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Perpetuals

tip

Live. Perpetual futures are MetaFlux's flagship market and the platform default — funding rates, mark prices, margin modes, and the liquidation ladder all describe perps unless a page says otherwise.

What a perp is​

A perpetual future ("perp") is a leveraged contract that tracks an asset's price with no expiry. Buy to go long, sell to go short, post margin to back the position, and hold it as long as it stays healthy. A perp position is exposure backed by collateral, not ownership of the asset — it is entirely separate from spot.

Three mechanisms make that work:

  • Funding keeps the price honest. Every hour longs and shorts exchange a funding payment sized to pull the perp price toward the underlying. It is paid between traders, not to the exchange.
  • Mark price drives risk. Margin, unrealized PnL, the liquidation level and trigger orders are all computed against the mark price, not the last trade, so a single stray print cannot distort a position.
  • Liquidation is graduated. A position that can no longer cover its margin is wound down by tiered liquidation, not a single sudden close.

Set per-asset leverage and the cross/isolated toggle with update_leverage.

Trading actions​

A perp order targets a perp market id (distinct from a spot pair). The order surface is the shared CLOB used across MetaFlux.

ActionEffect
submit_orderPlace one perp order (limit / market / trigger), any order type
cancel_order / batch_cancelCancel by oid, one or many per signature
cancel_by_cloid / cancel_all_ordersCancel by client id, or cancel all (optional asset filter)
update_leverageChange leverage or toggle isolated margin on an asset
set_position_modeToggle one-way vs. hedge mode (long + short at once)

submit_order returns a synchronous per-order status once it commits — the assigned oid with a resting / filled / error entry, or pending if no commit lands in the order-wait window. Orders can be signed by the master account or an active agent wallet.

Margin & risk​

Perps share the platform's full margin and risk stack:

  • Margin modes — Cross / Isolated / Strict-Iso, and how collateral is shared or walled off between positions.
  • Hedge mode — hold a long and a short in the same market simultaneously.
  • Portfolio margin — cross-asset, SPAN-like margin for offsetting exposures.
  • Tiered liquidation — a graduated ladder (T0 early warning → partial steps → T4) instead of a single wipeout.
  • ADL — auto-deleveraging as the final backstop when the insurance fund is exhausted.

Fees​

A perp fill charges a maker and a taker fee. Your base rate comes from your trailing-30-day volume tier; a maker-rebate tier and a staking discount then stack on top. A maker-rebate tier can push the net maker rate negative (paid to make); a staking discount cuts the taker rate by up to 50%.

Rates are governance parameters, so read the live card from /info fee_schedule rather than a table. Fee schedule has the current tiers and how the three components combine.

Funding is not a fee — it is a periodic long↔short payment, not revenue to the exchange.

Listing new perp markets​

Perp markets are permissionless to deploy: any builder can register a new perpetual by paying the current Dutch-clock deploy fee and posting a slashable staking bond, then configuring leverage, fee tier, and oracle before activating it. No review committee, no allow-list — but a builder-deployed market is isolated in the deployer's own dex, not the shared market set every trader sees by default. See MIP-3 for the deploy flow and the isolation rule.

Perpetuals and options do not share a margin account. An option is fully collateralized on its own lane: it holds no margin, takes no mark price, and cannot be liquidated.

Delisting a perp market​

⚠️ NOT LIVE YET. The settlement below ships with the next node release. Until then, a delist cancels resting orders and makes the market reduce-only. Open positions stay open, and markets never sends the settled key.

Governance delists a perp market by a two-thirds-stake validator vote. The vote ends the market in ONE block, in this order:

  1. It cancels every resting order, parked trigger, TWAP parent and pending batch-auction order on the market.
  2. It closes every open position on the market.
  3. It marks the market permanently closed.

No block lies between these steps. No order can fill, and no liquidation can run, between the cancel and the close.

The settlement price. The vote can name one price, and every position then closes at it, cut to 8 decimals. The oracle band does not apply to that price. When the vote names no price, every position closes at the market's risk mark: the mark price, clamped to the oracle band. The liquidation engine judges health at this mark. It is not the raw mark_px, so the two can differ when the mark sits outside the band. When the risk mark is stale or absent, the vote must name a price.

A settlement is a ledger entry, not a trade. It does not touch the order book, so it has no slippage. It charges no fee. It writes no fill, so no user_fills row appears. Each closed leg writes one ledger_updates record with kind: "liquidation" and cause: "delist_settlement", and its mark_px is the settlement price. A hedge account gets one record per leg.

Where the PnL goes. A cross leg moves its PnL into the account balance. An isolated leg returns its whole margin bucket plus the PnL. A loss larger than the bucket is paid from the insurance fund, then the treasury queue. A cross loss the account cannot pay follows two rules:

  • An account that still holds a cross position on another market keeps the negative balance. The liquidation engine collects it by closing those other positions.
  • An account with no other cross position has its deficit covered by the deficit waterfall, the same way a liquidation deficit is covered.

After the settlement, the market never reopens.

  • Every order on it is refused, reduce-only orders included: market settled — trading closed.
  • A vote to relist it is refused.
  • Its markets row stays, with halted: true, settled: true, and the settled_px it closed at.
  • A later listing of the same underlying is a new market. It gets a new asset id and a new coin, and it inherits no position, order or funding state.

A pause is not a delist. To stop trading without closing positions, governance sets the market's open and close flags instead. A paused market keeps its positions and trades again when the flags clear. See funding on a paused market.

This settlement covers perp markets only. A spot pair delist closes no spot-margin position on that pair.

See also​