Overview
Margin Trade supports trading across multiple market types — each designed to offer 24/7 access to global assets on a single onchain platform.
Currently, there are three main categories of markets available through Margin Trade:
Crypto Perpetuals Onchain perpetual futures for major digital assets like BTC, ETH, and SOL.
Equity Perpetuals Synthetic perpetual markets that track the price of global equities — allowing users to trade companies like AAPL, NVDA, or TSLA 24/7.
Commodities Markets Realtime perpetual futures trading for commodities such as Gold and Oil.
All three markets can operate on a unified account balance (see Cross Margin).
At launch, a curated selection of high-liquidity digital assets will be listed, with new markets added progressively as liquidity deepens and oracle coverage expands.
Perpetual Assets
A perpetual future (or perp) is a derivative contract that allows traders to speculate on the price of an underlying asset — such as BTC, ETH, or AAPL — without ever taking delivery of it.
Perps have no expiration date, and their prices stay closely aligned to the underlying spot market through a funding rate mechanism (Read more on Funding Rate)
Key Features
No Expiry You can hold a position indefinitely as long as your margin balance remains sufficient. There’s no settlement date or contract rollover.
Funding Rate To keep perp prices aligned with the underlying asset, traders periodically pay or receive funding.
When the perp price is above the index, longs pay shorts.
When the perp price is below the index, shorts pay longs. The rate (displayed in the trading interface) updates continuously and is charged at regular intervals.
Oracle Price The oracle price represents the external fair value of the underlying asset, used to calculate funding rates and mark prices.
For crypto perps, prices are aggregated from leading exchange feeds.
For equity perps, data is sourced from licensed market data providers and verified through Margin Trade’s relayer system.
Mark Price The mark price is the fair reference price used to calculate your unrealized PnL, margin requirements, and liquidation triggers. It ensures fairness during volatile markets and helps prevent unnecessary liquidations.
Margin & Collateral All perpetual markets on Margin Trade are USDC-margined. Each account (Crypto Perps, Equity Perps, and Spot) maintains its own isolated collateral balance. Within a given account, users may have the option to choose between cross margin or isolated margin (see Margin for details).
Perpetual Market Details
Basis currently supports trading of a growing list of assets across crypto and equities. Listings are determined based on liquidity, price feed reliability, and community demand.
Typical parameters:
Leverage: up to 20× for highly liquid assets
Initial Margin: 2–10% depending on asset
Maintenance Margin: typically half of the initial margin (e.g., 2.5% for a 20× max leverage market)
New markets and listings are announced through Margin Trade release updates. Eventually, Margin Trade aims to support permissionless market listings through onchain governance.
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