Perpetuals
Deposit collateral, choose leverage, trade, and understand funding and liquidation.
A perpetual future tracks an asset's price with no expiry. You can go long or short with leverage. QRDX perps are matched on an on-chain order book: every trade has a buyer and a seller, so profits are paid by the other side's losses, never minted.
Markets are quoted in USD: BTC-USD-PERP, ETH-USD-PERP and others, priced against an oracle that validators vote from public exchanges.
Collateral
Perps margin is held as collateral in the clearinghouse. On testnet the collateral is native QRDX. On mainnet it will be a USD stablecoin, as on Hyperliquid. Profit and loss are computed in the market's quote unit (USD) and settled in collateral units.
1. Deposit collateral
On trade.qrdx.org/perps, choose Deposit and an amount. The deposit moves it from your wallet into the clearinghouse. Withdraw moves free collateral back, up to what your open positions do not need as margin.
2. Choose leverage and margin mode
Leverage is set per market (up to the market's maximum, 20× by default):
- Cross (default): one collateral balance backs all your cross positions. A profit in one market supports a loss in another.
- Isolated: the position has its own margin, moved out of your cross collateral. If it is liquidated, only that margin is at risk.
3. Place an order
There are only limit orders. A market order is a limit order at an aggressive price with immediate-or-cancel: whatever does not fill at once is cancelled. Reduce-only orders can only shrink a position and need no margin.
An order is accepted only if your account could carry the resulting position at initial margin (size × price ÷ leverage). Resting orders reserve their margin.
On networks with the 2026-10 trading features
QRDX Trade offers these where the network's node runs them:
- Time in force: GTC, Post only (refused if it would take, so it always pays the maker rate), IOC, and FOK (fills whole or not at all). Hidden orders match like any other but show nothing in the book; an iceberg shows part of its size at a time.
- Stop tab: a stop-loss or take-profit that waits for the mark price and then becomes a market order (at most 10 % through the mark) or a limit at the price you give. A buy above the mark or a sell below it is a stop; the others take profit. Margin is checked when it fires.
- TP / SL on an order: a take-profit and a stop-loss sized to it, placed with it; the first to fire cancels the other.
- A position's TP / SL (the positions table, or a take-profit / stop-loss line drawn on the chart): closes the whole position, whatever its size when it fires.
- TWAP: a size worked into the market in equal slices over a duration, each slice at most 3 % from the mark.
- Edit changes an order in place; only a smaller size at the same price keeps its place in the queue.
- Isolated margin can be added or taken back on an isolated position.
- Prices have at most 5 significant figures and sizes come in whole lots of the market (its order grid); the form says when an input is off it.
- Trading operations are free while your account has free actions left: the wallet's approval says so.
One-click trading, sub-accounts and vaults
- One-click trading (the button above the order form): the wallet approves a trading key kept in this browser, once, for 7 days. Orders, cancels, edits, stops and TWAPs are then signed in the browser, with no wallet window each. The key can trade your account but never withdraw or transfer from it; turning one-click off revokes it on chain, and Portfolio → Trading keys lists and revokes every key.
- Sub-accounts (Portfolio → Sub-accounts): separate balances, margin and orders under the same wallet, up to 20. Move funds in and out, then pick one in Trading account above the order form: the forms show and trade its balances and positions, and the wallet signs for it.
- Vaults (the Vaults page): deposit perps collateral with a trader for shares at the vault's value; the leader trades it and keeps a share of depositors' gains. Start your own with at least 100, then trade it by choosing it as the trading account.
- Fees and referrals (Portfolio): your 14-day volume and rates, a referral code to share (you earn 10 % of referred fees), or one to use (4 % off).
- Dead man's switch (Portfolio): cancel every order, trigger and TWAP at a time unless you renew it.
- Leaderboard: traders by realized profit or volume, from the node's trading history; Portfolio → Trade history lists your own fills and order events.
4. Watch the position
Your position shows its size, entry price, mark price, unrealized PnL, margin and an estimated liquidation price: the mark at which the position falls to maintenance margin, holding your other positions at their current marks.
Prices
| Price | What it is | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Trade | the order book's fill price | entry, exit, realized PnL |
| Oracle | the stake-weighted median of the prices validators vote (a majority of stake must vote) | funding, the mark |
| Mark | a median of the oracle plus a smoothed book premium, the book's own prices, and a smoothed book median, held within ±5 % of the oracle | margin, liquidation, unrealized PnL |
Liquidations use the mark, not the last trade, so one large trade or a spoofed order on a thin book cannot liquidate everyone on the other side.
Funding
Every hour, longs and shorts pay each other so the contract price tracks the oracle. When the book trades above the oracle, longs pay shorts; below it, shorts pay longs. The rate is the average premium over the hour plus a small interest term, capped at 4 % per hour. Payments sum to exactly zero.
Liquidation
If your equity falls below maintenance margin (half the initial margin at the market's maximum leverage):
- Your resting orders in that scope are cancelled and your positions are closed on the book, never below the price that would leave you with negative equity. Whatever margin remains is yours.
- If the book cannot take them, the backstop vault takes the positions over at the mark price, with the margin that backed them.
- If the vault cannot cover a loss, auto-deleveraging closes the most profitable, most leveraged opposite positions to make up the difference.
The backstop vault
Anyone can deposit free collateral into the vault for shares at its net asset value. The vault earns all perps trading fees and the margin left on the positions it takes over, and carries their risk. Withdrawals redeem shares at NAV after a lockup (4 days by default).
Oracle staleness
If a market's oracle price has not updated for 5 minutes, it accepts only reduce-only orders until it does. Liquidations keep running.
Listing a market
On networks from the 2026-10 release, markets the validators price are listed by governance. Anyone else can become a deployer: bond 1,250 QRDX under a namespace (Perps → New market), then list namespace:ASSET markets with a starting price, at least 10,000 of perps collateral to seed the book's liquidity vault, and the 25 QRDX listing fee. The deployer keeps the market's oracle price up to date itself (at most 1 % a second), takes up to half of what the protocol keeps on its fees, and can settle it for good. Its markets take isolated margin only; validators can freeze one that misprices, and governance can slash the bond.
The perpetuals engine has the full model.