Every market you can trade through Based is a perpetual future, usually just called a perp. Not the stock, not the coin, but a contract that tracks its price. Before you trade one, you should understand what that means, because perps behave differently from the things they track. This guide covers the whole picture in plain English, risks included.
A future with no expiry date
A classic futures contract is an agreement about a price with an end date. Traders have used them for centuries, but the end date is a hassle: positions have to be closed or rolled when the contract expires.
A perpetual future removes the end date. You open a position, long if you think the price goes up, short if you think it goes down, and hold it as long as you want. No expiry, no rolling, no settlement day.
That raises an obvious question: without a settlement date, what keeps the perp's price glued to the real thing? The answer is funding.
Funding rates, the anchor
Funding is a small payment that flows between traders at regular intervals. When the perp trades above the price it tracks, longs pay shorts, which nudges the price back down. When it trades below, shorts pay longs, nudging it back up. The payments are usually tiny fractions of a percent, and depending on your side you either pay or receive them.
This is the mechanism that lets a Micron market track Micron's price at 3am on a Sunday when the Nasdaq is closed. It is elegant, and it is also a real cost to be aware of: hold a position for weeks on the popular side of a market and the funding adds up.
Margin and leverage
You do not pay the full value of a position up front. You post margin, USDC in your wallet, and the margin backs the position. Leverage is the ratio between position size and margin: with 5x leverage, $100 of margin controls a $500 position, and every price move hits you five times as hard, in both directions.
Leverage is optional and adjustable. Nobody reviews your choices before you trade, which is freedom and responsibility in equal parts.
Liquidation, the risk that matters most
If the price moves against your position far enough, your margin runs out. At that point the position is closed automatically. That is liquidation, and the margin backing the position is gone.
This is the honest, structural difference between holding a perp and holding a stock. A stock you own outright can fall 40 percent and recover while you wait. A leveraged perp position can be liquidated by a move much smaller than that, and there is no waiting for a recovery afterwards, because the position no longer exists.
The defences are boring and effective. Use low leverage or none. Size positions so a bad week does not threaten them. Know where your liquidation price sits, it is shown before and after you open a position, and keep it far from the current price.
What a perp is not
A perp is a derivative. It is not the underlying stock or coin. No dividends, no voting rights, no coins landing in your wallet. If your goal is owning an asset for a decade untouched, buy the asset through whatever venue sells the real thing. Perps are built for trading: reacting, hedging, going short, using capital efficiently.
What you get in exchange is the reason they exist. Markets that never close, the ability to short as easily as to buy, and on Hyperliquid all of it from a self-custody wallet with no broker involved. Based is that wallet.