> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://tokenterminal.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Perpetuals

> Every perp and order-book market: trades, open interest, funding and liquidations, across every venue.

This section covers two kinds of market.

A **perpetual future** is a contract that tracks the price of something, bitcoin say, without ever expiring and without anyone holding the thing itself. A trader puts down a deposit, can hold a position worth many times that deposit, and settles up in the token the market prices in.

An **order-book market** on the same venue is an ordinary cash market, where the token really does change hands, matched through a book of buy and sell orders. That covers spot books and outcome markets.

Each kind has its own registry table, its own table of individual trades and its own daily tables. The two only come together once the figures are added up to the level of an app on a chain.

## Pages

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Registry" icon="table-list" href="/docs/catalog/perpetuals/registry">
    Market identity, settlement tokens, and the two apps each market credits.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Trades" icon="bolt" href="/docs/catalog/perpetuals/trades">
    Individual trades, with size and fees on the same row.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Metrics" icon="chart-line" href="/docs/catalog/perpetuals/metrics">
    Daily volume, open positions, funding, liquidations, trader stats and fees.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## What one row means

A perpetual futures market is identified by `perp_market_id` and an order-book market by `order_book_market_id`. Under each market sits a finer table, one row per market per settlement token, and that is where amounts are turned into dollars. Every broader figure is that table added up, never measured a second time.

A perpetual market has two apps behind it, and both get credit. The **exchange app** is the venue that matches buyers with sellers. The **interface app** is whoever built the front end the trade was placed through, which on a venue's own markets is the venue itself. So the same trades are reported twice, once credited to the exchange and once to the interface, in two separate columns. Pick the one that answers your question; adding them together counts every trade twice. Order-book markets have a single operator, so they need only one column.