Leverage and margin

Leverage on this desk does one thing: it divides the margin that backs an exposure. It never multiplies the size of the position, and it never multiplies the payout. A 1 BTC position is 1 BTC of exposure at 1x and 1 BTC of exposure at 50x; what changes is how much of the trader's money is standing behind it, and therefore how small a price move wipes that money out.

Everything on this page follows from that one sentence.

The arithmetic

notional = amount × price
margin   = amount × price ÷ leverage
fee      = notional × feeRate ÷ 100
debit    = margin + fee

Worked through, on a BTC/USDT market with taker: 0.05:

The margin is rounded to the market's price precision. On a market with a coarse precision and a very small order, that rounding can take the margin to zero, and the order is then rejected with "The resulting margin is too small for this market's precision." — a signal that the market's precision and its minimum amount disagree.

Isolated margin, and only isolated margin

Each position posts its own margin and is settled against that margin alone.

• A position cannot lose more than the margin it posted. The close payout is max(0, margin + pnl); there is no branch anywhere that debits a wallet when a position ends.
• A profitable position cannot rescue a losing one. There is no account equity, no maintenance margin pooled across positions, and no cross-margin mode.
• Two positions on the same symbol — a long and a short — each post their own margin and are liquidated independently.

That last point is hedge mode, and it has a cost worth telling traders about: a hedged pair ties up two lots of margin and both legs can be liquidated by moves in opposite directions on the same day.

Which currency everything moves in

Always the quote currency, in the FUTURES wallet. For BTC/USDT: margin in USDT, fee in USDT, refunds in USDT, PnL in USDT, liquidation credit in USDT. A short does not post margin in BTC.

That wallet is reachable only from an ECO wallet — see Install — and it is the balance the order route checks before accepting anything.

What is held, and what is given back

The hold placed at order time and the margin the position ends up carrying are not always the same number, because an order can fill better than the price it was reserved against. The engine settles that difference rather than keeping it.

Limit orders. The hold is sized at the order's own limit price. If a buy at 110 crosses a resting ask at 100, the position opens at 100 — so 10 × amount ÷ leverage of the hold is money the trader posted that nothing would ever pay back. It is credited back on the fill.

Market orders. The hold is sized at the dearest level the sweep can touch, so the worst realistic outcome is fully covered. Whatever the order actually fills at, the difference is released the same way.

The release happens per fill, keyed by order id and fill size, so a partly filled order releases once for each fill and a genuine retry of the same fill is deduplicated. Rounding dust below 1e-8 is not credited — crediting it would turn every ordinary fill into a tiny mint.

The practical consequence: a trader's net cost is the price they actually got, not the price their order was held at. Support questions of the form "why was I charged more than the fill" are answered by this release, which may land a moment after the fill.

Choosing the leverage rungs

A market publishes its leverages as a comma-separated string in metadata.limits.leverage:

{
  "leverage": "1,2,5,10,20,50",
  "amount": { "min": 0.001, "max": 10 },
  "price":  { "min": 0.01,  "max": 0 },
  "cost":   { "min": 10,    "max": 0 }
}

The trading ticket renders exactly those values as slider rungs, and the order route rejects anything else. A max of 0 on amount, price or cost means "no maximum".

Those percentages are derived from the engine's own thresholds and are the same for every market — see Liquidation.

Fees

Maker and taker are per-market percentages set in the third step of the market wizard. Two details matter operationally.

The fee is charged on the notional, not the margin. At 20x, a 0.05% taker fee on a 100,000 notional is 50 USDT against a 5,000 margin — a full 1% of what the trader put up. Traders reading the number as "0.05% of my money" will be surprised; the ticket shows the figure, but it is worth saying in your own fee page.

The fee is credited to the platform immediately, into the Super Admin wallet, recorded as a TRADE profit entry keyed to the order id. When an order is cancelled, the unfilled share of that fee is refunded to the trader and an offsetting loss entry is written, so your revenue reporting does not count money you gave back.

Affiliate rewards, if the MLM addon is installed, are calculated on the notional — the trade the referrer introduced — not on the margin.

Position value versus margin, in the UI

The ticket shows both, and they answer different questions:

• Position value (amount × price) — the exposure. Leverage does not change it.
• Margin (position value ÷ leverage) — what leaves the wallet.

If a screen ever shows a "position value" that grows with the leverage slider, that screen is wrong: the amount is what the trader typed, and it is what the market's amount limits are checked against.

Changing leverage

You cannot, on an open position. Leverage is written onto the position at open and every later calculation — margin, liquidation price, payout — reads it from there. A trader who wants different leverage closes the position and opens a new one, paying the fee twice.

Changing the rungs a market offers is safe and takes effect on the next order. Existing positions keep the leverage they were opened at, including a rung you have since removed.