Crypto Futures: Dated Contracts and Perpetuals

Leverage in crypto futures is the ratio of position size to posted margin. 10x means your position is 10x your margin; 100x means 100x. Higher leverage means a smaller adverse price move triggers liquidation: under the maintenance-margin model explained below, a long at 10x with a 0.5% maintenance rate is liquidated about 9.5% below entry, and at 100x about 0.5% below.

The intuition that often costs new traders money: higher leverage does NOT make a position more profitable. Compare $1,000 at 5x with $100 at 50x — both control a $5,000 position, so a favourable 10% move earns $500 either way, and the other $900 simply sits in the wallet. What changes is how close liquidation sits: the 5x position survives an adverse move of roughly 19.5%, the 50x position only about 1.5%. The same 3% drop that costs the 5x trader $150 of a $1,000 buffer ends the 50x position outright — a smaller loss in money terms (most of the $100 margin) but a certain one, on a position you no longer hold when the price recovers. Which matters more depends on what you hold, for how long and how volatile the market is; no leverage number is safe for everyone.

Try the numbers yourself with our liquidation calculator — enter a price, margin, leverage and maintenance rate and it shows the liquidation price under that stated model. Exchanges add tiers, fees and mark-price rules, so treat the result as an estimate, not the venue's exact figure.

If your position’s loss eats into your margin enough that maintenance margin can no longer be satisfied, the exchange force-closes the position to prevent insolvency. The threshold price at which this happens is the liquidation price. It is determined by entry price, position direction, leverage, maintenance-margin rate, and (under cross margin) account-wide equity.

Beginners commonly underestimate how close their liquidation price is to entry. At 100x leverage with a 0.5% maintenance-margin rate, a long position liquidates at roughly 0.5% below entry — a move that occurs many times per day in crypto. Treat liquidation price as a hard input to every trade, not a theoretical edge case.

Watch liquidation orders as OKX publishes them on our liquidation tracker (OKX's public feed for 20 USDT perpetuals — other venues publish no order-level feed), and use the liquidation calculator before opening any leveraged position.

Isolated margin assigns a fixed amount of margin to one position. Its loss can consume that margin — plus anything you add later, or that an auto-margin-replenishment setting draws from your available balance if you enable it — and when the margin left falls to the position's maintenance requirement, the position is liquidated. Whether a loss can exceed that margin depends on the product: closing below the bankruptcy price leaves a deficit that the venue's insurance fund or auto-deleveraging covers on most products, and your account on some.

Cross margin lets every open position draw on the account's eligible collateral. Liquidation is still triggered by the maintenance test, not by the balance reaching zero: when the account's maintenance-margin ratio reaches 100% — the total maintenance requirement measured against eligible equity at the mark price — the venue starts closing positions, and it can do so while equity is still positive: with a $50 maintenance requirement and $50 of eligible equity, the ratio is 100%. Cross absorbs a loss for longer, because one position's gains back another's losses, but a single bad trade can consume the whole balance.

We compare both modes in detail on isolated vs cross margin.