Every market has two sides, and you can trade either one. Going long means you profit when the price goes up. Going short means you profit when the price goes down. That is the entire idea, and everything else is plumbing.
Most people only ever use one side. Buying is longing, and buying is all a normal brokerage account makes easy. The short side usually sits behind extra permissions and paperwork. This guide explains both sides in plain words, and why the short side works differently on Based.
Going long, the side everyone knows
A long position profits when the price rises and loses when it falls. Buy something at $50, sell it at $60, and the $10 difference is yours. If you have ever bought a stock or a coin, you have been long. There is nothing more to it.
The long side has one comforting feature. A price cannot fall below zero, so the most an unleveraged long can lose is what went in. That ceiling on losses does not exist on the short side, which is worth understanding before you get there.
Going short, in plain words
Shorting is selling something you do not own yet, planning to buy it back later, cheaper. If the price drops from $50 to $40 after you short, you buy back at $40 and keep the $10. You are trading the same price move as a long, just from the other direction.
At a stockbroker this is genuinely awkward. Shares are property, so to sell shares you do not have, the broker first has to borrow real shares from someone else. That means a margin account, which is a separate application with its own approval. It means a locate, the broker finding shares that are available to borrow, which for heavily shorted stocks can fail entirely. And it means borrow fees ticking the whole time the position is open, on top of margin interest.
None of that is a conspiracy against short sellers. It is the mechanical cost of selling property you do not own. But it does mean that for most retail traders, shorting a stock is effectively a different product with a different gatekeeper.
Why shorting a perp is one tap
Perpetual futures change the mechanics completely. A perp is a contract that tracks a price, not the underlying asset itself. Nothing is borrowed, because nothing is owned. Going short on a perp just means opening a position that gains when the tracked price falls, and it takes exactly the same tap as going long. The two sides are perfectly symmetrical.
That symmetry is one of the main reasons perps exist. On Based you can long or short every market the same way: Tesla, Bitcoin, Micron, all of it, from one self-custodial wallet. The markets live on Hyperliquid and run 24/7, so the short side is open on a Sunday too. The perps guide covers how the instrument works in full.
The honest risks, in both directions
Shorting carries a structural risk that longing does not. A price can rise without limit, so an unleveraged short's potential loss is theoretically unlimited, where a long's loss stops at zero. In practice perp positions are margined, so the realistic version is liquidation: if the price moves against you far enough, the position is closed automatically and the margin behind it is gone. That risk applies to longs and shorts equally.
Funding fees also apply while any perp position is open, whichever side you are on, and depending on which side is crowded you either pay funding or receive it. And a perp is a derivative, not the asset: no dividends, no voting rights, no coins in your wallet, on either side of the trade. If all of that still sounds good, browse the markets and you will see both buttons on every one.