# About this reference

Perp Reference · Front matter · Updated: 24 September 2026

Perp Reference is compiled by the The Perp Reference maintainers. We read what perpetual futures venues
publish about themselves — documentation, trading terms, market lists, audit reports — record every
figure with the day it was read, and then read the order books ourselves, because a venue's own pages
can tell a reader what it charges but not what is resting in its book at the moment of asking.

Entries carry no byline: nothing here rests on a person's judgement being trusted. It rests on one
formula, settled on a scale of 0 to 7 before any venue was read and published with its weights on
[how we rate](/scoring-method), and on sources a reader can open and check the entry against.

## What this reference covers

Sixteen venues are followed closely enough to be written about, and 10 of them
carry a score. Scoring needs a public order book to read, because the criterion that carries the most
weight — thirty of the hundred points — is a measurement, and it cannot be taken on a book nobody
outside the venue can see. A venue that prices from an oracle and fills against a pool therefore
appears in the entries, where a reader would look for it, but not in the tables. Each entry then
answers one question and stops there — if an order cannot stay where it is, which venue can take it.

## Where each figure comes from

Four kinds of figure appear on these pages, and they are not equally strong. Two are measured, two are
somebody else's, and an entry says which is which wherever it prints a number.

| Figure | Where it comes from | The date it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Fees, markets, leverage ladders, closed jurisdictions, custody terms | the venue's own documentation and trading terms, read in a browser | the day they were read, 18 September 2026 |
| Depth, spread and price impact on the BTC perpetual | snapshots of each public order book, taken by the method on how we rate | the window they were taken in |
| Open interest and the previous day's volume | each venue's own figure as published by CoinMarketCap | the day that ranking was captured, 22 September 2026 |
| Audits, bug bounties and past incidents | the reports, bounty pages and incident write-ups themselves | the date printed on the document |

The second row is the work behind the rest. In one series of readings ending 20 September 2026 twenty-eight public BTC order books were
asked what was resting within 10 basis points of the mid price, every ten minutes, from one machine. The venues scored here were read a median of 117 times and the fewest 113, so an entry prints the number of
readings beside the median and a thin sample cannot pass for a thick one. Where a venue's own page
and its terms of use disagree, the entry follows the terms and says so.

## What this reference is not

A score is not a recommendation, and this is not a buyer's guide. A total says one thing: where a
venue's published terms and its measured book fall on a formula fixed before that venue was read.

What is missing is missing because we did not test it. Whether support answers, whether a withdrawal
clears on a day the market is moving, whether a venue will accept a particular reader at all — no
account was opened, no order was placed, no venue was written to for comment, and no entry reports on
anyone's conduct.

This reference makes no claim to be independent of the venues it covers, and it does not set itself
up as a watchdog. It is a compilation with its arithmetic on the table, so a reader who disagrees
with a weight can see which weight produced which placing. Nothing here is investment advice:
perpetual futures are leveraged contracts, and a position can take the whole margin behind it.

## When an entry is revised

Entries are re-read every thirty to sixty days, and the figures that move fastest — depth, open
interest, fee schedules — at the short end of that. When an entry changes, three dates move together:
the one under its heading, the one in the page's structured data and the one in the sitemap. A date
is never moved on its own, because a date that shifts without a reason tells a reader nothing about
how stale a figure is.

## Corrections

Write to corrections@thekiddushclubnft.com. The message acted on fastest names the entry, quotes the
line that is wrong and links to the venue's own page showing the current value: a fee schedule, a
market list, a terms page. A venue that has changed a term since 18 September 2026 has not made an
error — we have, from the moment we know of it. A corrected entry carries a new date, and where the
correction moves a placing, a line saying what moved.

## The domain before this reference

This domain carried an unrelated project before the reference existed. The web archive holds three
captures of it, all from late 2021, showing a page that counted down to the launch of an NFT
collection on Ethereum, made for a community with nothing to do with derivatives or trading. There is
nothing in the archive before those captures and nothing after them.

Perp Reference has no connection to that project, to the people who ran it or to anyone who followed
it, and speaks for none of them. None of it is carried over: not the name — this publication is
called Perp Reference and nothing else — not the artwork, not the wording, and above all not the
community framing the project was built on, which belonged to the people it was written for and has
no business decorating a site about leveraged trading. The addresses the archive records are not
recreated either; a request for one of them is answered by this site's own page for an address that
does not exist, which offers the way back in.

Prepared by The Perp Reference maintainers for perpetual futures venues and the alternatives to the largest of them, last revised on 24 September 2026. Corrections and disputed figures: corrections@thekiddushclubnft.com.

The maintainers are paid to publish this reference, and a venue with an entry here may be the party that paid for it.