A contract with no end date
A perpetual future is an agreement whose value follows the price of an asset. You never take delivery of the asset: the contract settles in cash, and nothing expires, so a position can be held for an hour or for a year.
Long means the position gains when the price rises; short means it gains when the price falls. Both sides meet on the same order book, and every contract open is one long and one short: what one side gains, the other loses.
Because nothing expires, something has to keep the contract's price near the asset's own. That something is funding, a payment made between the two sides, every hour on Hyperliquid.
Margin and leverage
You do not pay the contract's value, you post margin against it. On Hyperliquid the margin required to open a position is position_size * mark_price / leverage, and the leverage is an integer between 1 and the market's maximum, which varies by asset from 3x to 40x.
Two figures follow from that, and confusing them is the usual beginner's mistake. The notional is what the position is worth, and it is what the market moves. The margin is what you put up, and it is what you can lose. Leverage is the ratio between them.
The price that decides
Three prices matter. The book price is where trades happen. The spot oracle price is published by the validators every 3 seconds, as a weighted median of several exchanges' spot prices, and it is what funding is computed on. The mark price, which the documentation describes as combining external exchange prices with Hyperliquid's own book state, is what margin, liquidations and order triggers are measured against.
The documentation warns that in volatile times, or on a highly leveraged position, the mark price can be significantly different from the book price. A position is judged on the mark price, not on the last trade you saw.
One position, as an example
The figures below are round on purpose. They are an example, not a quote, and no market has to behave like this. BTC's maximum leverage was 40x on this site's snapshot of 4 October 2026, and the maintenance margin is half the initial margin at that maximum, which puts it at 1.25% of the notional.
| The position | Figure |
|---|---|
| Entry price (an example) | $100,000 |
| Size, long | 0.1 BTC |
| Notional | $10,000 |
| Leverage chosen | 10x |
| Initial margin, notional over leverage | $1,000 |
| Maintenance margin | 1.25%, $125 |
| Taker fee to open, at the base rate | 0.045%, $4.50 |
Now the price moves. Up 5%, to $105,000, and the position is worth $10,500: an unrealized profit of $500, half of the margin put up. Down 5%, to $95,000, and the loss is the same $500. That is the whole of leverage in one line: 5% of the notional is 50% of the margin.
Funding runs in the background while the position is held. At the interest component alone, 0.00125% an hour, this long pays about $0.125 an hour, near $3 over a day, and the payment is computed on the spot oracle price rather than the mark price.
Liquidation, in the same example
A position is liquidated when the equity behind it falls below the maintenance margin. The documentation gives the price at which that happens as liq_price = price - side * margin_available / position_size / (1 - l * side), where side is 1 for a long, l = 1 / MAINTENANCE_LEVERAGE, and, for an isolated position, margin_available = isolated_margin - maintenance_margin_required.
Put the example's figures in. The margin available is $1,000 less $125, so $875. A maintenance margin of 1.25% is a maintenance leverage of 80, so l is 0.0125. That gives $875 over 0.1 BTC over 0.9875, about $8,861 below the entry: a liquidation price near $91,139, a fall of 8.9%. At 20x instead of 10x the margin would be $500 and that distance would roughly halve.
In this example a move of 8.9% against a long ends it. With no margin added, the $1,000 is gone, and in a backstop liquidation the maintenance margin is not returned either. On a cross margin account the same event reaches the collateral behind every other position. A leveraged position can lose everything put into it.
What it costs to hold one
- The fee on each side of the trade. On perpetuals the base rate is 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker, and it falls with your rolling 14-day volume and with staked HYPE.
- Funding, every hour, in whichever direction the rate points. It is a cost of holding, not of trading, so it grows with the days.
- Slippage, the distance between the price you saw and the price you got, which is the order book's answer and not a fee anyone charges.
None of the three depends on your leverage: fees and funding are computed on the notional, not on the margin. Leverage changes only how much of your own money stands behind that notional.