Glossary

Every term used across these docs, defined once, in the sense KestrelPerps means it.

Words in trading are reused across venues with slightly different meanings. This page fixes the meaning used everywhere else in the documentation. Where a term behaves differently in the demo terminal at /demo and in real trading at /trade, both behaviours are stated.

Terms

Alphabetical list of trading and product terms used throughout the documentation
Term	Meaning
Basis point	One hundredth of a percent, 0.01%. Our fee on routed real volume is 1 basis point. The protocol ceiling is 0.1%, so we sit at a tenth of it.
Collateral	The USD-denominated funds in the trading account that back your positions. In real trading the collateral stays in your own account and we never hold it. In demo it is a number credited to your wallet, with no cash value.
Entry price	The price at which a position was opened. In demo it is taken server-side from the live on-chain pool price at the moment of the fill. The client cannot assert it.
Funding	A periodic payment between traders that keeps a perpetual's price tethered to the underlying market. It is exchanged between longs and shorts, not paid to us. Real trading charges and pays funding. Demo does not charge it at all.
Funding rate	The rate that sets the size of each funding payment, applied to position notional. A positive rate means longs pay shorts, a negative rate means shorts pay longs.
Immediate-or-cancel	An order instruction meaning: fill whatever you can right now against the book, then cancel the rest. Nothing rests on the book afterwards.
Leverage	The multiple applied to your margin to produce position size. Notional equals margin times leverage. Higher leverage moves the liquidation price closer to the entry price.
Limit order	An order with a price limit. It will not fill worse than that price. It may fill partially, or not at all.
Liquidation	The forced closing of a position when losses reach the threshold. In demo the threshold is a loss of 90% of margin, and the remaining 10% is returned to the balance. In real trading the venue's risk engine decides, using a maintenance margin that varies by asset and position size.
Liquidation price	The price at which liquidation occurs. In demo it is exact: long is entry x (1 - 0.9 / leverage), short is entry x (1 + 0.9 / leverage). In real trading that formula is an approximation only. The live liquidation price is always shown on the position itself.
Long	A position that gains when the price rises and loses when it falls.
Maintenance margin	The minimum equity a real position must keep before the venue's risk engine liquidates it. It varies by asset and by position size, and it is larger for bigger positions. The demo has no equivalent: it uses the fixed 90% loss threshold instead.
Maker	An order that rests on the book and adds liquidity, filled by someone else's aggressive order. The demo does not model resting orders, so every demo fill is a taker fill.
Margin	The collateral committed to a single position. It is what you can lose. In demo you choose it directly, and the server derives everything else from it.
Mark price	The reference price used to value an open position and to decide liquidation, rather than the last traded price. Using a mark price prevents a single thin print from liquidating a healthy position.
Market order	In real trading there is no true market order. A market order is an aggressive immediate-or-cancel limit order priced through the book, with a default slippage tolerance of 5%. In demo, fills are instant, complete and priced with no slippage.
Non-custodial	We never take possession of your funds. Real collateral sits in your own trading account, and withdrawals require your own wallet signature, never the session key.
Notional	Position size in USD terms, equal to margin times leverage. The demo taker fee of 0.06% is charged on notional, on open and again on close, which is the industry convention.
Open interest	The total value of positions currently open in a market. It measures how much exposure is live, not how much has traded.
Order book	The set of resting bids and offers at each price. Real orders are matched against it. The demo does not model book depth.
Perpetual	A futures contract with no expiry date. It never settles, so it is held open indefinitely and kept near the underlying price by funding.
Position size	The quantity of the asset controlled by the position, derived from notional and entry price. Real order size is rounded to the market's own size precision.
Realised PnL	Profit or loss locked in when a position is closed, after fees. It moves your balance.
Reduce-only	An order instruction meaning it can only shrink an existing position, never open or increase one. It protects against accidentally flipping from long to short.
Session key	A key you authorise once so that orders are signed locally without a wallet popup per trade. It expires after 24 hours and can be revoked at any time. It can place, modify and close orders. It cannot withdraw funds or send them to another address.
Short	A position that gains when the price falls and loses when it rises.
Size precision	The step size a market allows for order quantity. Order size is rounded to it. Getting precision wrong is the single most common cause of a rejected order.
Slippage	The difference between the price you expected and the price you got, caused by taking liquidity through the book. Real market orders default to a 5% tolerance. Demo fills have no slippage.
Taker	An order that crosses the spread and removes liquidity from the book. The demo charges a taker fee of 0.0006, that is 0.06%, on notional at open and at close.
Tick size	The smallest allowed price increment. In real trading, price is also limited to 5 significant figures and to no more than (6 minus size decimals) decimal places.
Tokenized equity	A token on Robinhood Chain that tracks a listed company or fund, named on chain as "<Company> - Robinhood Token". Examples include SPY, NVDA, AAPL, QQQ, TSLA and HOOD. Roughly 25 of the demo markets are tokenized equities.
Unranked, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond	The holder tiers, read from the on-chain PERPS balance at 0, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 tokens. They grant a leverage bonus of +0, +5, +10, +20 or +50, capped at 100x overall, and reward multipliers of 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x and 3x.
Unrealised PnL	Profit or loss on a position that is still open, marked against the current price. It moves continuously and is not yet in your balance.

Two systems, two meanings

Several terms above split in two because the demo and real trading are separate systems. The demo is a simplified model with exact, published arithmetic. Real trading is a live market with a risk engine we do not control.

Terms whose behaviour differs between the demo terminal and real trading
Term	Demo	Real
Funding	Not charged	Charged and received between traders
Slippage	None, fills are complete and instant	Real, 5% default tolerance
Liquidation	Loss of 90% of margin, 10% returned	Venue risk engine, maintenance margin varies
Leverage cap	Derived from pool liquidity, up to 25x	Up to 40x
Markets	82 Robinhood Chain assets	300+ markets, 17 of them Robinhood Chain assets

Demo leverage caps

The demo derives each market's leverage cap from that market's real on-chain liquidity depth, so a thin pool cannot be levered like a deep one.

liquidity > $2,000,000  ->  25x
liquidity >   $500,000  ->  20x
liquidity >   $100,000  ->  15x
liquidity >    $25,000  ->  10x
otherwise               ->  floor

floor = 10x for tokenized equities
floor =  5x for crypto

Liquidity depth to maximum leverage, with a floor by asset class

The floor is higher for tokenized equities because an equity token tracks a real instrument and is far less manipulable than a thin memecoin pool of the same size.

Numbers worth remembering

0.06% demo taker fee, on notional, at open and at close.
90% of margin lost triggers demo liquidation, 10% returned.
1 basis point our fee on routed real volume, against a 0.1% protocol ceiling.
0.05% the maximum you approve once, leaving headroom without re-approval.
24 hours session key lifetime, revocable at any time.
10,000 demo USD credited on a wallet's first connect.
2,500,000 demo USD per ETH on a demo top-up. It has no cash value.
0.01 ETH the on-chain fee to open a demo market for an asset that does not have one.
4663 the Robinhood Chain ID, hex 0x1237. Gas is paid in ETH.

For how these terms fit together in practice, see leverage and margin, funding, orders, and security.