Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Robinhood plans to sell US retail traders crypto perpetuals with up to 10x leverage
Robinhood said eligible US customers will trade eight crypto perpetual futures in its app within months, with up to 10x leverage on bitcoin and ether. The product brings leverage US retail traders mostly found on offshore exchanges into a mainstream American brokerage.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- The other six contracts, on SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and Hyperliquid's HYPE token, will be capped at 3x leverage.
- Robinhood said users will get stop-loss and take-profit orders, real-time liquidation prices and alerts when a position is at risk.
- Trading will cost one basis point, or 0.01%, per trade through the end of 2026, and Robinhood has not said what it will charge from 2027.
- Robinhood's release does not name the US exchange and clearing entities behind the product, give a launch date, or define who counts as an eligible customer.
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Why it matters
- decision The route Robinhood chooses decides whether customers hold a contract listed on a US exchange, as at Kalshi, or a foreign future reached through a US broker, as at Coinbase.
- constraint Seven of the eight contracts, DOGE and HYPE among them, depend on a fit with the Kalshi order's deep-spot-market test that neither Robinhood nor the CFTC has publicly explained.
- contradiction Tenev's "first true perps" is Robinhood's own label; the CFTC approved Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual four months before the announcement.
A leverage cap sets how far the price can move before the margin is gone. At 10x, the margin behind a position is a tenth of its size, so a 10% move the wrong way can erase all of it [6]. At 3x, the equivalent move is about a third of the price, before fees [2]. The platform closes a position automatically at the liquidation price, the level at which the remaining margin can no longer cover losses [21]. Because a perpetual never expires, a position stays open for as long as the margin holds [3].
According to cryptotimes.io, the caps follow liquidity. Bitcoin and ether are the two largest and most liquid crypto assets, and the other six tend to see sharper price swings [20]. Liquidity is also the property written into the CFTC's order for Kalshi. That analysis applies to bitcoin and similarly structured contracts on digital commodities with "deep, active, and continuous spot market trading" [17]. If the split does track market depth, Robinhood's own schedule rates six of its assets as thinner markets than the two it leverages most [20].
Before May 29, 2026, US regulators treated perpetuals as swaps, a category that kept them largely out of retail reach [11]. On that date the CFTC approved BTCPERP, a bitcoin perpetual, for listing as a futures contract on KalshiEX, a designated contract market. It also adopted a policy statement on listing perpetual contracts [12]. The same day, its staff issued Letter No. 26-17 to Coinbase Financial Markets, a registered futures commission merchant. The letter confirmed that certain perpetuals listed on Deribit FZE, Coinbase's affiliated foreign exchange, may be treated as foreign futures when US customers trade them through the FCM [13]. Robinhood's version comes through its US broker, Robinhood Derivatives, which will offer contracts "through" Bitstamp, the exchange Robinhood owns [14]. The company has not said which of these frameworks the product relies on [15].
Vlad Tenev, Robinhood's co-founder and chief executive, wrote in a post on X: "Robinhood is bringing America its first true perps. No expiry, with P&L settled every 15 minutes. A new chapter for US derivatives." [9] Profit-and-loss settlement means crediting gains to trader accounts and debiting losses from them [22].
What to watch
- Any CFTC filing by Robinhood Derivatives or Bitstamp that identifies the listing venue and clearing house for the eight contracts.
- Whether the CFTC says how contracts on DOGE, HYPE and the other non-bitcoin assets meet the deep, continuous spot market standard in its Kalshi analysis.
- How Robinhood runs the 15-minute P&L settlement Tenev described, which the company has not yet explained.