding rate settlements — transparent and frequent
Long or short, any time: Crypto markets are open 24/7. React to any news, any time.
Start Trading Perpetual Futures on Everything
Ready to put this into practice? Everything is live on Telegram. Click the link below to start trading crypto perps with up to 1000x leverage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I need to own Bitcoin or any crypto to trade perpetual futures?
No. Perpetual futures are contracts — you're trading price exposure, not the underlying asset itself. You never hold actual Bitcoin or Ethereum. You hold a position that profits (or loses) based on price movement.
Q: What happens if I hold a long position and the funding rate is positive for weeks?
You'll pay hourly funding fees to the short side. On Everything, funding settles every hour. On a large leveraged position, this adds up. It won't cause liquidation on its own, but it erodes your P&L. If you expect to hold long-term, factor funding costs into your plan.
Q: Is there a minimum position size on Everything?
Check Everything's current limits directly in the Telegram bot, as minimums may vary by asset. Generally, perps are accessible with small amounts of capital, especially compared to traditional futures which often have large contract sizes.
Q: What's the difference between a paper loss and liquidation?
A paper loss means your position is underwater but still open — the price is against you but hasn't hit your liquidation threshold. You could still recover. Liquidation is when the exchange automatically closes your position because your margin dropped below maintenance level. Once liquidated, the loss is realized and the position is gone.
Q: Which crypto assets can I trade perps on at Everything?
Everything currently offers perpetual futures on crypto assets including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and more. Check the app for the full list of available markets.
You Wanted to Short Crypto. It Got Complicated.
Picture this: it's Sunday evening. A major exchange just announced a hack. You're convinced Ethereum is going to dump hard when Asian markets open — and you want to profit from that drop. But you don't own any ETH to sell. You could buy a put option but options on crypto are clunky and expensive. You feel stuck.
Now imagine instead you just open an app, tap "Short ETH," pick your size, and you're in — right now, any time, no expiry, no waiting for anything.
That's what perpetual futures give you. The ability to trade prices going up or down, on crypto assets, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ever actually owning the underlying coin.
On Everything, you can trade perps on crypto with up to 1000x leverage. But before we get to the exciting (and dangerous) part, let's build the foundation.
The Core Idea: You're Trading Price, Not the Asset
A perpetual future is a contract, not an asset. When you trade ETH perps, you don't own a single unit of Ethereum. You're making an agreement about what its price will do.
Go long → you profit if the price goes up
Go short → you profit if the price goes down
And unlike options or traditional futures contracts, there's no expiry date stamped on the contract. It doesn't "expire" on a Friday. It lives on indefinitely, until you decide to close it. That's the "perpetual" part.
Why Does No Expiry Date Matter?
Traditional futures contracts were invented for physical commodities — a wheat farmer locking in a price months before harvest. They have expiry dates because someone, eventually, has to actually deliver wheat.
With crypto, no one's delivering anything. The expiry date was just a leftover convention. Perpetual futures dropped it entirely. You hold the position as long as you want. You close when you're ready.
A "What If" Walkthrough: Ethereum Drops, You Win
Let's say Ethereum is trading at $3,000 and you think it's about to pull back.
You open a short position on ETH perps worth $1,000 notional on Everything.
A week later, ETH drops 5% to $2,850. You close the position.
Without leverage, you'd have made roughly $50 on that move — 5% of $1,000.
That's a fine return for a week. But your actual account capital? Maybe you only put up $100 as margin. In that case, you made $50 on $100 committed — a 50% return on your actual stake.
That's leverage doing its job. But leverage is a multiplier on both sides, which brings us to the most important thing to understand.
Leverage: It's a Risk-Sizing Tool, Not a Get-Rich Button
Most beginners think about leverage backwards. They see "1000x available" and think "I should use as much as possible." That's how people get liquidated in minutes.
Here's the smarter frame: leverage is how you control position size relative to your account.
Say you have $500 in your account and you want to trade Bitcoin perps. Bitcoin is at $60,000. If you used no leverage, you could only afford 0.008 BTC worth of exposure — barely enough to matter.
With 10x leverage, that $500 of margin controls $5,000 of Bitcoin exposure. Now a 2% Bitcoin move means a 20% gain (or loss) on your margin.
The question isn't "how much leverage can I use?" — it's "how much of my account am I willing to lose if this trade goes wrong?" Work backwards from that. Use leverage to get the exposure you want without tying up all your capital.
Everything offers up to 1000x leverage on crypto. For most retail traders, positions between 5x–50x are where disciplined sizing happens. Higher leverage is available, but it dramatically compresses your margin for error.
Funding Rates: The Mechanism That Keeps Everything Honest
Here's something that confuses a lot of new perp traders: if there's no expiry date, what stops the price of a perpetual contract from drifting completely away from the real-world spot price?
The answer is the funding rate.
Why It Has to Exist
Think about what happens when everyone wants to be long on Bitcoin. Demand for long positions surges. If left unchecked, the perp price would trade significantly higher than actual Bitcoin spot price — because everyone's buying the contract, not actual BTC.
That creates a broken market. The whole point of trading perps is to have price exposure that tracks the real asset.
So the funding rate is a correction mechanism. When longs outnumber shorts, longs pay shorts a small fee periodically. This makes being long slightly more expensive, which dampens demand until the perp price snaps back toward spot. When shorts dominate, it flips: shorts pay longs.
How It Works in Practice
On Everything, the funding rate settles every hour. The rate itself is variable — it fluctuates based on market conditions.
If you're long and the funding rate is positive:
You pay a small fee every hour to the shorts in the pool
If you're holding a large leveraged position for days, those hourly payments add up
If you're long and the funding rate is negative:
You receive hourly payments
This is one of the less-discussed perks of being on the "right side" of sentiment
Practical takeaway: Check the funding rate before holding a position overnight or across multiple days. A strongly positive rate can slowly drain an otherwise good trade.
Liquidation: Why It Exists and How to Stay Ahead of It
No one likes hearing the word liquidation. But it helps to understand it from the exchange's perspective.
When you open a leveraged position, you're borrowing against your margin. The exchange is extending credit. If the trade moves against you and keeps moving, at some point your losses exceed your margin — and the exchange would be left holding the bag.
Liquidation is the exchange's way of closing your position before you go into debt. It's automatic, it's mechanical, and it kicks in when your margin falls below a threshold called the maintenance margin.
How to Avoid It
Don't max out your leverage. Higher leverage = liquidation price closer to entry. A 100x leveraged position gets liquidated on a 1% adverse move.
Set a stop-loss before you enter. Decide where you're wrong before the trade opens. If Bitcoin drops to $55,000, you're out. Don't wait for the market to decide for you.
Don't add to losing positions. "Averaging down" on a leveraged position just moves your liquidation price closer while compounding your exposure.
Size positions so a loss doesn't destroy your account. Losing one trade should sting, not end your trading.
Why Trade Perps on Everything?
Telegram-native: Everything runs directly in Telegram. No new apps to download, no separate exchange account to maintain.
Up to 1000x leverage on crypto
Hourly funding rate settlements — transparent and frequent
Long or short, any time: Crypto markets are open 24/7. React to any news, any time.
Start Trading Perpetual Futures on Everything
Ready to put this into practice? Everything is live on Telegram. Click the link below to start trading crypto perps with up to 1000x leverage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I need to own Bitcoin or any crypto to trade perpetual futures?
No. Perpetual futures are contracts — you're trading price exposure, not the underlying asset itself. You never hold actual Bitcoin or Ethereum. You hold a position that profits (or loses) based on price movement.
Q: What happens if I hold a long position and the funding rate is positive for weeks?
You'll pay hourly funding fees to the short side. On Everything, funding settles every hour. On a large leveraged position, this adds up. It won't cause liquidation on its own, but it erodes your P&L. If you expect to hold long-term, factor funding costs into your plan.
Q: Is there a minimum position size on Everything?
Check Everything's current limits directly in the Telegram bot, as minimums may vary by asset. Generally, perps are accessible with small amounts of capital, especially compared to traditional futures which often have large contract sizes.
Q: What's the difference between a paper loss and liquidation?
A paper loss means your position is underwater but still open — the price is against you but hasn't hit your liquidation threshold. You could still recover. Liquidation is when the exchange automatically closes your position because your margin dropped below maintenance level. Once liquidated, the loss is realized and the position is gone.
Q: Which crypto assets can I trade perps on at Everything?
Everything currently offers perpetual futures on crypto assets including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and more. Check the app for the full list of available markets.
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