What is Perpetual futures?

A perpetual future is a derivative contract that tracks the price of an asset and never expires. Unlike a dated future, which settles on a fixed day, a perpetual can be held indefinitely, and it stays close to the spot price through a mechanism called the funding rate: at regular intervals, whichever side of the market is crowded pays the other side a small fee. That payment is what pulls the contract price back toward spot without any expiry date doing the work.

Perpetuals are traded with margin. A trader posts collateral, chooses a leverage, and opens a position several times larger than the collateral. The position shows an unrealized profit or loss as the mark price moves, and if the loss eats through the margin, the position is liquidated: closed by the venue, with the collateral gone. Liquidation distance, the gap between the current price and the price at which that happens, is the number a leveraged trader should know at all times.

They exist on two kinds of venue. Centralized exchanges run perpetuals inside the account, readable through the same read-only API key as spot balances. On-chain venues such as Hyperliquid and Lighter run the order book on a chain, which makes every position, fill and funding payment public data tied to a wallet address. Nothing has to be connected to see it.

The tracking problem is that real PnL on a perpetual is not the number on the position card. Funding paid and received, fees on each fill, and the difference between mark and entry all move it, and across two venues the only useful figure is total exposure and total PnL with one definition. TrueHold reads Hyperliquid and Lighter by address and exchange futures by read-only key, and totals them next to spot and DeFi, funding included, so the figure is the one that survives into a tax file.