This page is conceptual. Live per-market margin and leverage parameters come from
GET /v1/markets; your account’s current margin and equity come from GET /v1/account.Collateral
Collateral is held as USDG, the protocol’s settlement stablecoin, in your Arcus account. Your account equity is your collateral balance plus the unrealized profit and loss of your open positions. See Onboarding & deposits for how funds arrive as USDG.Initial vs. maintenance margin
| Term | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Initial margin | The collateral required to open a new position or add to an existing one. Higher initial margin = lower maximum leverage. |
| Maintenance margin | The minimum collateral a position must retain. If equity falls below this level, the position becomes eligible for liquidation. |
Cross and isolated margin
The exchange is designed to support both cross margin (positions share the account’s collateral, so the whole balance backs every position) and isolated margin (collateral is allocated to a single position, capping its risk to that allocation). At launch, perps use cross margin. Isolated margin is planned to follow.Leverage
Leverage is the inverse of the initial margin requirement. Arcus supports up to 50x leverage; the maximum is set per market and published with each market’s parameters. Higher-volatility or less-liquid markets carry lower maximum leverage.Off-hours margin
For perps whose underlying has set trading hours (equities, commodity and index ETFs), Arcus raises the initial margin requirement while the underlying market is closed. This makes it more capital-intensive to open or grow positions during thin overnight and weekend liquidity, reducing the risk of disorderly moves and liquidation cascades. Maintenance margin is not raised off-hours — existing, adequately-margined positions are not pushed toward liquidation simply because the market closed. Crypto perps have no off-hours regime; their margin requirements are constant. See Off-hours trading for the related funding and price-band behavior.Exact off-hours margin multipliers and per-market requirements are part of each market’s published parameters and may change. Always read the live values from the API rather than hard-coding them.