On a perpetual position, collateral is the capital posted against a leveraged exposure, distinct from a payment for the asset itself. Every venue defines its own list of accepted collateral, and the type posted directly shapes how much buying power it produces, how that buying power behaves under stress, and in some cases what happens to it while it sits unused.
Margin secures both sides of a position against an adverse move. Initial margin is what opens a position; maintenance margin is the minimum that has to remain for the position to stay open. Falling below maintenance margin triggers liquidation, closing the position before losses can exceed the collateral backing it. Collateral itself is distinct from notional: a trader posts margin, and leverage determines how much notional that margin controls, a relationship covered in full in leverage ratios on perps .
What counts toward that margin is entirely a function of what the venue accepts and how it prices each accepted asset moment to moment. A venue that lists ten accepted collateral types is effectively running ten separate pricing feeds behind the scenes, one for each asset, and every one of those feeds has to stay accurate and available for margin calculations, and by extension liquidations, to function correctly across the whole account.
Most perp venues, centralized and decentralized alike, settle and margin primarily in a USD-pegged stablecoin, because a stable unit removes a second source of price risk from the margin itself: the collateral's value stays roughly constant regardless of what the broader market is doing. Some venues also accept volatile assets such as BTC or ETH as collateral, letting a holder open a position without first selling the asset. That convenience comes with a trade-off: the collateral's own price can move against the trader at the same time the position does, compounding the risk, which is exactly the opposite of what collateral is supposed to provide.
Venues typically discount, or haircut, the value of non-stablecoin collateral when calculating available buying power, counting only a portion of its market value toward margin. The purpose is conservative sizing: if the collateral's own price drops at the same moment a position needs the margin most, a smaller counted value leaves a bigger buffer before the account runs short. Stablecoin collateral is generally not discounted in the same way, since its price is designed to stay near a fixed peg, though a venue may still apply a smaller haircut to account for depeg risk on any given stablecoin. The size of the haircut on any accepted asset generally tracks that asset's own historical volatility and its liquidity on the spot market the venue references, since a deeper, steadier spot market gives the venue more confidence that its own pricing feed for that collateral will hold up during a fast move.
A growing number of venues also accept liquidity-pool tokens or interest-bearing tokens as collateral, letting a trader keep earning yield on an existing position while also using it to margin a perpetual. This adds a layer of complexity on top of a simple price haircut: the collateral's value now depends on the health of whatever pool or protocol issued it, on top of the market price of the underlying asset, so a problem in that protocol can affect margin even when the headline asset's own price has not moved at all. A venue accepting this kind of collateral typically applies a deeper haircut than it would to a simple stablecoin or a major asset, precisely because there are now two things that can go wrong instead of one: the market price of what the token represents, and the mechanics of the protocol that issued it.
A separate question from what counts as collateral is what the venue does with it while it sits posted. On some models, collateral is held one-to-one and used only to back the specific position it margins. On others, posted collateral can be pooled or reused by the venue for other purposes, such as market-making or lending, before being returned on withdrawal, a practice generally referred to as rehypothecation. Neither approach is inherently unsafe, but they carry different risk if the venue itself runs into operational trouble, and it is worth checking which model a given venue follows before treating collateral custody and collateral acceptance as the same question.
In isolated margin, collateral is ring-fenced to a single position, capping potential loss to whatever was allocated to it. In cross margin, the full account balance backs every open position at once, giving each one a larger buffer but also exposing the whole balance to a single bad trade. The margin mode chosen makes collateral selection an explicit, position-by-position decision under isolated margin, and a shared, account-wide decision under cross margin. When multiple collateral types sit in the same cross-margin account, the account's overall buying power becomes the sum of each asset's haircut-adjusted value, which means a mix of stablecoin and volatile-asset collateral behaves differently under stress than either one held alone: a drop in the volatile portion reduces the shared buffer available to every open position at once, extending well beyond whichever single position that asset happens to be backing. The practical mechanics of depositing collateral and opening a position from there are covered in how a perp DEX works .
Collateral crypto is any digital asset a venue accepts as margin against a leveraged position, ranging from USD-pegged stablecoins to major assets such as BTC or ETH. The accepted list and any haircut applied to non-stablecoin assets are set independently by each venue. Posting a volatile asset as collateral adds the collateral's own price risk on top of the position's directional risk.
Margin collateral is the capital a trader locks up to open and maintain a leveraged position, sized against the position's notional value. Initial margin opens the position, and maintenance margin is the floor that keeps it open before liquidation. That floor, together with the leverage chosen, sets how far price can move before the position closes automatically.
Perpetual markets for stocks, gold, indices and pre-IPO names — settled on-chain, no wallet-to-exchange transfers.
