How to trade US stocks with 100x contracts?

Written by: Jaleel Jia Liu, Rhythm

Money always flows to where there is more money, and liquidity is always in pursuit of deeper liquidity.

The market capitalization of Bitcoin is $1.7 trillion, while the total market capitalization of the US stock market exceeds $50 trillion. Tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and NVIDIA each have a market value that can crush half of the entire cryptocurrency market.

An increasing number of savvy crypto enthusiasts seem to have reached a subtle consensus that trading cryptocurrencies is really not as good as trading US stocks.

The U.S. stock market is deeply tied to the global economy, geopolitical issues, and technological innovation, with its volatility and topicality far surpassing that of any single cryptocurrency. This level of global attention is something that meme coins and altcoins can never reach.

Major Perp DEXs in the crypto industry, such as Hyperliquid, Trade.xyz, Ostium, and Lighter, have already launched perpetual contract trading for U.S. stocks.

With the integration of on-chain perpetual contracts, this financial tool, which is already commonplace in the cryptocurrency market, has become more exciting and attractive in the US stock market.

After all, in the traditional financial world, ordinary people need to overcome numerous obstacles to trade U.S. stocks: opening overseas brokerage accounts, waiting for a long review process, enduring limited trading hours, and accepting a leverage limit of 2 times or at most 4 times.

But now, the rules of the game are being rewritten. Perpetual contracts are merging with the US stock market in an unstoppable manner. And US stock perpetual contracts may also be the next key investment direction for smart money.

This article will deeply analyze the core mechanisms of the three platforms: Trade.xyz, Ostium, and Lighter, comparing their differences in trading experience, risk control, and data performance.

Which DEX has more stocks and stronger leverage?

Let's first look at the basic issues that traders care about: the types of stocks supported, the available leverage multiples, and the fee structure.

trade.xyz

trade.xyz is the first perpetual DEX deployed based on the Hyperliquid HIP-3 protocol, and it is also the largest perpetual DEX on HIP-3, set to launch in October 2025. The biggest innovation is the realization of 24/7/365 all-weather trading of US stocks, focusing on US stock index (XYZ100) and individual stock perpetual contracts. It is currently in a growth mode, with trading fee reductions of ≥90%, and the actual taker fee is only about 0.009%.

The team is relatively mysterious, mainly consisting of members from the Hyperunit team (@hyperunit), operating in an anonymous or low-profile manner, with no detailed founder information disclosed. There are community rumors that the Hyperunit team comes from Hyperliquid. Currently, no external financing has been conducted, as it is a Pre-TGE project. Related reading: “10 days, 2 billion USD in trading volume, another blockbuster from Hyperliquid.”

As shown in the figure, trade.xyz currently supports 11 types of US stock assets, most of which offer 10x leverage, while the index product XYZ100 (tracking the Nasdaq) can go up to 20x. The trading model used is the CLOB model.

The overall fee structure is quite friendly: under the current growth model, the fee discount exemption ≥90%, actual fees: taker ≤0.009% (approximately 9 cents / 1000 dollars), maker: ≤0.003%.

Lighter

Lighter is a custom ZK-rollup perpetual trading platform based on Ethereum, officially launched in early 2025, known for zero trading fees and provable fairness. The platform uses zero-knowledge proof technology to validate all order matching and settlement processes. The U.S. stock trading feature was just launched on November 26.

Founder Vladimir Novakovski has a strong background, being a Russian immigrant and a gold medalist in the USA Mathematical Olympiad and Physics competitions. After graduating from Harvard at 18, he joined Citadel as a trader, possessing 15 years of experience in fintech. He co-founded the AI social platform Lunchclub, which raised $30 million. Lighter recently completed a $68 million Series B funding round in November 2025, with a valuation of $1.5 billion, led by Founders Fund (Peter Thiel) and Ribbit Capital, with other investors including top firms like a16z crypto, Lightspeed, and Coatue.

As shown in the figure, Lighter supports 5 types of US stock assets, and the leverage is uniformly 10 times. The trading mode also adopts the CLOB model.

Lighter's trading fees for US stocks adhere to its biggest selling point and feature: 0 fees, with retail investors' orders and offers being 0%. For high-frequency trading and professional users, the fees are Maker 0.002% and Taker 0.02%. Additionally, Lighter will also calculate the funding rate, capped at ±0.5% per hour, based on premium TWAP.

Ostium

Ostium is an open-source decentralized perpetual futures exchange built on Arbitrum, focusing on trading real-world assets (RWA), including U.S. stocks, indices, commodities, foreign exchange, and more. Key features include leverage of up to 200 times.

Ostium Labs was founded in 2022 by former Bridgewater Associates employees, with two founders being Harvard classmates. On October 6, 2023, it completed a $3.5 million seed round financing, led by General Catalyst and LocalGlobe, with participation from notable institutions including Balaji Srinivasan, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), GSR, and others. It is currently in the Pre-TGE stage, operating a points system to reward active users.

As shown in the figure, Ostium has the most comprehensive variety of US stocks, currently supporting 13 types of US stock assets. The leverage multiples are also quite aggressive, varying based on the liquidity and trading volume of different assets. Major tech stocks such as Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla support leverage of up to 100 times. Crypto-related stocks like Coinbase, Robinhood, MicroStrategy, SBET, and Circle support leverage of 30-50 times.

Unlike the CLOB mode of the previous two, Ostium adopts a pool-to-pool model in its trading mode using the Arbitrum AMM pools.

In terms of fee structure, the opening fee is fixed at 0.05% with no closing fee; the oracle fee is charged at $0.10 each time, and may be refunded after closing depending on the different trading forms, as detailed in the fee rules; additionally, there is a rollover fee similar to the funding rate, calculated based on block compounding and holding costs, with asymmetric long and short rates.

How to trade US stocks while Wall Street sleeps?

After comparing the assets, leverage, and fees of the three companies, there is another very critical factor that determines the “trading experience differences”: US stocks are not traded 24 hours a day, while perpetual contracts on the blockchain are.

So when external prices stagnate, how oracles continue to operate and how to handle trading during market closures varies completely among different platforms.

trade.xyz

For trade.xyz, its approach can be summarized as “dividing assets and time periods.”

Index products (such as XYZ100, which tracks the Nasdaq) do not directly rely on the spot market for US stocks, but instead use CME's NQ futures—these futures are traded for 23 hours a day, providing a more continuous price source. trade.xyz will use a cost-holding model to backtrack the futures prices to “the corresponding spot index price,” allowing index contracts to keep price updates almost around the clock.

But for individual stocks, the situation is not that simple. Stocks do not have nearly all-day liquidity like futures, so trade.xyz mainly relies on Pyth's price sources, covering extended periods such as pre-market, after-hours, and overnight.

The system will only switch to the internal pricing mechanism of trade.xyz when there is absolutely no external data input, such as the one-hour trading halt window that futures have every day, or the long 48-hour suspension during weekends in stocks. It smooths the price using an exponential moving average (EMA) with an eight-hour time constant based on the on-chain order book and adjusts the impact spread according to the depth of buy and sell orders, so that the price can still reflect on-chain supply and demand in the absence of external data. Once external data is restored, the oracle will immediately switch back to the external price.

This design allows the oracle to self-adjust based on the on-chain order book in the absence of external data, maintaining a response to market supply and demand.

Ostium

Ostium has built its own pull-based RWA oracle system, which has been finely tuned for different asset trading periods, futures rollovers, opening gaps, and other situations. The data sources, exchange period information, and node aggregation logic are all constructed by the development team, and then handed over to a node network like Stork for operation.

The overall cost will be relatively high, so trading on Ostium will involve an oracle fee of $0.1 for each transaction. If the transaction fails due to reasons such as low slippage, this fee will still be charged, but it can be refunded after the transaction is successfully completed and fully settled. For details, please refer to the fee rules.

For ordinary users, this means that prices won't fluctuate wildly during the market closure, but you can still place orders in advance—both limit orders and stop-loss orders can be submitted, but they will only be executed once the market reopens and the price conditions are met, while market orders cannot be submitted at all during the closure. This mechanism is somewhat akin to “strictly adhering to the traditional market rhythm,” and even includes special holiday closure times, making the pricing behavior more reflective of the real market.

In addition, although Ostium's leverage is relatively aggressive, allowing for up to 100 times leverage, this is only limited to intraday trading. Once it exceeds the daily window or enters overnight, the leverage requirements will be strictly tightened.

Example of Day Trading Position

Specifically, the leverage multiplier can be turned on or adjusted at any time during normal market hours (Eastern Time 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM). Once it exceeds the daily window (Eastern Time 9:31 AM to 3:45 PM) or enters overnight, the leverage requirements will be tightened, and the specific tightening multiplier will vary depending on different categories of products. All intraday trades with leverage greater than the limit will be forcibly liquidated 15 minutes before market close, which is at 3:45 PM Eastern Time, to reduce overnight risk.

Lighter

Lighter's strategy is more straightforward.

During the market closure, Lighter chooses to freeze the market in a relatively safe state: entering reduce-only mode, which means you can only reduce positions and cannot increase positions or adjust leverage to continue expanding risk.

During trading hours, its RWA assets and ordinary crypto assets are indistinguishable, with prices updated normally and orders matched as usual; however, once the market closes, the index price will no longer be updated, and the mark price can only fluctuate up or down by 0.5% around the current point to avoid significant deviation.

The funding fee is still charged normally, but new active trades cannot be executed.

How to eat this juicy piece of dividend?

When it comes to perpetual contracts in the US stock market, there is an unavoidable question: stocks pay dividends, what about the contracts?

Bitcoin, as a cryptocurrency, never pays dividends; its price is simply its price. However, companies like Apple and Microsoft distribute money to shareholders every quarter. In the traditional stock market, the stock price automatically drops on the ex-dividend date— for example, if a stock is priced at 100 dollars and pays a dividend of 2 dollars, it will drop to 98 dollars after the ex-dividend date.

This is where the problem arises in perpetual contracts: if no action is taken, won't the short sellers have picked up a $2 price difference for free? As long as they open a short position before the dividend, they can just wait for the stock price to drop and make a profit. Isn't this a risk-free arbitrage?

So let's take a look at how these three platforms each show their strengths on this issue.

trade.xyz

The solution of Trade.xyz is to incorporate dividend calculations into the funding rate. Assuming the oracle price is $100, at a future moment T, due to the issuance of $2 dividends, it jumps to $98. Before T, the marked price must present a smooth discount curve every hour.

At time T-1, in order to prevent arbitrage, the funding fee paid by short sellers must precisely equal the profit obtained from the price dropping from the mark price to $98 . According to the funding rate formula: funding rate = ( mark price - oracle price ) / oracle price + truncation function (…)

Due to the marked price being lower than the oracle price, the funding rate has become negative. A negative funding rate means that shorts have to pay longs. Looking back to moments T-2 and T-3, the marked price gradually slides from 99.95, 99.90… all the way down to 98.975. Every hour, shorts have to pay a funding fee to longs.

The final result is: the short position seems to have made a $2 price difference (from 100 to 98), but all of it was paid out through the funding rate; the long position nominally lost $2 (the price dropped from 100 to 98), but by receiving the funding fee, it compensated exactly, which is equivalent to having received a dividend.

Ostium

Ostium believes that perpetual contracts track price movements, not the stocks themselves. You don't actually hold shares of Apple, so what right do you have to enjoy dividend payouts? A contract is a contract, and the rise and fall of prices is the only thing that matters.

So on Ostium: the ex-dividend date price will drop if it should, following the oracle; there will be no compensation for longs through funding rates; nor will there be additional fees charged to shorts.

Aren't the bulls at a disadvantage? Here, Ostium uses another mechanism to balance, the Rollover Fee.

What is the extension fee? In simple terms, it is the time cost of holding a position, similar to the financing cost or yield of holding real stocks. Its characteristics are: asymmetry between long and short positions: the rates for long and short positions may be different; compounding per block: every block (approximately every few seconds) is being calculated, but you don't feel it; settlement upon closing: it is not deducted in real-time, but calculated together when you close the position.

The extension fee will be displayed on the net profit margin (L/S) label. Hovering over it will display a tooltip explaining the long and short extension fees.

In other words, if you go long on a certain stock, the rollover fee may be positive; if you go short, the rollover fee may be negative.

This roll-over fee mechanism actually indirectly reflects the holding costs, including the impact of dividends. Although Ostium does not directly handle dividends, through the roll-over fees and adjustments by oracles, the final profits and losses for both long and short positions are still relatively fair.

Lighter

The documentation for Lighter does not explicitly mention the special handling of dividends, but mechanism-wise, it should rely on price adjustments from the oracle.

That is to say: if the spot price drops on the ex-dividend date, the oracle will also drop; if the contract's mark price does not follow suit, a negative premium will occur; the negative premium leads to a negative funding rate, where shorts pay longs; ultimately achieving balance.

This method is actually somewhat similar to Trade.xyz, except that Lighter does not separately emphasize the handling of dividends, but rather incorporates it into the overall price tracking mechanism.

It is also worth noting that Lighter has a funding rate cap: ±0.5% per hour. This is to prevent the funding rate from skyrocketing during extreme market conditions, protecting traders from being overwhelmed by excessively high fees.

Summary

The PMF of the perpetual contracts in the US stock market has been preliminarily validated. Data shows that the cumulative trading volume of trade.xyz has surpassed 2 billion USD, with a single-day trading record of 200 million USD during the NVDA earnings report release, and the trading volume in the past 24 hours was approximately 734 million USD.

Lighter's overall trading volume and OI (open interest) data are impressive, with a trading volume of $7.16 billion over the past 24 hours and an OI (open interest) of $1.634 billion. Since Lighter just launched US stock trading a few days ago, there is limited data available regarding US stock trading, and there are no very reliable specific data sources for tracking yet.

Looking at Ostium again. The total trading volume is over $27.2 billion, with a trading volume of $138 million in the past 24 hours.

According to the data statistics on US stock contract trading from Ostium on Dune, the daily trading volume of US stock contracts has surpassed 50 million USD. The OI (open interest) curve for US stock contract trading reached a historical peak of about 64 million USD in October this year, but has now fallen back to around 45 million USD. It can also be seen from the OI that Ostium's open interest in US stock contracts accounts for 20% of the total open interest.

But amidst the excitement, it's important to remind all perpetual contract traders of US stocks: the efficiency of financial markets is ruthless, and behind the temptation of 100x leverage is 100 times the risk. For those interested in US stock perpetual contracts, it's best to start with small positions and low leverage.