- Robinhood began rolling out crypto perpetual futures to US customers on 29 September, with eight supported assets and leverage of up to 10 times, according to The Defiant.
- A perpetual future has no expiry date, so a leveraged position can be held open indefinitely. In exchange, holders pay or receive a funding payment for as long as the position stays open.
- UK retail investors cannot buy these contracts. The FCA banned the sale of crypto derivatives to retail consumers in January 2021, and that part of the ban has not been lifted.
Robinhood has spent a decade making it easy for ordinary Americans to buy a share on their phone. Since 29 September it has been offering them crypto contracts with up to ten times leverage instead. A UK reader who goes hunting for that feature will not find it, and the reason is a rule rather than a product decision.
Leverage changes the arithmetic of a bad day. At ten times, a 10% move against you removes your entire stake, and crypto prices have covered that distance inside a single session more than once. The product also charges you a small fee repeatedly, just for staying in the trade, which is the part that tends to surprise people.
The second half matters more if you live here. Because UK rules bar the sale of these contracts to retail customers, anyone who wants one ends up at an offshore venue with no FCA authorisation behind it. That means no Financial Ombudsman, no compensation scheme, and nobody to complain to if the platform closes your position at a price you dispute.
What we know about the rollout, and what we couldn’t check
Our source here is The Defiant’s write-up, which reports eight supported assets and leverage of up to 10x from 29 September. We could not find Robinhood’s own announcement or a published contract specification, so those two figures come from a secondary report rather than from anything we read on the company’s site.
That gap matters more than it usually would, because the detail that determines what one of these products actually costs a customer lives in the specification: how often funding is charged, how margin is calculated, and what price the venue uses to decide that a position has run out of collateral. None of that is in the reporting. Robinhood has been moving towards derivatives for some time, and coverage through last year described a perpetuals offering for eligible European customers routed through Bitstamp, the exchange it bought. We have not verified that against Robinhood’s own materials either, so treat it as background rather than fact. Our Robinhood review covers what the broker offers UK customers today.
A future, minus the expiry date
Start with the ordinary version, because perpetuals are a modification of something that has existed for centuries. A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell something at a fixed price on a fixed future date. Farmers used them to lock in a price for a harvest months before it existed. Traders use them to bet on a price without owning the underlying asset, because the contract can be bought and sold on its own.
The fixed date is the awkward bit. If you hold an oil future to expiry, the contract settles and your position disappears. A trader who wants to stay exposed has to “roll” into the next contract, which costs fees, takes attention, and can happen at a worse price than the one they left.
A perpetual future removes the date entirely. The contract tracks the price of, say, bitcoin, and it never settles. You open a long position if you think the price is going up, or a short position if you think it is going down, and you close it whenever you choose. Nothing forces you out. That design came out of crypto exchanges rather than traditional finance, and perpetuals have been the most heavily traded crypto instrument in the world for years.
The funding rate is what replaces the expiry
Take away the settlement date and you take away the mechanism that drags a futures price back towards the real price of the asset. Perpetuals solve that with a funding rate: a small payment that passes between the two sides of the market at regular intervals, usually every few hours on crypto-native venues.
The direction depends on where the contract is trading. If the perpetual price sits above the spot price, meaning more money is pushing long than short, the longs pay the shorts. If it sits below, the shorts pay the longs. The effect is a steady financial nudge back towards the spot price, and the practical consequence for a holder is that a position can cost money to keep open even when the price has not moved at all. Funding does not appear in the headline profit figure on most apps. It appears in the balance.
What 10x does to a 10% move
Leverage means the venue lets you control a position larger than the money you put up. At ten times, £1,000 of your own cash supports £10,000 of exposure. A 5% rise in the underlying asset is £500, which is a 50% gain on your stake. A 5% fall is the same £500 in the other direction.
Keep going in that direction and the stake runs out. A 10% adverse move wipes out the whole £1,000, and at that point the venue liquidates: it closes the position automatically so the loss does not exceed the collateral you posted. Fees and accumulated funding payments eat into the same collateral, so the real point arrives slightly earlier than the clean 10% figure suggests.
Ten times is also, by the standards of this market, restrained. Large offshore exchanges have offered 20x, 50x and in some cases 100x on the same instrument for years, which is why a comparison with crypto-native venues makes Robinhood look cautious. The genuinely new thing is not the leverage cap. It is that the product now sits inside a mainstream retail brokerage app, next to the button people use to buy index funds.
Why a UK reader cannot buy this
On 6 January 2021, an FCA ban took effect on the sale, marketing and distribution of crypto derivatives and exchange traded notes to retail consumers in the UK. Futures, options, contracts for difference and, at the time, crypto ETNs all fell inside it. The regulator’s reasoning was that retail customers could not reliably value these products or assess the risks, and that the combination of extreme volatility and leverage was likely to cause them harm.
The ETN half of that decision has since been revisited, and retail access to crypto exchange traded notes on UK exchanges was reopened. The derivatives half has not moved. Professional clients can still access these markets; retail customers cannot be sold them by a UK-authorised firm, whatever the leverage cap happens to be. So a British reader comparing brokers on features will find perpetuals missing from the UK app not because Robinhood chose to leave them out, but because offering them would be unlawful. Our guide to where to buy crypto in the UK sets out what is available here instead.
The wider regime is also in motion. The FCA has published guidance on how the law underpinning the UK’s future cryptoasset rules will apply, saying it “will help firms understand how the law underpinning the UK’s future cryptoasset regime applies to their business” and which activities need authorisation. Applications open from 30 September 2026 and the regime comes into force on 25 October 2027. Nothing published so far suggests the retail derivatives restriction is being reconsidered as part of it. Meanwhile the regulator has been visibly active at the enforcement end, running operations with HMRC and the Metropolitan Police against illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading in London and securing confiscation orders worth more than £850,000 in a £1.5m investment fraud case.
What to watch
The contract specification, whenever Robinhood publishes one. Funding interval, margin tiers, the price feed used for liquidations and whether there is an insurance fund or an auto-deleveraging process behind it are the terms that decide how this behaves in a fast market, and none of them are in the reporting so far.
Whether the leverage cap stays at ten. Venues that start conservative often raise limits once volumes justify it, and a rising cap inside a mainstream brokerage app would be a bigger development than the launch itself.
And when a headline about perpetuals turns up next, check two numbers before reacting to it: the leverage on offer, and the funding rate. Those tell you what the product costs to hold and how quickly it can end. The launch date tells you very little.