How Precious Metals Perpetual Futures Track Gold and Silver Prices
Summary
The document explains Bitget’s USDT-settled perpetual futures linked to precious metals. It distinguishes index-based contracts such as XAU and XAG, which reference traditional market prices, from token-linked contracts such as XAUT and PAXG. It also compares these products with crypto perpetuals and precious-metals CFDs, covering trading hours, funding, leverage, pricing, and settlement. The contracts provide leveraged long and short exposure without requiring ownership of physical metal, and have no expiry.
The pricing discussion describes an index formed from reliability-weighted quotes from multiple providers, with updates every second. Mark prices may use smoothing when liquidity is low or traditional markets are closed. Funding payments help keep perpetual prices aligned with the underlying index; the document also outlines margin modes, liquidation controls, insurance funds, and order types. Its main practical caveats are funding costs, liquidity conditions, leverage-related losses, and price gaps caused by economic or geopolitical events. The material is a platform-specific product overview, not an independent performance analysis, and some risk-management sections are incomplete in the supplied text.
Key ideas
- XAU contracts reference traditional gold price indices, while XAUT and PAXG represent tokenized gold exposure.
- Precious-metals perpetuals use USDT for margin and settlement and have no expiry.
- A weighted set of external quotes contributes to the index, while mark-price smoothing may be used during thin or closed markets.
- Funding helps align perpetual prices with the underlying index, but can add costs to holding a position.
- Leverage and market gaps can cause substantial losses despite liquidation and insurance mechanisms.
Tags
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.