Check whether you are allowed to trade this at all
For an English-speaking audience this is the section that matters most, because in several major markets the answer is no.
**United Kingdom.** The FCA banned the sale of crypto derivatives and exchange-traded notes to retail consumers with effect from 6 January 2021. If you are a UK retail consumer, regulated firms may not sell you crypto futures, options or CFDs. An offshore platform that accepts you anyway is not thereby making it lawful for a UK firm to serve you, and you have no access to the Financial Ombudsman Service or the FSCS if something goes wrong.
**United States.** Binance.com does not serve US persons. The US entity does not offer the perpetual futures discussed here. Offshore crypto derivatives are generally not available to US retail.
**European Union.** MiCA governs crypto-asset services from December 2024, but derivatives on crypto-assets sit under MiFID II instead. Leverage limits, appropriateness testing and negative balance protection therefore depend on whether the venue is authorised in the EU. Most offshore perpetual venues are not.
**Elsewhere.** Rules vary widely and change. Before depositing anything, check your own regulator's register rather than a platform's marketing page.
If you cannot lawfully use leveraged crypto derivatives where you live, the rest of this page is background reading, not a recommendation.
How the maintenance-margin ladder actually works
Binance USDⓈ-M perpetuals use a tiered maintenance-margin rate plus a cumulative "maintenance amount" that keeps the ladder continuous across tier boundaries.
The practical effect is that your liquidation price moves as position notional crosses into a higher tier: the maintenance rate rises, and the adverse move the position can absorb narrows. The maintenance amount is an absolute deduction whose job is to stop the liquidation price jumping discontinuously at a boundary.
This part you can check yourself. The calculator on this site applies each venue's published ladder directly, so the same inputs can be compared side by side — considerably more useful than a subjective score.
Fees: the headline rate is not what you pay
Three variables sit between the published schedule and your actual cost.
The first is your maker share. On futures the taker rate is typically two to three times the maker rate, so trading entirely with market orders can cost more than double what resting limit orders costs at identical volume. It is the most improvable line in a trader's cost and the most commonly ignored.
The second is the VIP tier, set by 30-day volume, which only changes when you cross a threshold.
The third is the platform-token discount, which differs between spot and futures.
Referral discounts also exist, but their size is set by each venue's affiliate policy and can change without notice, so the calculator here assumes none and uses published schedules only.
Funding: the cost that is not a fee
Funding on a perpetual is a transfer between longs and shorts that keeps the contract near spot. The exchange takes no cut. Positive funding means longs pay shorts; negative means the reverse.
For anyone holding beyond a few hours, funding usually matters more to total cost than trading fees do. The same contract frequently funds at different rates on different venues, and that spread is itself the basis of a delta-neutral carry.
Settlement intervals differ by venue and by symbol — eight hours is common, four and one also occur — and annualising with the wrong interval scales the figure by whole multiples.
Five things to verify yourself before depositing
All five change, so any review that states them will go stale. Check them at the moment you open the account.
- Whether your region is served, and what additional verification applies
- Which withdrawal networks are supported, with minimums and per-transaction fees
- The current maintenance-margin tiers and maximum leverage for the contract you intend to trade
- Current VIP thresholds and the platform-token discount rate
- Account security: two-factor authentication, withdrawal allowlists, API permissions and IP restrictions
Tax
In most jurisdictions derivatives gains are taxable, and the treatment of perpetual futures often differs from spot. Some tax authorities treat funding payments as separate income. Rules differ enough between countries that a general answer would be worse than none.
This site does not give tax advice. The point of this section is only that it is your problem to resolve before it becomes a large one.
Still pending first-hand testing
These need a funded account and a complete record to conclude anything about. There is no first-hand evidence yet, so no score and no ranking is given.
Each will be filled in with a date and redacted evidence when done. Until then these fields contribute to no conclusion here.
- KYC: documents required, manual review rate, actual completion time
- Deposits: real arrival time per network, with transaction records
- Order handling: limit, market, stop and reduce-only workflows in the actual interface
- Volatile markets: fill quality, slippage and any order-entry latency
- Support: question type, channel, first response and actual resolution time
- Withdrawals: what triggers security review, the fee charged and real arrival time
Risk and limitations
Leveraged trading can lose your entire deposit, and in disorderly markets losses can exceed the margin posted. Published rules change and regional restrictions change with them; the update date on this page reflects when the text was last edited, not that every item was re-checked today.
Nothing here is investment advice.
