What are perps?
A perp, perpetual future, is a contract that tracks an asset’s price and lets you bet on it rising or falling, without owning the asset and without an expiry date. Here is the whole idea, minus the jargon.
A perp is a bet on which way a price moves, with no expiry Held in line with the real market by a running “funding” payment, and amplified, for better and worse, by leverage.
Prediction markets bet on questions. Perps bet on lines The price of Bitcoin, of Ether, of anything with a chart. They are the second room your fund can trade, and they work on three ideas: direction, no expiry, and a tether called funding.
01A bet on direction, not a purchase
A perpetual future is a contract whose value follows an asset’s price. Open a long and you profit when the price rises; open a short and you profit when it falls. You never hold the coin itself, no wallets full of tokens, no custody of the asset, just a position that gains or loses as the line moves.
| Position | Price goes up | Price goes down |
|---|---|---|
| Long | You gain | You lose |
| Short | You lose | You gain |
02Perpetual means no expiry
A classic future settles on a fixed date. A perp never does. You can hold the position for an hour or a season, and you close it whenever the thesis says so. That freedom is the point: the trade ends when the reason for it ends, not when a calendar says time’s up.
03Funding: the tether to reality
With no settlement date, something must keep the perp’s price glued to the real asset’s price. That something is funding A small periodic payment between longs and shorts. When the perp trades above the real price, longs pay shorts, nudging it back down; below, shorts pay longs. For a fund, funding is both a cost to count and a signal to read: it tells you which side the crowd is leaning on, and how hard.
04Leverage, where the heat is
Perps let you open a position larger than the money you put up, 2x, 5x, more. That is leverage, and it cuts both ways: gains multiply, and so do losses, down to liquidation if the move goes far enough against you. It is the single biggest difference in risk profile versus a prediction-market share, where the most you can ever lose is what you paid.
A leveraged perp can lose money faster than any prediction-market bet. In an Opusfund, leverage sits behind your caps, sized small, stopped early, and off unless you allow it.
That is a perp: a direction, held as long as the thesis holds, tethered by funding, amplified, carefully, by leverage. How your fund actually uses them, and under what limits, is covered in the FAQ: does my CEO trade perps on its own?
What to remember
- A perp bets on direction, not ownership. You never hold the asset.
- No expiry: the position stays open until you or your CEO close it.
- Funding is the small recurring payment that tethers the perp to the real price.
- Leverage multiplies both the gain and the loss, it’s where the risk concentrates.