Perpetuals, explained for collectors

The word perpetual scares off more collectors than the mechanism ever should. If you can read a slab label, you already handle more jargon than you will need here. This page assumes you know cards and have never touched a futures contract, and it explains what a perpetual on PKMN is and what happens to your position when the index moves.

A contract that follows a price and never expires

A traditional futures contract settles on a set date. A perpetual is the same idea without the date: it follows a reference price, in this case the Quanta index, and stays open for as long as you keep enough margin behind it. There is no delivery day and no rolling over. You close when you want to close.

Every position has a trader on the other side. Each dollar long is matched by a dollar short on the orderbook (The DEX), so what you gain the other side loses, and the reverse. Quanta is never the counterparty to your trade.

Two mechanisms keep the contract tied to the index. Funding, a periodic payment between the two sides of the market, pulls the traded price toward the index (Funding). And the mark price, the price your position is valued at, is held by the matching engine inside a narrow band around the index, so the contract cannot wander off into a price of its own (Index price, mark price, last price). You never own the underlying cards. The contract is a position on a number, and that number is built from real sales of graded cards (What is a Quanta index).

Long and short

Long means you gain when the index goes up and lose when it goes down. Short is the reverse: you gain when the index goes down and lose when it goes up. Collectors have always been long by default, because owning cards is a long position in cards. Now you can also be short an entire category of physical collectibles without selling a single slab.

Every position has two sizes. The position size is your exposure, the number of dollars of the index you are long or short. The margin is what you put aside for that one position, in USDC, the currency you deposit and the one its profit and loss settle in. Leverage is position size divided by margin. So 100 USDC of margin at 20x gives 2,000 USDC of exposure, while 2,000 USDC at 1x gives the same exposure with twenty times as much margin behind it. Leverage goes up to 20x. Margin is isolated, so your loss is capped at the margin on the position (Margin, leverage and liquidation).

Where the volatility comes from

Individual cards move sharply. In 2026, single sports cards ranged from a 60% drop to a 400% gain over a few months (The Hobby Wire, Sep 2026). A category index behaves differently by design: a median-based price across many constituents, weighted so that no single card dominates and lightly smoothed, seldom moves the way one chase card can move in a week (Methodology principles). Next to individual card prices, an index looks calm.

Leverage is what gives a position on a calm index its movement. At 20x, a 2% move in the index is a 40% move on the margin, up or down. At 2x, the same move is 4%. The index sets the pace and you choose the multiplier. A lower multiplier gives the same category exposure with more margin behind it, which places the liquidation price further from the entry.

Profit and loss, open and closed

While a position is open, its value follows the mark price. The percentage change from your entry to the current mark, applied to your position size, is your unrealized PnL. It changes your margin balance and sets your distance to liquidation, but it is not locked in yet. Funding accrues to or from the position over time, and taker or maker fees apply when you open and when you close (Fees).

To close, you place the opposite trade for the same size: sell to close a long, buy to close a short. The PnL becomes realized, and your margin plus any gain, or minus any loss, returns to the free balance of your trading account, ready to withdraw. You can also close part of a position and keep the rest open. A position stays open until you close it, unless losses bring its margin down to the maintenance level (liquidation) or, in a stressed market, auto-deleveraging applies; both are described on Market safeguards.

Three scenarios

The numbers below are rounded to keep the arithmetic simple. In each case, fees apply at open and close, and funding accrues while the position is open.

Example. A collector hedging ahead of a sale. You plan to sell a Pokémon collection over the next two months and want cover against a broad market drop in the meantime. You open a PKMN short sized at 5,000 USDC with 1,000 USDC of margin (5x). If the index falls 10% before you sell, the short gains about 500 USDC, offsetting part of the drop in your cards' value. If the index rises 10%, the short loses about 500 USDC, and your cards are worth more. The hedge covers the category as a whole rather than your specific cards.

Example. A trader with a view. You believe graded Pokémon has run too far. You open a short with 200 USDC of margin at 20x, for 4,000 USDC of exposure. A 2.5% fall in the index gains about 100 USDC, half the margin. A 2.5% rise loses about 100 USDC, and your loss is capped at the 200 USDC of margin on the position. Collectors' markets often lean long, and when the market trades above the index, longs pay funding to shorts, so a short collects it while the crowd sits on the other side.

Example. Exposure without storage. You want to hold the category for a long time without buying, storing or insuring cards. You go long with 1,000 USDC of margin at 1x, so the full exposure is covered by margin and liquidation is far away. A 20% rise gains about 200 USDC and a 20% fall loses about 200 USDC. Funding accrues while you hold, and the market page shows the current and predicted rate.

What you never receive, and never need

No slab is ever sent to you, and you never send one. A position on PKMN is a position on a number. That also means a list of things you can drop: a vault, insurance, a grading queue, shipping, and the hunt for a buyer who wants your exact card at the moment you want to sell. What you need is a Solana wallet, some USDC, a little SOL for network fees, and a view on the category. Getting started picks it up from there, and the market itself is at /trade/PKMN.

Sources for this page are listed in Sources.