Axiom perpetuals: how leverage and liquidation work

I watch the leverage field before anything else on a perp screen, because that one number decides how long a trade survives a bad hour. On Axiom the perpetuals sit one tab from the home page: load axiom.trade, then pick Perpetuals from the navigation across the top. The order panel is the easy part. What decides whether a position lasts the afternoon is the leverage behind it, and the panel gives that number one small field.

Where the perpetuals sit inside Axiom

Axiom is a non-custodial web trading terminal for Solana memecoins, reached at axiom.trade. Non-custodial means the site never holds your coins: you connect a wallet, sign what you want to do, and the assets stay in your own wallet until a trade settles. The Discover page lists tokens such as FOMO, Caquinho, Fujiwara, GUN and Timothy. That is the memecoin side of the site.

The navigation across the top is where the other sections live: Trackers, Perpetuals, Predictions, Vision, Portfolio and Rewards. If you came for prediction markets, they sit one tab along. Perpetuals loads a trading screen with a candlestick chart in the middle, Order Book and Trades tabs beside the chart, and the order entry panel down the right side.

One label in the corner matters before you fund anything. The bottom right of the screen reads Powered by Hyperliquid, so your order is filled against that venue's liquidity, and its rules on fees, funding and liquidation apply rather than Axiom's. The chart runs on one-minute candles, a fast timeframe for a leveraged position: a single candle there can cover the distance to your stop.

Which markets you can trade, and at what leverage

There is no single leverage limit for the whole site. The market dropdown at the top left pairs each symbol with its own maximum, and the numbers drop as the asset gets smaller.

BTC carries the highest cap at 40x, and ETH matches it. SOL stops at 30x. KNDX and ENI, the two smaller tokens on the list, cap at 10x. That pattern is common on perpetual venues: the thinner the order book, the lower the cap, because a thin book cannot absorb a large forced liquidation without the price gapping through it. I read those caps as a comment on market depth as much as a limit on my own position. Nothing in the dropdown points to commodities or equity indices.

That number is a ceiling. With BTC selected, the leverage field in the order panel read 20x, half of what the market allows, and you decide whether to change it. At that moment the chart showed BTC between about 66,040 and 66,052 USDC. If you already know the symbol you want, search it instead of scrolling: every price, chart and order field on the page changes with the market you pick, and the form will not catch a wrong one for you.

Placing a perpetual trade on Axiom, step by step

If you need an account first, you can sign up through this site's referral link at axiom.trade/@code20, and the site may earn a share of the fees of people who join through it. Account creation, wallet connection and filter settings are covered in our Axiom setup guide, so these steps start on the trading screen. Type the address yourself and check that the bar reads axiom.trade before you connect a wallet.

1. Open axiom.trade and go to the Discover page.
2. Select the Perpetuals tab at the top of the screen.
3. Click the BTC dropdown in the top left and choose the market you want, or search for the symbol directly.
4. Set the chart to one-minute candles, the timeframe shown on the screen.
5. Decide your direction and click Long in green, or Short in red.
6. Set the leverage in the order panel, which read 20x on BTC.
7. Choose Market or Limit as the order type.
8. Enter the trade amount in USDC in the Trade Amount field.
9. Tick the TP/SL box if you want a take-profit and a stop-loss attached to the order.
10. Check the symbol, the direction and the amount, then submit.

A market order fills at whatever the book offers, the quick choice when you want in now and the expensive one when the book is thin. A limit order sits at the price you name until someone takes the other side, which keeps control of your entry at the cost of missing the move. The Order Book tab shows the resting orders on each side, and Trades shows recent fills; both tell you whether your size will slip. The Add More Funds button moves more collateral into the account when margin runs short.

Three Step Guide, whose July 23, 2026 walkthrough I followed for this screen, puts the advice narrowly: "Even a small change in trade size can affect your exposure, so accuracy matters." The leverage field two rows above changes your exposure far more than a nudge in size, and nothing on the form warns you about it.

How leverage and margin work in that panel

Margin is the collateral you post. Leverage multiplies it into a position: at 20x, 500 USDC of margin controls 10,000 USDC of BTC exposure, and profit and loss are worked out on the 10,000. A 5% move in your favour doubles the margin. A 5% move against you erases it.

Liquidation is the venue closing the position for you when the remaining collateral falls below the buffer it requires to keep the trade open. Nobody calls to ask. The order is closed at the market price, a fee is usually charged on top, and whatever collateral is left comes back to your account. On a leveraged perp the liquidation price is the number that decides how long you last, and it sits closer to the entry than most new traders expect.

Leverage and size are two dials pointing at the same number, the position value, and setting both by feel is how an account ends up with a position ten times bigger than intended. Decide the most you are willing to lose on the trade, divide that by the distance to your stop, and you have the position size; the margin then follows from the leverage you choose. I would work that out on paper before touching the panel, because the panel will happily accept any number you type.

Margin modes matter once you hold more than one position. Isolated margin gives a position its own collateral, so a loss stops at that trade. Cross margin lets the account balance back every open position, which keeps trades alive longer and puts the rest of the account behind the one that goes wrong. Perpetual venues generally offer both.

A worked example of a 20x liquidation

Take 1,000 USDC of your own money at 20x, the setting shown in the panel, with BTC at 66,040 USDC on the chart. The position is 20,000 USDC, a little over 0.3 BTC. A 1% fall in BTC costs 200 USDC, a fifth of your margin. A 5% fall takes the price to about 62,738 and costs about 1,000 USDC, which is all of it.

The chart below shows the adverse move that uses up the margin at each leverage level in this article, before fees and the venue's maintenance margin.

At 40x the same 1,000 USDC controls 40,000 and the wipeout move is 2.5%. At 10x it is 10%. Two extra costs pull the real liquidation price closer than the arithmetic: the maintenance margin the venue keeps back, and the fees on the way in and out, both of which come out of your collateral. On a 20x position that gap is small next to a 5% move and large next to a wick.

Volatility sets the rest. SOL, capped at 30x here, can move several percent in a day. KNDX and ENI look tame at 10x until you remember that 10x still means a 10% move takes the whole margin, and small tokens have covered 10% in an hour.

What a perpetual trade costs on Axiom

Perpetual venues usually charge a fee to open and another to close, taken from your collateral or your proceeds. Leverage multiplies that fee along with the position: 20,000 USDC of exposure pays twenty times the fee of a 1,000 USDC spot buy at the same rate.

There is a second cost that surprises spot traders. A perpetual contract has no expiry date, so the venue needs another way to keep its price near the spot price. That mechanism is the funding payment, which longs and shorts exchange at set intervals, often every few hours. When funding is positive, longs pay shorts. When it is negative, shorts pay longs. A position carried for days can spend more on funding than on trading fees, and the rate changes, so a trade that makes sense for an afternoon can be expensive to hold for a week.

Check Axiom's fee and contract pages for the current rates, funding intervals and minimum order sizes before you size a trade. Liquidation usually carries its own fee as well, which matters most at the moment you can least afford it.

Stop-loss, take-profit and the order book

The TP/SL checkbox attaches a take-profit and a stop-loss before the order goes in, which is the right time to plan an exit: before the first red candle, not after it. On a long, the stop sits below your entry and the take-profit above it. On a short, the two swap.

A stop-loss is an instruction to close, not a promise about the price. In a fast market or a thin book the fill lands wherever the next bid or offer is, which is why the Order Book tab matters before a market order, and why a stop placed just under an obvious low is a popular target for a wick. A stop two percent away on a 20x position costs 40% of your margin if it fills there. The tighter the stop, the smaller the position has to be for the same risk. Size the position from the stop, not the stop from the position.

Risks I would weigh before sizing a position

Axiom is non-custodial, so no one can reverse a signature you approve. Check that the address bar reads axiom.trade before you connect; a lookalike domain one letter off can drain a wallet with a single approval. Never share a seed phrase or private key. No support person, moderator or giveaway needs either, and anyone who asks is stealing.

Because fills come from Hyperliquid, your order also depends on a venue outside Axiom. If that venue has an outage, changes a contract's rules or halts a market, the Axiom screen will not protect the position for you.

Then there is leverage itself. A correctly entered trade at 40x can be liquidated within minutes, and nothing about a tidy order form changes that. The caps in the dropdown show where the platform treats the markets as thin, and I would stay well under them rather than treat them as targets.

What to check before your first Axiom perp trade

Four things are worth checking on every order before you press Long or Short: the symbol in the top left, the leverage number, the trade amount in USDC, and the liquidation price the panel shows. The liquidation price is the only one of the four that tells you where the position ends. If you cannot find it, cut the size until the risk is obvious.

The move that wipes out a position at these leverage levels is smaller than it feels on the chart, a few percent before fees and maintenance margin make it worse. I would start with an amount I could lose in full, because that is exactly what a leveraged position can do.