What Is Perpetual Futures (Perps)?
Futures contracts with no expiration date that track an underlying asset.
Definition
A perpetual future is a leveraged bet on a price with no settlement date. Traditional futures expire and roll. Perps just keep going, held near spot by funding payments instead of by a delivery date.
How it works
You post margin and open a side. Funding flows between longs and shorts periodically to pull the contract price toward spot. Leverage scales both the gain and the loss.
In Continuum
Continuum synthetics are tokens rather than contracts, which changes what you can do with them: no expiry, no liquidation on the mint itself, and they leave the app. The short leg does carry a volatility decay where a perp would carry funding, tracking realized volatility rather than positioning; the long leg carries nothing. Perps are still the better tool at high leverage. Synthetics are better for holding something for months, especially long-only.
Related terms
More trading terms
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