Robinhood Opens US Perps With 10x on Bitcoin, Only 3x on Altcoins

Robinhood is now offering crypto perpetual futures to eligible US customers, announced September 29. Bitcoin and Ethereum positions can carry up to 10x leverage. Six altcoins — SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE — are stuck at 3x. Perps never expire, so a trader can hold a leveraged position indefinitely.

That gap looks like a deliberate line drawn between the majors and everything else in Robinhood's product design. The sources reviewed for the report don't spell out why the cutoffs landed where they did. It's also not a rule handed down from Washington: no universal CFTC requirement forces a 10x/3x split, making the tiers a product call.

Robinhood isn't the first big US platform through the door. CryptoSlate reported Coinbase launched CFTC-regulated perpetual-style futures for US traders in July 2025, starting with Bitcoin and Ethereum at up to 10x. But Coinbase opened with just two assets at the same ceiling, so it never set the kind of tiering policy Robinhood just adopted.

The offshore pattern is starker. Anton Palovaara, Founder and Lead Market Analyst at Leverage.Trading, studied 5,963 futures contracts across 15 major exchanges. He found 55.1% of BTC and ETH contracts offered at least 100x leverage, while just 5.7% of other crypto contracts did. The median maximum across all contracts sat at 50x, with only 6.7% reaching 100x or higher — a single-source dataset rather than an independent audit, but the ordering is identical.

Regulation is still catching up. According to Finance Magnates, the CFTC has asked the industry for feedback on perpetual futures, continuous trading and how these products should be treated. Leverage and margin requirements remain unresolved questions.

The timing is loaded. 24/7 Wall St. reported October 3 that the launch followed a $478 million liquidation event, a moment when losses erased traders' margin and exchanges force-closed positions. That's context for the rollout, not a stated reason for the tiers. Why the biggest assets keep getting the most rope is still an open question — one theory is that BTC and ETH are simply easier to manage when volatility spikes, another is that platforms are more comfortable taking bigger risks on their most traded assets.