A plain-English guide to perpetual futures ("perps") — leveraged contracts that track an asset's price with no expiry date — and how to trade them on Bloxwap.
A perpetual future — "perp" for short — is a contract that lets you bet on whether a price will go up or down, without owning the thing itself and without any expiry date. You can hold it for a minute or a month, then close it whenever you want.
If some of those words are new, don't worry. This guide explains all of them in plain English.
The one-sentence version
A perp tracks the price of something — like Bitcoin or a stock — and pays you (or charges you) based on which way that price moves. You never actually buy the asset. You're trading the price, not the thing.
How perps work
When you open a perp, you pick a direction:
- Long means you think the price will go up.
- Short means you think the price will go down.
You put down some money to back the trade. That deposit is called margin. The money you trade with is USDC, a digital dollar where 1 USDC is worth about $1.
Most perps let you use leverage, which multiplies your trade. With 10× leverage, $50 of your own money controls a $500 position. A small price move then becomes a bigger gain — or a bigger loss. Leverage cuts both ways.
Here's a worked example. You go long on Bitcoin with $50 USDC at 10× leverage:
- Bitcoin rises 2% → your position gains about 20% → roughly +$10.
- Bitcoin falls 2% → you lose about the same → roughly −$10.
If the price moves far enough against you, your margin can run out. At that point the exchange closes your trade automatically so your loss can't go below your deposit. This is called liquidation — it's the safety cutoff, and it's why leverage is risky.
One more piece: the funding rate. Because a perp never expires, exchanges use a small recurring payment between longs and shorts to keep the perp's price close to the real market price. Sometimes you pay it, sometimes you receive it. It's usually tiny, but it's worth knowing it exists.
How perps differ from regular futures
A normal ("dated") future has an expiry date — a day when the contract ends and settles. Perps remove that. There's no expiry and nothing to roll over, so you can stay in a trade as long as you like. That's the whole idea behind the name: perpetual.
The funding rate is the trade-off. A dated future doesn't need one; a perp uses it to stay anchored to the real price.
Why people trade perps
- No expiry to manage — open and close on your own schedule.
- Trade both directions — you can profit when a price falls, not only when it rises.
- Capital efficiency — leverage lets a small deposit control a larger position (with matching risk).
- No ownership needed — you don't have to hold the actual coin or stock.
Where Bloxwap fits
Bloxwap is the easiest way to trade perps. It's an app that sits on top of Hyperliquid, a large decentralized exchange, and turns trading into two buttons:
- Tap up to go long.
- Tap down to go short.
There are no order forms to fill out. Bloxwap is also non-custodial — it never holds your money. Your funds stay in your own wallet, you sign every trade, and it settles on Hyperliquid.
New to the app itself? Start with What is Bloxwap?. To see what you can trade, browse the assets page.
A note on risk
Perps are powerful, and leverage makes them riskier than simply buying an asset. A move against you is magnified, and liquidation can close your trade and take your deposit. Only trade money you can afford to lose, start with low leverage while you learn, and read the full docs before you size up.
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