How to Trade BTC Perpetual Futures on Kraken

A step-by-step walkthrough of opening, sizing, and managing a Bitcoin perpetual futures position on Kraken, plus how it compares to Bybit, Binance, and OKX.

What it is

A perpetual futures contract lets you take a leveraged long or short position on Bitcoin’s price without ever holding BTC itself, and without an expiry date. Unlike a dated futures contract, a perpetual stays open indefinitely: instead of converging to a settlement date, it uses a periodic funding rate paid between long and short traders to keep the contract price tethered to the spot price.

This is different from margin trading (borrowing an asset to trade it directly) and different from a CFD (a contract with a broker that mirrors an asset’s price movement; see our CFD guide for how regulation treats CFDs differently from exchange-listed futures).

How it works

Leverage multiplies both gains and losses. 10x leverage means a 10% move against you wipes out your margin.
Funding rate is exchanged between longs and shorts every few hours: when it’s positive, longs pay shorts (usually means the market is crowded long).
Liquidation price is the price at which your position is forcibly closed because your margin can no longer cover the loss. This is the number that matters more than your entry price.
Isolated vs. cross margin determines whether a losing position can only drain the margin you assigned to it (isolated) or can draw on your entire futures wallet balance (cross).

Worked example. You open a $10,000 long position on the BTC perpetual at $60,000 using 10x leverage, putting up $1,000 of margin. A 10% adverse move, to $54,000, would wipe out that $1,000 before fees or funding are even factored in, but in practice, Kraken’s maintenance margin requirement sits below your full initial margin, so your actual liquidation price lands a bit closer to your entry than a naive 10% calculation suggests, often in the 8–9% range depending on the maintenance tier for that position size. Funding adds a slower, ongoing drag on top of that: at a funding rate of 0.01% paid every hour, a $10,000 position on the paying side costs roughly $1/hour, or about $24/day. That’s small next to a sharp price move, but it compounds over a multi-week hold the same way borrowing interest does on Kraken’s margin product: a position can drift measurably closer to liquidation purely from carrying cost, even while price sits still.

Step-by-step: opening a position on Kraken

Fund your Kraken account and transfer balance into the Futures wallet. Kraken keeps spot and futures balances separate.
Select the BTC perpetual contract (typically listed as PF_XBTUSD or similar; Kraken’s futures contracts use their own ticker convention, distinct from the spot XBT/USD pair).
Choose isolated or cross margin. For a first position, isolated margin caps your downside to what you’ve allocated (the safer default while you’re learning how liquidation pricing behaves).
Set your leverage. Lower leverage (2–3x) gives your position more room to move against you before liquidation. Higher leverage shrinks that room dramatically. This is the single most common way beginners get liquidated on a technically “correct” trade idea.
Choose your order type: market (immediate, at current price) or limit (executes only at your specified price or better).
Enter position size, and check the liquidation price the interface shows you before confirming: this is the number to internalize, not your entry price.
Confirm the order. Once open, monitor your margin ratio, not just the price: a stable price with a shrinking margin ratio (from funding payments) can still creep toward liquidation.

Common questions

Why would funding go negative for longs? Funding flips direction based on which side is more crowded: if shorts outnumber longs, shorts pay longs instead of the usual direction. Check the current and recent funding rate before entering rather than assuming it will always work against or for you; it changes with market positioning, not with which side you’re on.

If I close a position and reopen it, does anything carry over? No. A new position starts its own liquidation calculation from scratch, based on its own entry price and margin, independent of whatever happened on the position you just closed. Closing at a loss and immediately reopening the same direction is effectively a fresh bet, not a continuation of the old one.

Risk

This is leveraged trading: you can lose more than your initial margin faster than in spot trading. Never open a leveraged position sized larger than you’d be comfortable losing outright. Start with the lowest leverage the platform allows while you learn how liquidation pricing actually moves, and read Position Sizing: The One Skill That Actually Prevents Liquidation before your first trade. Nothing on this page is financial advice.

Use the position size calculator to work out contract size from your account balance and a target risk percentage before you open the trade, not after.

How Kraken compares

Exchange	Perpetual contracts	Typical max leverage*	Funding interval
Kraken	Yes (`PF_` prefixed tickers)	Varies by asset: check live terms	Every 1 hour
Bybit	Yes	Varies by asset: check live terms	Every 8 hours
Binance	Yes (USDT-M and COIN-M)	Varies by asset: check live terms	Every 8 hours
OKX	Yes	Varies by asset: check live terms	Every 8 hours

Max leverage and fee schedules change frequently and vary by account tier and region: always confirm current numbers directly on the exchange before trading.

What about Kraken’s dated futures?

Kraken also lists dated futures: contracts with a fixed expiry, closer in structure to Coinbase’s nano futures than to the perpetual described above. They’re a smaller part of retail trading volume than perpetuals and aren’t covered in depth here; the same leverage, margin, and liquidation principles from this guide still apply, with the added dimension of managing the position before it expires.