Spot vs perps vs on-chain: where a trade actually happens

"I bought some bitcoin" is four different sentences depending on where the trade happened, and the differences are not about price. They are about who holds the asset while you think you do, and they only show up on the day something breaks. This page sorts the four, in the plain terms the desk uses for its own futures: what the instrument is, who the counterparty is, and what you are left holding if the venue disappears.

Spot, in your own wallet

Spot means the coin itself, delivered now. If it sits in a wallet whose keys you hold, there is no counterparty after settlement: the entry on the ledger is yours, the network enforces it, and no exchange's balance sheet is involved. The cost of that is total responsibility — a lost key is a lost coin, there is no password reset, and the post-quantum page explains why the key being public on the ledger is itself a long-run exposure. The benefit is that the sentence "I own it" is literally true.

Spot, on an exchange

Most people's "spot" is not that. It is a balance on an exchange's books: the exchange holds the coins (or says it does), and the customer holds a claim against the exchange. On a good day the two are the same thing. On a bad day they are not, and the bad days are documented in court. FTX's founder was sentenced in March 2024 for "stealing over $8 billion of his customers' money," having "channeled billions of dollars in customer deposits from FTX to Alameda" — the deposits customers believed were sitting in their accounts were the firm's working capital. The Celsius ruling of January 4, 2023 is the quieter and in some ways more important case: no theft was needed. The bankruptcy court read the terms of use that customers had clicked through and held that "title to and ownership of all Earn Assets unequivocally transferred to the Debtors" — about $4.2 billion of customer crypto, some 77% of the platform's assets, belonged to the bankrupt company, and the customers were creditors in a queue. The terms of service are the instrument. Reading them is the trade.

An exchange balance is still the right tool for a lot of things — it is where fiat enters and leaves, where a limit order rests, where a regulated venue reconciles and reports (the taxes page covers the 1099-DA that now follows). The honest description of it is a claim on a company, with the company's solvency as the first risk and its terms as the second.

A perpetual: a contract, not a coin

A perpetual future never delivers a coin at all. It is a cash-settled contract, held near spot by funding payments, with leverage and a liquidation engine attached; the perpetuals page has the mechanics. What you hold while the trade is open is margin posted with the venue, and a position whose value the venue's own mark price decides. The counterparty is the venue's clearing arrangement — on the offshore exchanges, an insurance fund and, past it, other traders through auto-deleveraging; on a regulated U.S. venue, a clearing house. Since June 15, 2026 Kraken has offered U.S. clients perpetuals under CFTC oversight — the first to do so — which is why the desk's own crypto plan names it; Hyperliquid, the largest on-chain perpetuals venue, restricts U.S. persons in its terms, and the desk does not route around a venue's terms. A perpetual is the instrument a trader uses to be short, or levered, or to express a view for a week without the key-management burden of coins. It is also the instrument on which "I own bitcoin" is simply false; you own a bet about its price, with the venue in the middle.

On-chain: a swap against a formula

The fourth place is a decentralised exchange. Uniswap's own description: "Instead of relying on order books, Uniswap is an automated market maker (AMM)," in which "a trader interacts with the pool directly instead of matching against another user's posted order," designed "for decentralization, censorship resistance, and self-custody," where "anyone can swap, provide liquidity, or create new markets at will," and "once deployed, core contracts are not upgradeable." Translated: there is no company holding your coins during the trade — the swap executes inside a transaction you sign, from your wallet, against a pool whose price is a formula (the pools page has the arithmetic). The counterparty risk of the exchange is replaced by the contract risk of the code, the pool's depth replaces the order book (a large order moves the formula's price against you, visibly, in the quote), and the fee goes to the people who supplied the pool rather than to a company. On-chain is where a new token trades on its first day, which is why the desk's token plan opens with locked pools rather than an exchange listing; it is also where a token with no depth can be bought and never sold at anything like the same price.

The question before the button

Line the four up by one question — whose asset is it at 3 a.m., when the venue is offline? — and they sort themselves. In your wallet: yours, with no one to call. On an exchange: the exchange's, with you as a creditor whose rank the terms decide. In a perpetual: nobody's — a contract, marked to a price the venue publishes, with your margin on the venue's books. On-chain: yours, before and after the transaction, with the code between. None of these is the right answer for everything. A long-term holding belongs in the first; a weekly trade with leverage can only live in the third; a new token exists only in the fourth; and the second is the door the others are reached through. What the desk asks of a member is only that they know which sentence they are saying when they say "I bought some bitcoin" — and that they have read the terms of whichever venue is holding it while they sleep.

• What a perpetual future is and how funding works
• Holding your own keys: what a signature proves, and what nobody should ask you for
• The vault: hash-based keys and what they protect
• Liquidity pools and impermanent loss, with the arithmetic
• Staking — what you earn, what you risk, what is taxed
• Post-quantum on a token vs in a wallet: what the words can and cannot mean

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