Liquidation and margin requirements

Liquidation force-closes a leveraged position when the maintenance margin requirement is breached. Margin Trading and Futures Trading draw on the same Collateral balance, so both products share one maintenance margin schedule, one account-wide leverage setting, and one liquidation sequence. The sections below cover the trigger price, the margin threshold, the order in which exposure closes, and the API fields that report liquidation state.

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Trigger price

On perpetual markets, liquidation is evaluated against the mark price, not last_price. A temporary wick in the order book does not by itself trigger a liquidation. Mark price is the fair value of the perpetual contract, derived from the underlying index price and the futures basis. The value is a point-in-time reading from the latest premium index snapshot, exposed as mark_price on GET /api/v4/public/futures. While no fresh snapshot is available for a market, mark_price returns an empty string. The index_price field on the same endpoint carries the index the contract tracks, read from the same snapshot. While the index is unavailable, index_price falls back to the last traded price of the spot market, then of the futures market, and returns "0" when neither has traded.

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Maintenance margin and leverage brackets

The Maintenance Margin Rate (MMR) is 3% for leverage 1x–10x. Per-market leverage limits and collateral brackets are published on the collateral brackets page. The leverage endpoint accepts 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100. Leverage is an account-level setting — a change affects all open positions across both products. A market’s max_leverage field may be lower than 100, and setting leverage above a market maximum returns an error. The brackets object on GET /api/v4/public/futures maps each leverage multiplier to the maximum open position size in USDT equivalent at that level. Brackets are position-size limits, not MMR percentages. A position that exceeds a bracket limit moves to higher tiers with progressively lower leverage.

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Liquidation sequence

Partial liquidation is the primary mechanism: a portion of the position (for example, 20–30%) closes first to restore margin. Full liquidation follows only when partial liquidation is insufficient. Collateral allocated to a liquidated position is lost. Exposure closes in a fixed order:

1. Margin positions, from smallest to largest initial margin value
2. Crypto borrowings
3. Futures positions

On futures markets, Auto-Deleveraging is the final stage, reached only when order-book liquidity cannot absorb the liquidation order.

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Liquidation state in API responses

Because liquidationPrice is nullable, a risk monitor treats a missing value as “not yet computed” rather than “no liquidation risk”, and tracks marginFraction alongside.

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Cost of borrowed funds

A commission applies to borrowed funds on margin positions, charged only when an order is at least partially executed. Unexecuted orders incur no borrowing fee. Current rates are published on the trading fees page. No public endpoint returns the borrowing rate itself. Accrued borrowing cost per open borrow is available as unrealized_funding on the Borrows stream — the funding due at the next borrow stage change.

Coming soon: the full mark price calculation method (snapshot cadence and basis handling), the trigger price for margin positions on spot pairs, MMR values for leverage brackets above 10x, and per-position liquidation price formulas. For institutional risk-modelling requirements, contact institutional@whitebit.com.

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