Perpetual futures contracts are leveraged trading instruments that allow traders to speculate on asset prices without an expiration date. Unlike traditional futures, perpetuals remain open indefinitely and are cash-settled, eliminating the need for physical delivery of the underlying asset.
On Helix, perpetual contracts are margined with stablecoins (e.g., USDT), making them more accessible and reducing the need to hold or store the underlying asset. Perpetuals also tend to be more liquid than traditional futures, minimizing slippage during trades.
To maintain alignment with the underlying asset's spot price, perpetuals rely on a funding mechanism. Funding payments are exchanged periodically between long and short positions based on the funding rate, which adjusts for price deviations between the perpetual contract and the underlying asset. This mechanism ensures the price remains close to the spot price, preventing significant overpricing or underpricing.
Realized vs. Unrealized Profit and Loss (PNL)
Realized PNL: Profit or loss locked in when a position is closed, accounting for entry/exit prices and fees (e.g., trading fees, funding payments).
Unrealized PNL: Potential profit or loss on an open position based on the current market price, fluctuating with the mark price.
Mark Price
The fair value price used to calculate unrealized PnL and liquidation events, preventing manipulation from temporary price changes. Helix uses decentralized oracles like Pyth and Stork for accurate mark price data.
Margin Requirements
Initial Margin: Margin required to open a position, based on position size and leverage.
Maintenance Margin: The minimum margin needed to keep a position open. Falling below this threshold triggers liquidation, automatically closing the position to prevent further losses.
Liquidation
Triggered when the margin balance drops below the maintenance margin. To avoid liquidation, traders can add more margin, reduce their position size, or monitor market conditions closely.
Funding Payments
Periodic payments exchanged between long and short positions to align the perpetual price with the spot price. On Helix, funding occurs hourly.
Positive funding rates: Longs pay shorts.
Negative funding rates: Shorts pay longs.
This mechanism incentivizes traders to bring the perpetual price back in line with the underlying market.
Leverage and Risk Management
Higher leverage reduces the buffer between the initial and maintenance margin, increasing the risk of liquidation. Traders should calculate liquidation prices and adjust their strategies to manage risks effectively.
Helix perpetual futures go beyond standard trading applications, enabling innovative use cases like Pre-IPO Perpetuals, Index Perpetuals, and - at relevant times - Election Perpetuals.
Pre-IPO perpetuals are derivatives that track the price of a pre-IPO asset.
Key Features
Leverage: Trade with up to 5x leverage.
Funding Mechanism: Funding payments align the contract price with the index. Due to the nature of these products, funding is capped at ~2% annually, or 0.000275% hourly.
Mark Price: Uses a proprietary oracle from SEDA, which pushes data on chain every four hours from Caplight, taking into account recent funding rounds and disclosed private market transactions.
Example: For OPENAI/USDT PERP, the mark price reflects the fair market value of pre-IPO OpenAI shares as traded OTC on the private market, or as recognized through traditional funding rounds (e.g. Series A, Series B).
Index perpetuals are derivatives that track the price of an index instead of a single asset. These contracts are perpetual futures tied to indices, such as baskets of cryptocurrencies or on-chain metrics like the total supply of a product. For example, the BUIDL/USDT Index Perp tracks the net asset value (NAV) of BlackRock's BUIDL fund.
Key Features
Leverage: Trade with up to 5x leverage.
Funding Mechanism: Funding payments align the contract price with the index.
Mark Price: Uses a proprietary oracle from Stork, which applies a 1-hour TWAP to smooth price fluctuations.
Example: For the BUIDL/USDT Index Perp, the mark price reflects the total supply of the BUIDL fund based on its smart contract on Ethereum. The NAV is scaled down for readability (e.g., 500 million tokens equates to a price of 5000).
Index perps provide flexible and innovative trading opportunities, allowing traders to speculate on broader market movements or specific on-chain metrics without holding the underlying assets.
Overview
The NVIDIA H100 Hourly Perp is a perpetual index product designed to provide transparent, tradable exposure to the hourly rental price of the highly sought-after NVIDIA H100 GPU, one of the most advanced accelerators powering AI, HPC, and large-scale inference workloads.
Pricing for this product is sourced from Squaretower, a trusted compute-market intelligence platform, and updates once per hour. The index reflects market conditions across a wide range of global GPU providers, making it a reliable measure of the real-time cost of compute in the AI economy.
This product enables market participants - from institutional investors and hedge funds to AI labs and decentralized compute networks - to hedge, speculate, or benchmark against the evolving economics of GPU supply and demand.
Squaretower’s H100 price feed aggregates and normalizes pricing data from dozens of reputable AI compute providers, capturing on-demand and inference rates.
Data Sources:
Leading centralized cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP equivalents)
Specialized AI compute providers and GPU rental marketplaces
Pricing Methodology:
Aggregation: Collection of live GPU rental quotes across multiple providers.
Normalization: Adjustment for contract length, configuration, and regional pricing variations.
Benchmarking: The NVIDIA H100 Hourly Perp can be used as a standardized reference rate for compute costs, allowing AI companies to forecast operational expenses and investors to compare strategies against the broader GPU market trend.
ETFs and Derivatives: Financial engineers can design products such as ETFs, structured notes, or options based on the index, creating exposure to GPU economics without the need for physical GPU ownership.
Hedging & Risk Management: AI labs and data centers can lock in future compute costs to stabilize budgets, and trading firms can hedge exposure to AI-related equities or infrastructure tokens correlated to GPU prices.
Real-Time Tracking: Updated once per hour, the index reflects the most recent GPU market conditions, giving traders and analysts timely data to act upon.
Historical Data & Analytics: A full historical price series is maintained, enabling:
Long-term trend analysis
Overview
The TradFi Stocks Index is an index designed to provide investors with diversified exposure to hundreds of the largest publicly-traded equities in the US.
The index is priced by formulaically aggregating the nominal prices of each equity component's market cap. The mark price is provided for this .
Trading
Like all other perpetual futures contracts on Helix, the TradFi Stocks Index is a derivative product with leverage. This specific product has a maximum leverage of 25x, with an initial margin of 3.33% and maintenance margin of 2%. The pair trades 24/7/365, though the oracle only updates during typical NYSE trading hours, from 2:30pm UTC to 9pm UTC on weekdays (except NYSE trading holidays).
Speculation: Traders can express a directional view on GPU demand growth, AI adoption, or supply chain constraints.
Correlation analysis against AI-related equities, tokens, or compute infrastructure indexes
Overview
The TradFi Tech Stock Index is an index designed to provide investors with diversified exposure one hundred of the largest publicly-traded, non-financial equities in the US.
The index is priced by formulaically aggregating the nominal prices of each equity component's market cap. The mark price is provided for this product by Pyth.
Trading
Like all other perpetual futures contracts on Helix, the TradFi Tech Stock Index is a derivative product with leverage. This specific product has a maximum leverage of 25x, with an initial margin of 3.33% and maintenance margin of 2%. The pair trades 24/7/365, though the oracle only updates during typical NYSE trading hours, from 2:30pm UTC to 9pm UTC on weekdays (except NYSE trading holidays).
Overview
The Helix "AI Index" is a cryptocurrency index designed to provide investors with diversified exposure to the most promising AI blockchain projects and AI Equities. The index comprises 50% of 10 selected AI blockchain tokens and 50% of 6 AI Equities.
Components: 10 AI tokens, including Near (NEAR), Internet Computer (ICP), Bittensor (TAO), Render (RENDER), Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUALS), Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET), Injective (INJ), Akash Network (AKT), Ai16Z (Ai16z) and Grass (GRASS)
Rebalancing Frequency: Monthly.
Components: 6 AI stocks, including Nvidia (NVDA), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd (TSM), Palantir (PLTR), Arista Networks (ANIT), Super Micro Computer Inc (SMCI), and SenseTime (SNTMF)
Weighting Methodology: Market capitalization-weighted.
Rebalancing Frequency: Monthly.
Stocks
NVDIA
0.363449688376
TSM
0.096836076142
PLTR
0.021002110020
Market Cap Calculation: For each token, its market capitalization is calculated by multiplying the token's price by its circulating supply. Tokens represent 50% of the index. For each stock, the market capitalization is taken from Bloomberg Terminal. Equities represent 50% of the index.
Initial Weights: Each token’s weight is determined by dividing its market cap by the total token market cap. Likewise, each equity’s weight is determined by dividing its market cap by the total equity market cap.
Index Value: The index is priced by aggregating the weighted prices of each component token and equity.
Formula: First we divide the market capitalization for each asset by the sum of the market capitalization in each asset sector, equities and crypto. This gives us the asset-specific weight for for the index. Then we sum the market capitalization for all equity assets and all crypto assets. Next, we multiple each asset-specific weight by the sum of the market capitalization of all assets to get the normalized market capitalizations for each asset. This normalizes the assets so that 50% of the index represents AI Equities and 50% of the index represents AI Tokens. Lastly, we add up the normalized market capitalizations and divide by 1,000,000,000 (10^9) to get an index price for the asset.
Here are the steps in formula form:
Calculate the total market capitalization for each sector:
where TMCequity​ represents the total market cap of the equity companies in the said basket, and TMCcrypto​ represents the total market cap of the crypto companies in the basket. MCiequity represents the element with index i in the real valued vector MCequity∈Rm and similarly MCjcrypto represents the element with index j in the real valued vector MCcrypto∈Rn
Calculate asset-specific weights:
where wicrypto and wjequity represents each element of the real valued vectors wcrypto​∈Rn×1 and wequity​∈Rm×1
Adjust the weights to a scaled value of 50% crypto and 50% equity:
where nwcrypto​∈Rn×1 and nwequity​∈Rm×1 where n and m represent the total number of crypto and equity companies, respectively, nwcrypto​ and nwequity​ is the adjusted weight metric.
Now let us introduce another variable nw which represents the entire basket of equity and crypto whose dimensions are now a direct sum of nwcrypto​⊕nwequity​ as nw∈R(n+m)×1
Calculate normalized market capitalizations:
Based on the new nw we calculate the total normalized market cap:
where
Calculate the index price:
The index price is now:
where the numerator is a vector summation, and the divisor=109.
Benchmarking: Investors can use the "AI Index" as a benchmark to measure the performance of their portfolios.
ETFs and Derivatives: The index can serve as the basis for financial products like ETFs or derivatives that track its performance.
Cap on Dominance: The representative caps prevent any single token or equity from dominating the index, reducing concentration risk.
Diversification: By including 10 tokens, the index mitigates the impact of poor performance in any one project.
Real-Time Tracking: The index value is updated in real-time based on the latest prices of the component tokens.
Historical Data: Historical index values are available to analyze trends and performance over time
Overview
The Helix "L1 Index" is a cryptocurrency index designed to provide investors with diversified exposure to the most promising L1 blockchain projects.
Components: 10 tokens, including Solana (SOL), BNB (BNB), Tron (TRX), Avalanche (AVAX), Sui (SUI), Toncoin (TON), Hyperliquid (HYPE), Injective (INJ), Sonic (S), and Sei (SEI).
Weighting Methodology: Market capitalization-weighted.
Arista Networks
0.015632109434
Super Micro Computer Inc
0.002100211002
SenseTime
0.000979805025
Crypto
Near (NEAR)
0.111904058106
Internet Computer (ICP)
0.086567290233
Render (RENDER)
0.065453317005
Bittensor (TAO)
0.073898906296
Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUALS)
0.028503863857
Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI)
0.059119125037
Injective (INJ)
0.038005151809
Ai16z
0.014568641527
Akash Network (AKT),
0.012900637642
Grass (GRASS)
0.009079008488
Rebalancing Frequency: Monthly.
Market Cap Calculation: For each token, its market capitalization is calculated by multiplying the token's price by its circulating supply.
Initial Weights: Each token’s weight is determined by dividing its market cap by the total token market cap.
Index Value: The index is priced by aggregating the weighted prices of each component token.
Formula: First we divide the market capitalization for each asset by the sum of the total market capitalization. This gives us the asset-specific weight for for the index. Then we normalize the weights, such that no single asset represents more than 25% of the index. Lastly, we add up the normalized market capitalizations and divide by 100,000,000 (10^8) to get an index price for the asset.
Here are the steps in formula form:
Calculate the total market capitalization:
represents the element with index in the real valued vector
Calculate asset-specific weights:
where represents each element of the real valued vector
Calculate normalized market capitalizations:
Based on the new we calculate the total normalized market cap:
where
Calculate the index price:
The index price is now:
where the numerator is a vector summation, and the .
Benchmarking: Investors can use the "L1 Index" as a benchmark to measure the performance of their portfolios.
Cap on Dominance: The representative caps prevent any single token from dominating the index, reducing concentration risk.
Diversification: By including 10 tokens, the index mitigates the impact of poor performance in any one project.
Real-Time Tracking: The index value is updated in real-time based on the latest prices of the component tokens.
Historical Data: Historical index values are available to analyze trends and performance over time
Solana (SOL)
0.25
BNB (BNB)
0.25
Tron (TRX)
0.1267427
Avalanche (AVAX)
0.1045627
Sui (SUI)
0.0931559
Toncoin (TON)
0.0868188
Hyperliquid (HYPE)
0.0506971
Injective (INJ)
0.0139417
Sonic (S)
0.0126
Sei (SEI)
0.0114068