Crypto & Futures
Perpetual futures (perps) are derivative contracts that track the price of an asset such as BTC or ETH without an expiry date; instead of settling on a fixed day, they use a periodic funding payment between longs and shorts to keep the contract price close to the spot price, and they can be traded with leverage in both directions.
Perpetuals are where most crypto signal trading happens: they allow shorting, leverage, and reduce-only protective orders, and they have the deepest liquidity on the major exchanges. They also introduce risks that spot trading does not have: a liquidation price, funding payments that accumulate while a position is open, and a mark price that is used for liquidation and differs slightly from the last traded price. A signal written for perps, with "20x" and a short direction, cannot be executed on a spot account at all.
AlgoVesta supports USDT-margined perpetual futures on the supported exchanges as the primary market for crypto signals. Each bot is set to a market type, spot or futures, and the two are kept apart: separate positions, separate price feeds and separate API permissions, even for the same symbol. On futures, leverage is capped per bot, the margin mode can be chosen, the stop-loss and take-profit are placed as reduce-only conditional orders on the exchange, and the dashboard shows entry, mark price, liquidation price, margin and unrealised profit exactly as the exchange reports them. Mark prices are read from the exchanges' public streams so the cost does not grow with the number of accounts. Funding payments are charged by the exchange and are visible in your exchange account; the trade log shows gross trade results. See Supported exchanges for which markets each exchange offers and funding rate for the periodic payment.
A channel posts "ETHUSDT SHORT 3,100, SL 3,160, TP 2,980, 10x". On a futures bot with a 5x cap and $100 margin, AlgoVesta opens a $500 short at 5x, places a reduce-only stop at 3,160 and a reduce-only take-profit at 2,980, and shows the liquidation price the exchange calculates. On a spot bot the same signal is blocked, because a short cannot be opened on spot.