Bybit Futures review: closing fees inside the maintenance requirement

Offshore access does not restore your protections

The regulatory section on this page is short because the position is simple, and worth stating plainly rather than burying.

The FCA has prohibited the sale of crypto derivatives and ETNs to UK retail consumers since 6 January 2021. Bybit does not serve US retail with these products. In the EU, crypto derivatives sit under MiFID II rather than MiCA.

The point that gets lost: if an offshore venue accepts you despite a restriction where you live, that does not make the trade regulated. It means the opposite. You are outside the compensation scheme, outside the ombudsman, and outside the leverage caps and negative balance protection that a domestically authorised firm would have to give you.

Check your regulator's register before depositing, not the platform's own page.

• FCA Financial Services Register

The mechanic that matters: closing fees inside the maintenance requirement

This is a real difference between Bybit and both Binance and OKX, and most calculators do not model it.

The usual liquidation condition is that margin plus unrealised PnL falls to the maintenance requirement. Bybit's requirement additionally includes **the taker fee you would pay to close**.

The effect is that at an identical maintenance-margin rate, Bybit liquidates marginally earlier than a venue that excludes the closing fee. The gap is small but its direction is fixed: the adverse move the position can absorb is slightly narrower.

On a 1 BTC long entered at 60,000 with 10x leverage, the difference is worth tens of USDT on the liquidation price against an equivalent mark-price model. That sounds trivial, and it scales proportionally with leverage and position size.

The calculator here models the term separately, so the gap is checkable rather than asserted.

• Compare all three venues

Banded like Binance, calculated like OKX

Bybit bands maintenance-margin tiers by notional value in USDT — the same as Binance, unlike OKX's contract-count bands.

But Bybit applies the tier rate to the whole position without a cumulative maintenance amount — the same as OKX, unlike Binance.

So the three venues combine two independent choices differently:

Any calculator that treats all three as one formula is wrong about at least two of them.

• Binance: notional bands, plus a maintenance amount
• OKX: contract-count bands, tier rate applied flat
• Bybit: notional bands, tier rate applied flat, closing fee included

No platform-token discount to model

Bybit does not offer standard users a platform-token fee discount comparable to BNB. Rates are set by VIP tier, which is determined by volume and asset size.

That removes a variable from the cost model: there is no token you need to hold to lower your fee. Whether that suits you depends on what you would otherwise hold, but the arithmetic is simpler.

• Work out your real cost

Funding

Settlement intervals can differ between contracts, and annualising with the wrong one scales the figure by whole multiples. The board here infers the interval from historical settlement timestamps rather than assuming eight hours.

• Funding rates and spread

Five things to verify yourself

• Whether your jurisdiction is served, and what that means for your protections
• Current maintenance-margin tiers and maximum leverage for your contract
• Current VIP thresholds and the rates they carry
• Supported withdrawal networks, minimums and per-transaction fees
• Account security: two-factor authentication, withdrawal allowlists, API permissions and IP restrictions

Still pending first-hand testing

No first-hand evidence yet, so no score and no ranking.

• KYC: documents required, manual review rate, actual completion time
• Deposits: real arrival time per network, with transaction records
• Unified account: how transfers and shared margin behave in practice
• Volatile markets: fill quality, slippage and order-entry latency
• Support: question type, channel, first response and resolution time
• Withdrawals: what triggers security review, fee charged, real arrival time

Risk and limitations

Leveraged trading can lose your entire deposit, and in disorderly markets losses can exceed posted margin. Published rules and licensing status both change; the update date reflects when this text was last edited.

Nothing here is investment advice.