Arena Blog

Polymarket has offered perps with up to 20× leverage since September. A Bitcoin long there is liquidated after a 2.5 % move against it. Since 2024, that happened within a week after 64 % of all entry days, including 38.5 % of the weeks Bitcoin ended higher.

A YouTube rulebook promises +71 % on margin for 5× long grids when price rises and −20 % when it falls. Rebuilt on BTC, ETH and SOL, the gain comes from leverage, and falling markets cost 59 to 86 % on average.

Count in units of the asset, not in dollars: holding 1 coin always leaves you 1 coin. A 2x long gets closer to 2 the higher the price climbs, but never reaches it, and a halving takes everything. That holds for every asset. Since 2017, a 2x long would have been liquidated within a year after one in three entry days for Bitcoin and almost one in two for Ether.

A leveraged long grid was liquidated in 1 of 70 ninety-day windows since 2017 — because a grid never deploys more than half its notional. What leverage does instead: it deepens every drawdown and pays funding in the down windows.

A market fable in two acts — and what it is meant to teach.

Trump announced tariffs, $19 billion was force-sold — and three days later the market looked normal again. Sorting the occasion from the cause.

A leverage backtest rarely shows more return – often less. Why effective exposure = position × leverage decides, and where 5× would have liquidated your strategy in 2018.

The perpetual is crypto's most-traded derivative — a future that never expires. To stop it drifting from spot, longs and shorts pay each other funding. How it works, who's really on the other side of your leveraged long, and why funding flips whole strategies.