Perpetual futures

A perpetual future — a “perp” — is a derivative contract with no expiry date. You post margin, you take leveraged long or short exposure to a price, and you pay or receive a funding rate that tethers the contract to an index. You do not own the asset. Nothing settles on a calendar date, so the position stays open until you close it or the venue closes it for you.

That is the entire mechanism. Margin, funding, liquidation. The venue, the chain it runs on, and the points program attached to it are packaging around those three things.

Koi does not offer perps, does not route orders to anyone who does, and has not announced a derivatives product. This page exists because “perps on Robinhood Chain” is starting to get typed, and almost everything answering it right now is a venue describing itself.

Perps, spot, and dated futures

A dated future converges to spot because it has to — it expires. A perp never expires, so something else has to do the tethering. That something is funding.

The funding rate

Funding is a payment exchanged directly between traders, not a fee the venue pockets. When the perp trades above its index, longs pay shorts; when it trades below, shorts pay longs. The payment repeats on a fixed schedule — hourly on some venues, every eight hours on others — which makes the crowded side of the book pay rent for staying crowded, and that rent is what drags the contract back toward the index. The practical consequence is that a position can be right about direction and still bleed, because funding accrues whether or not the price moves.

Liquidation

Margin is collateral, and leverage is a small amount of collateral standing behind a large position. Every position carries a maintenance margin — the minimum equity the venue requires to keep it open. If price moves against you far enough that your equity drops below that floor, the venue closes the position at whatever it can get, and the loss is yours. There is no phone call. On a volatile asset at high leverage the distance between entry and that floor can be a couple of percent, and it is measured against a mark price the venue calculates, not against the last number you saw on a chart.

Perps on Robinhood Chain

Robinhood Chain is a permissionless Arbitrum-stack Layer-2, so anyone can deploy on it, derivatives venues included. Robinhood’s own ecosystem notes list Lighter and Arcus under perps. Appearing on that table is Robinhood’s characterization of its ecosystem. It is not an endorsement from Robinhood of either venue’s risk, and it is definitely not one from us — we have not audited either.

We are writing the phrase down before the query exists, which is not the same as claiming a place in the answer. Koi is not on that list and is not trying to get on it.

Who can actually trade them

We are not going to tell you whether you are eligible. That determination belongs to the venue, it varies by jurisdiction, and it changes. What we can report is what was reported: coverage of the Robinhood Wallet perps integration said access was restricted for users in the United States and the United Kingdom at launch. Treat that as press from a particular week, not as a legal conclusion from Koi and not as a description of today.

Read the venue’s own terms and eligibility page, and assume it geofences. If a page like this one is your source on whether you are permitted to trade a derivative, you have the wrong source.

Stock tokens are not perps

Robinhood Stock Tokens are ERC-20s giving economic exposure to an underlying share or ETF — spot-like exposure to a price, with no expiry, no funding, and no liquidation built into the instrument itself. They are not perpetual futures. Some venues have been reported as accepting them as margin, which makes them collateral sitting behind a perp rather than a perp. That distinction starts to matter when the collateral can gap on its own.

Questions people actually type

What are perpetual futures?

A leveraged derivative contract with no expiry date, held open indefinitely by paying or receiving a periodic funding rate that keeps its price near an index. You get exposure to the price, not the asset.

What is a funding rate?

A recurring payment exchanged directly between long and short traders that pulls the contract back toward its index price. It goes to the other side of the book, not to the house.

How are perps different from spot?

Spot is the asset: no expiry, no funding, no liquidation. A perp is a leveraged claim on the price that the venue can close for you the moment your margin falls below maintenance.

Does Koi offer perps?

No. Koi does not run a derivatives venue, does not refer users into one, and has not announced a perps product. Who Koi actually is: Koi.

Questions