Your first trade

KestrelPerps runs two separate systems. The demo terminal at /demo uses no real money and exists so you can learn the mechanics. Real trading at /trade uses real collateral and is non-custodial. Balances, positions and markets are not shared between them. Start on the demo side. This page walks the full loop there, then covers what changes when you move to real money.

Demo: connect and get a balance

Connect a wallet on Robinhood Chain, chain ID 4663 (hex 0x1237). Gas on the chain is paid in ETH, but connecting costs nothing. The wallet address is the identity for your demo account.

1. Open /demo and connect your wallet. The first time an address connects, the account is credited with 10,000 demo USD. This is a one-time credit, and it is denominated in USD.
2. Pick a market. There are roughly 83 of them, one for every token actually traded on Robinhood Chain: about 25 tokenized equities such as SPY, NVDA, AAPL, QQQ, TSLA and HOOD, and the rest crypto such as PONS, WETH, CASHCAT and BUN. Prices are read from live on-chain pool data and refresh about every 20 seconds. Nothing is seeded or hardcoded. If the asset you want has no market, anyone can open one for a real on-chain fee of 0.01 ETH.
3. Choose a side, long or short, then set your margin in demo USD and your leverage. The leverage slider stops at that market's cap, which is derived from the real liquidity depth of its pool. Deeper pools allow more.

The floor differs by asset type. A tokenized equity tracks a real instrument and is far harder to push around than a thin memecoin pool of the same size, so equities floor at 10x and crypto at 5x.

Read the ledger before you submit

Once margin and leverage are set, the panel shows a preview ledger. Read all of it. Every line is computed from the live price, and none of it is a guess you have to make yourself.

• Entry price: the live price the fill will use.
• Position size: the quantity of the asset the position represents.
• Notional: margin multiplied by leverage. This is the number the fee is charged on.
• Liquidation price: the price at which the position closes itself.
• Fee: the taker fee for opening, 0.06% of notional.

The taker fee is 0.0006, charged on notional rather than on margin. That is the industry convention and it means leverage multiplies the fee as well as the exposure. A 100 USD margin position at 20x is 2,000 USD of notional and costs 1.20 USD to open, plus the same again to close.

Liquidation triggers when the loss reaches 90% of your margin. The remaining 10% is returned to your balance, so a liquidation in demo is not a total loss of the margin, but it is close to one. At 20x the price only has to move 4.5% against you.

Submit, watch, close

1. Submit the order. Demo fills are instant, complete and free of slippage. Order book depth is not modelled, so a large demo position fills exactly as a small one does. Real markets do not behave this way.
2. Watch the position. Unrealised profit and loss updates as the price refreshes, roughly every 20 seconds. The liquidation price stays fixed at what the ledger showed you, because it was set from your entry and your leverage. Funding is not charged in demo, so the position does not bleed while you hold it.
3. Close it. The close is filled at the live price and the closing taker fee, another 0.06% of notional, is deducted. Your margin, plus or minus the realised profit and loss, minus that fee, returns to your demo balance.

If you want more demo balance you can pay ETH on-chain for it: 0.002 ETH credits 5,000 demo USD, 0.005 credits 12,500, 0.01 credits 25,000 and 0.02 credits 50,000, a flat rate of 2,500,000 demo USD per ETH. This buys demo balance and nothing else. It has no cash value and cannot be withdrawn.

Moving to real trading

Real trading is a different system with different markets: over 300 markets with leverage up to 40x, and 17 of them are the same assets that trade on Robinhood Chain, including PONS, CASHCAT, NVDA, TSLA, AAPL and GOOGL. It is non-custodial. We never hold your funds. Collateral is USD-denominated and stays in your own trading account.

The one-time session authorisation

You sign exactly two things, once. The first authorises a trading session key. The second authorises our fee. After that, orders are signed locally and no wallet popup appears per trade.

1. Sign the session key authorisation. The key expires after 24 hours and you can revoke it at any time before that.
2. Sign the fee authorisation. Our fee on routed volume is 1 basis point, 0.01%. The protocol ceiling is 0.1% and we sit at a tenth of it. You approve a 0.05% maximum once so the figure has headroom and you are not asked to re-approve.

The session key can place, modify and close orders. It cannot withdraw funds or send them to another address. That is a real limit, not a full protection: read the security page before you leave a key active, because a leaked key can still trade an account to zero.

Funding the account

Real trading needs USD-denominated collateral in the trading account. Robinhood Chain is not a supported deposit route directly, so funds arrive through a bridge from a supported network. That is several steps and real friction, not one click. Budget time for it and do the first transfer with a small amount. Withdrawals require a signature from your own wallet, never from the session key.

What behaves differently

• No true market order. A market order is an aggressive immediate-or-cancel limit order priced through the book, with 5% slippage tolerance by default.
• Precision is enforced. Size is rounded to the market's own size precision. Price is limited to 5 significant figures and no more than (6 minus size decimals) decimal places. Getting this wrong is the single most common cause of a rejected order.
• Liquidation is the venue's. The risk engine uses a maintenance margin that varies by asset and by position size. The demo formula above is an approximation there, not a guarantee. The live liquidation price is always shown on the position, so read that one.
• Funding is charged and received. It is paid periodically between traders. It does not come to us.
• Fills are not free or instant. You are trading against a real order book with real depth.

Next: read leverage and margin for how the liquidation threshold is derived, and fees for how notional charging compounds across a day of trading.