Perpetual Futures Statistics 2026: Volume, Funding and Leverage

On-chain perpetual futures venues traded $593.331 billion over 30 days, according to DefiLlama data captured on September 9, 2026. Those venues are only the on-chain slice of the market. Across all tracked exchanges, aggregate crypto futures open interest reached $140.23 billion the same day, and $223.16 million in leveraged positions were cleared inside a single 24-hour window.

The perpetual swap carries no expiry date, settles in crypto, and leans on periodic funding payments to stay tethered to spot. The perpetual futures statistics below cover venue-level volume and open interest, funding mechanics and their outer edges, liquidation cascades, and the leverage caps that venues narrowed over the past year.

Key Takeaways

• Hyperliquid alone cleared 36.5% of all 30-day volume on on-chain perpetual DEXs, making it the single most concentrated venue in the cohort.
• The two largest perp DEXs together handled 47% of the 30-day on-chain total, leaving the remaining fourteen tracked venues to split the rest.
• Open interest sitting on perpetual DEXs equalled 17% of aggregate crypto futures open interest, a far smaller share than the venues’ volume figures alone imply.
• Binance absorbed 54.97% of all liquidations in the four-hour window, more than triple the share of the next venue.
• Long and short liquidations ran close to balanced at $118.03 million against $105.13 million across 24 hours, signalling no one-sided flush.
• Funding rates stretched from 1.0087% at the high end to -2.0000% at the low end, against a baseline where a funding rate greater than 0.01% indicates bullish market sentiment.
• Leverage above 20x has been closed to new Binance Futures accounts during their first 30 days since December 2025.

Editor’s Choice

• On-chain perpetual DEXs recorded $593.331 billion in 30-day volume.
• Perpetual DEX open interest stood at $23.876 billion.
• Hyperliquid posted $216.821 billion in 30-day volume, the largest of any on-chain venue.
• Liquidations across tracked exchanges hit $223.16 million in 24 hours.
• Exchanges liquidated 83,250 traders over that same day.
• The record single-day cascade cleared $19.16 billion on October 10, 2025.
• Perpetual DEX volume over 24 hours came to $21.597 billion.

Perpetual Futures Statistics: Global Volume and Open Interest

• Aggregate futures data covers perpetual swaps and delivery contracts across major exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Bybit, so the headline totals are not perpetual-only.
• Perpetual DEX volume moved +0.65% week over week, a flat reading against the venue-level swings underneath it.
• Hyperliquid turned over $8.079 billion in 24 hours, more than a third of the on-chain perpetual total for the day.
• Liquidations over the trailing 12 hours reached $165.43 million, meaning most of the day’s clearing happened in its second half.
• The largest single liquidation order landed on HTX in BTC-USDT at $3.95 million.
• Long positions accounted for $101.47 million of the 12-hour total against $63.96 million in shorts.

About This Data

Figures here are compiled from eight sources, three of them tier 1 exchange documentation and five tier 2 market-data dashboards, all captured on September 9, 2026. Volume, open interest, funding, and liquidation readings are point-in-time snapshots that move intraday, so each carries its as-of date. Venue mechanics and leverage rules come from exchange documentation published between August 2025 and September 2026. Figures are reviewed on a rolling basis and updated when sources publish new readings.

Source: CoinGlass and DefiLlama dashboards, September 2026

The aggregate line and the on-chain line answer different questions, and merging them produces a number that describes nothing. CoinGlass tracks perpetual swaps alongside dated delivery contracts across centralized venues; DefiLlama tracks on-chain perpetual protocols only. Reading them as two disclosed methodologies rather than one market total is the difference between a usable figure and a misleading one. For the wider derivatives picture that includes dated contracts, the crypto derivatives market data page carries the category-level totals.

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Perpetual Futures Volume by Venue

• Hyperliquid cleared $45.343 billion over seven days, roughly a quarter of its own 30-day figure.
• Aster followed with $19.667 billion in seven-day volume.
• Lighter recorded $10.01 billion across seven days on a two-chain deployment.
• ApeX Protocol posted $9.299 billion in seven-day volume despite far thinner open interest.
• Variational reported $2.004 billion in 24-hour volume, with no normalized figure published.
• GMTrade reported $1.036 billion over 24 hours, also unnormalized.
• Pacifica turned over $418.36 million in a single day.
• edgeX matched the reported and normalized volume exactly at $1.132 billion.

DefiLlama splits reported volume from normalized volume because self-reported venue figures and wash-filtered figures diverge. Hyperliquid, Aster, and edgeX publish numbers that survive normalization largely intact. Variational, GMTrade, and Ondo Finance carry no normalized column at all.

That gap is the most useful signal on the whole table, because a venue whose reported volume cannot be independently normalized is asking readers to take its throughput on trust. The same reporting problem shapes the centralized side of the market, which the crypto exchange market share data page tracks in more detail.

Recent Developments in Perpetual Futures

• September 2026: perpetual DEX 30-day volume stood at $593.331 billion, up 0.65% week over week as of the September 9 snapshot.
• August 2026: liquidations of $2.99 billion linked to U.S. Treasury buybacks and SEC crypto regulatory tailwinds entered the all-time top ten on August 19.
• December 2025: Binance closed leverage above 20x to Futures accounts within their first 30 days of opening, applied retroactively, effective December 7.
• October 2025: A $19.16 billion cascade tied to a U.S. tariff hike on China on October 10 became the largest liquidation event on record.
• September 2025: $3.62 billion cleared as over-leveraged longs were flushed on September 22.
• August 2025: Binance made leverage levels over 5x unavailable to Futures Accounts created by regular users’ sub-accounts from August 12.

DEX Share of Perpetual Futures Volume

• Hyperliquid’s 30-day volume represented 36.5% of the entire on-chain perpetual cohort.
• Aster held 10.5% of that same 30-day total.
• Lighter accounted for 8.1% of on-chain perpetual volume.
• Every remaining tracked venue combined took 44.8% of the cohort.
• Hyperliquid holds 61.4% of all perpetual DEX open interest, a wider lead than its volume share.
• ApeX Protocol shows the inverse profile, converting $44.412 billion in 30-day volume from just $146.73 million in open interest.

One venue taking that large a slice of an entire on-chain category is unusual, and the concentration reads differently depending on which metric you pick. On volume, Hyperliquid is dominant; on open interest, it is still close to dominant. Our reading is that the volume share understates the venue’s structural position, because open interest measures capital that has committed to stay rather than flow that merely passed through. Venue-specific figures, including token and treasury data, sit on the Hyperliquid venue data page.

Perpetual Swap Open Interest Concentration by Venue

• Hyperliquid held $14.669 billion in open interest, more than five times the next venue.
• Aster carried $2.528 billion in open positions.
• Variational held $1.736 billion, placing it third despite ranking sixth on 30-day volume.
• Lighter followed at $1.495 billion.
• Grvt and Antarctic held $438.62 million and $336.49 million, respectively.
• Pacifica closed the tracked set at $96.91 million in open interest on $11.061 billion of 30-day volume.

Ranking venues by open interest reorders them against the volume table, and the reordering is the point. Variational commits far more capital relative to its throughput than the volume ranking suggests, while ApeX Protocol inverts that profile entirely.

Worth noting: Open interest and volume measure different things on a perpetual venue. DefiLlama’s September 2026 snapshot shows Variational turning over 19 times its open interest in 30-day volume, while ApeX Protocol turned over 303 times its own, two throughput-to-capital profiles that sit an order of magnitude apart.

Source: DefiLlama perpetual DEX rankings, September 2026

How Funding Rates Keep Perpetual Contracts Anchored to Spot

• Funding rates are periodic payments transferred between holders of long and short positions in Perpetual Contracts.
• Those payments exist to anchor the Perpetual Contract price to the Spot Index Price of the Underlying Asset.
• When the market runs bullish, the funding rate is positive, and traders long on a perpetual contract pay a funding fee to traders on the opposing side.
• When the market runs bearish, the funding rate turns negative, and traders short on a perpetual contract pay a funding fee to long traders.
• CoinGlass describes the same mechanism as a long-short balancing mechanism designed to keep contract prices anchored to spot prices.
• Exchanges settle those payments periodically, when the perpetual contract price deviates from the spot price.
• Funding is quoted on a standard cadence: all funding rates are quoted as 8-hour rates.
• Venues that quote on a different cadence are rescaled, so the dYdX rate is multiplied by 8, as dYdX quotes rates on an hourly basis.

Source: Binance Futures documentation and CoinGlass funding rate data, 2026

Funding moves value between traders, and the exchange keeps none of it. That distinction changes how the number should be read: a persistently positive rate says longs are paying to keep exposure open, which is a cost of carry rather than a directional forecast.

Across the funding data we track, the sign matters far less than how long the sign holds, because a brief spike costs a position almost nothing while a rate that stays elevated for weeks compounds into the dominant expense of holding it.

How does the funding rate work on perpetual futures?

Funding rates are periodic payments between long and short holders that keep a perpetual contract’s price anchored to the spot index price. When the rate is positive, longs pay shorts; when it is negative, shorts pay longs. All funding rates are quoted as 8-hour rates, and exchanges settle them on a repeating schedule rather than at any expiry, because perpetual contracts have none.

Funding Rate Extremes Across Perpetual Markets

• Funding peaked at 1.0087% on Gate for MICRODUCK/USDT, the highest reading across tracked venues.
• OKX carried the second-highest reading at 0.7194% on NG/USDT.
• The same NG/USDT pair on Gate ran 0.5025%, showing how far one contract’s funding can diverge across venues.
• NATGAS/USDT funding reached 0.3614% on Bitget and 0.3398% on Binance.
• At the opposite end, IOST/USDT on Gate hit -2.0000%, the lowest reading in the set.
• IOST/USDT funding stayed deeply negative across venues, at -1.8186% on Bitget, -1.5880% on Binance, and -1.4620% on Bybit.

Source: CoinGlass funding rate data, September 2026

The spread between those two tables is the clearest picture of what funding actually does. A single contract, IOST/USDT, carried funding near the floor on five separate venues at the same moment, while the natural-gas-linked pairs ran positive across four. Extremes cluster by contract rather than by venue, which points at the underlying positioning in a specific market rather than to any one exchange’s pricing. Leverage and funding both feed the same pressure that liquidations eventually release.

Perpetual Futures Liquidation Volumes

• The 24-hour long/short liquidation split ran 49.32% long against 50.68% short.
• In the trailing hour, longs took $10.88 million in losses against just $1.42 million for shorts.
• The four-hour window balanced out at $17.04 million long and $10.97 million short.
• Aggregate liquidation data spans perpetual swaps and delivery contracts across major exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Bybit.
• Liquidation totals reflect the total volume of leveraged positions cleared by the market within a short timeframe.
• The day’s single largest order cleared $3.95 million on HTX in BTC-USDT.

Liquidation totals compound unevenly across a day, and the shape of that compounding carries information. Roughly three quarters of the 24-hour total had already cleared by the 12-hour mark, while the final hour contributed a small fraction. A day whose liquidations cluster into a single window usually reflects one dislocation working through the book rather than sustained pressure, which is why the window matters as much as the total.

Liquidations by Exchange on Perpetual Venues

• Binance cleared $15.40 million in the four-hour window, the largest of any venue.
• OKX followed at $4.41 million, or 15.73% of the window’s total.
• Bybit and Hyperliquid cleared 9.88% and 7.24% of liquidations, respectively.
• Gate ran a heavily long-tilted book, with 75.56% of its liquidations on the long side.
• HTX ran against the field, with 96.91% of its liquidations on the short side.
• Smaller shares included CoinEx at 0.11% and Lighter at 0.02%.

Source: CoinGlass exchange liquidation data, September 2026

Binance’s share of liquidations runs well ahead of its share of the venues listed here. That follows from where leveraged positions actually sit, not from anything about its liquidation engine. The long-side percentages tell a separate story, with six of the seven venues clearing more longs than shorts and only HTX inverted.

Reading a single venue’s long-short split as a market-wide sentiment gauge is a common error, because venue-level books reflect their own user bases far more than they reflect aggregate positioning. Exchange-level volume and user data sit on the crypto exchange volume statistics page.

The Largest Liquidation Cascades in Crypto History

• The record single-day cascade cleared $19.16 billion on October 10, 2025, attributed to a U.S. tariff hike on China.
• Second place dates to April 18, 2021, at $9.94 billion, tied to an AML crackdown rumor and mining halt.
• Third place ran $9.01 billion on May 19, 2021, following a Tesla stance reversal and regulatory tightening.
• February 22, 2021 produced $4.10 billion in an overheated rally correction.
• El Salvador’s Bitcoin law launch coincided with $3.65 billion in liquidations on September 7, 2021.
• The record book splits by era, with seven of the ten largest events dated to 2021.

By the numbers: CoinGlass’s all-time ranking clusters into two eras. Seven of the ten largest liquidation events on record are dated to 2021, while the remaining three fall on September 22, 2025, October 10, 2025 and August 19, 2026. No event dated between 2022 and 2024 appears in the top ten at all.

The record itself is worth keeping in proportion. The October 2025 cascade cleared 1.9 times the 2021 peak, and it did so in a market where open interest is measured in the hundreds of billions rather than the tens. The pattern we read across this table is that cascade size tracks leverage build-up rather than headline severity, since the 2022 exchange failures destroyed far more capital than any single day here and yet produced no top-ten liquidation event.

Leverage Caps and the 2025 Access Tightening

• From August 12, 2025, Binance made leverage levels over 5x unavailable to Futures Accounts created by regular users’ sub-accounts.
• From December 7, 2025, leverage levels of over 20x became unavailable to Futures Accounts within the first 30 days of opening.
• Binance applied the second rule backward, so the new rules apply retroactively to Futures Accounts opened within the last 30 days.
• Existing positions were fenced in as well: applicable accounts with open positions within 20x leverage are not allowed to adjust those positions to over 20x leverage.
• Traders must sequence the decision, since you should first select your leverage and meet the Initial Margin requirement before opening a position.

Source: Binance Futures leverage and margin documentation, 2025 to 2026

Read as a sequence rather than as two isolated notices, these rules describe a structural narrowing of who can reach high leverage and when. The August change targeted account structure, closing a sub-account route to elevated leverage. The December change targeted account age instead, putting a waiting period between opening an account and reaching the upper tiers.

Both moves push in the same direction: leverage is becoming a function of account history rather than a setting a new user can select on day one, and that is the kind of access change most perpetual-futures data pages leave out entirely.

How much leverage can you use on perpetual futures?

Maximum leverage depends on the notional value of the position rather than on a single headline cap, with larger positions allowing lower leverage. On Binance, leverage over 20x is unavailable to Futures Accounts within their first 30 days, and leverage over 5x is unavailable to Futures Accounts created by regular users’ sub-accounts. Caps vary by venue and by jurisdiction, so the applicable ceiling is set by the exchange a trader actually uses.

How Margin and Notional Value Set Maximum Leverage

• The ceiling is position-dependent: the maximum amount of leverage available depends on the notional value of your position, and larger positions allow for lower leverage.
• The relationship runs both ways, since higher leverage allows for a smaller notional position size, while lower leverage allows for a larger one.
• Margin follows from the leverage choice, because the Initial Margin is determined by the leverage you select.
• Position sizing rests on one reference value: all position sizes are calculated based on the contract’s notional value.
• Account age adds a second ceiling, since leverage over 20x is unavailable within an account’s first 30 days.
• Binance publishes the relationship in qualitative terms and does not disclose a public notional-tier table alongside it, so the exact cap at a given position size is visible only in the trading interface.

Leverage on a perpetual contract behaves as a sliding constraint rather than a fixed multiplier. A trader who picks a high multiplier is also picking a ceiling on position size, and one who wants size must accept a lower multiplier to get it.

This trade-off is the mechanical reason large positions rarely carry the leverage figures that dominate retail discussion, and it is worth understanding before reading any venue’s advertised maximum as something universally available. Broader context on how these instruments are structured sits on the crypto derivatives explainer.

Perpetual Swap Mechanics and Origin

• The instrument has a single, documented origin: BitMEX invented the perpetual swap in 2016.
• By its issuer’s account, it became the most traded instrument in crypto history.
• Perpetual contracts carry no expiry dates, the instrument’s defining structural feature.
• BitMEX frames the sequence as deposit crypto, pick a currency pair, choose your leverage, trade.
• The design spread beyond crypto pairs, and that mechanism now powers forex perpetual contracts.
• Foreign exchange volume averaged $9.6 trillion daily in April 2025, the market that design now reaches.

A contract without an expiry date removes the single most operationally annoying feature of traditional futures, which is the roll. Removing the roll is what made the instrument tradable by retail participants at scale, and the funding mechanism is the price paid for that convenience. The on-chain venues carrying the volume covered above sit inside the wider decentralized finance market data picture, and dYdX, one of the venues whose funding cadence differs from the eight-hour standard.

What are perpetual futures in crypto?

Perpetual futures, also called perpetual swaps, are crypto derivatives with no expiry date that use periodic funding payments between long and short holders to anchor the contract price to the spot index price. BitMEX invented the perpetual swap in 2016. Traders deposit crypto, pick a pair, choose leverage, and hold the position indefinitely.

How Perpetual Futures Differ From Options and Dated Futures

• A perpetual carries no expiry date, while dated futures settle on a fixed calendar date.
• Perpetual venues substitute a funding payment quoted as an 8-hour rate for that settlement date.
• Those payments are periodic transfers between holders of long and short positions that hold the contract near spot.
• Exchange feeds separate the two contract types, covering perpetual swaps and delivery contracts as distinct categories.
• A perpetual position carries an Initial Margin determined by the leverage you select, while an option confers a right rather than an obligation.
• Funding cadence is not universal across venues, since the dYdX rate is multiplied by 8, as dYdX quotes rates on an hourly basis.

The practical difference a trader feels is where the cost sits. An options buyer pays premium once at entry, while a perpetual holder pays or receives funding repeatedly for as long as the position stays open.

Dated futures sit between the two, carrying no funding but forcing a decision at expiry. Each design moves the same cost to a different point in the trade’s life, which is why comparing headline fees across the three tells a reader very little. Contract-level data for the options side lives on the crypto options market share page.

Conclusion

On-chain perpetual venues cleared $593.331 billion in 30-day volume against $23.876 billion of open interest, while the aggregate futures market carried roughly $140.23 billion in open positions and cleared $223.16 million of liquidations in a single day. Hyperliquid took 36.5% of the on-chain cohort, funding rates stretched from 1.0087% to -2.0000% across tracked contracts, and the largest liquidation cascade on record still stands at $19.16 billion from October 10, 2025.

Two directions are worth watching from here. Venue concentration on the on-chain side remains extreme enough that a single protocol’s outage or rule change would move category-level numbers, and the leverage restrictions Binance introduced point toward access being gated by account age and structure rather than by a universal cap. Our editorial view is that the funding mechanism, not the leverage ceiling, remains the more informative signal for anyone reading this market, because it prices positioning continuously while leverage caps only bound it.