Spot, Perpetuals, CFDs, and Event Contracts: Know What You're Trading

Spot, perpetuals, CFDs, and event contracts can all appear in the same account, quoted in the same currency, moving on the same news. That surface similarity hides the fact that they are four different legal and economic objects. Before trading any of them, three questions matter: what do I actually hold, how does this price form, and what is the most I can lose?

This piece answers those three questions for each instrument, using them as the frame throughout. It is product education, not a recommendation of any of the four.

Spot: You Hold the Asset

A spot trade is the simplest of the four. You pay, and you own the asset — on BiFu, spot covers major digital assets such as BTC, ETH, and SOL, quoted in USDT, with limit and market orders and optional take-profit and stop-loss settings. There is no leverage on spot.

What you hold: the asset itself, credited to your account.

How the price forms: directly from buyers and sellers of that asset. The price you see is the price of the thing.

What you can lose: the value of what you bought, through price decline. There is no liquidation mechanism and no financing cost, but crypto prices can move sharply, and thin liquidity can make exits worse than the screen suggests. The loss is bounded by your outlay; it is not bounded above zero.

Spot is the baseline the other three deviate from. Everything below replaces ownership with a contract.

Perpetual Futures: A Contract With No Expiry

A perpetual future is a derivative that tracks an asset's price without an end date. You never hold the underlying — you hold a position whose gains and losses are measured against it. On BiFu, perpetuals are two-way (long or short), margined in USDT with cross or isolated modes, and priced on a dual track of mark price and index price, with a published liquidation mechanism.

What you hold: a contract position backed by margin, not the asset.

How the price forms: from trading in the perpetual itself, tethered to the underlying's index price by funding-style mechanisms. The contract price and the spot price are related but not identical.

What you can lose: more, faster. Leverage means a small adverse move produces a large loss against margin, and a position that breaches its maintenance level is liquidated under the published rules. Losses can consume the margin backing the position. The absence of an expiry date does not mean the absence of an exit forced by the risk engine.

The distinctive risk of perpetuals is time-plus-leverage: holding costs and margin pressure exist even when the price goes nowhere.

CFDs: Price Exposure Without the Underlying

A contract for difference (CFD) pays the difference between a position's opening and closing price. It is how BiFu offers forex pairs such as GBP/USD and EUR/USD, and commodities such as gold (XAU/USD). The CFD trader never owns the currency or the metal.

What you hold: a bilateral contract on price movement. No ownership, no delivery.

How the price forms: by reference to the underlying market — the currency pair or commodity price — with a spread. Forex prices respond to macro data, central-bank policy, rates, and liquidity conditions, which is where CFD exposure actually lives.

What you can lose: as a margin product, losses can accumulate quickly when the reference market moves against the position, and margin rules determine when a position is closed. Around major data releases, prices can gap and liquidity can thin, meaning exits may occur at worse levels than expected. Regulators such as the CFTC have long flagged leveraged forex products as a category where retail losses can be rapid; the warnings apply to the structure, not to any single venue.

A CFD on gold is not gold. That sentence sounds obvious and is still the single most common confusion in this product family.

Event Contracts: Trading an Outcome, Not a Price

An event outcome contract is the furthest from spot. You are not trading an asset's price at all — you are trading whether a defined event happens. On BiFu's prediction market, each event splits into a Yes contract and a No contract, priced in cents, with Yes and No summing to 100¢. The price is the market's implied probability of the outcome. Events span geopolitics, crypto, sports, weather, and economics; long-cycle events pay out at their settlement date, and short-cycle contracts such as bitcoin five-minute up/down settle every five minutes. Outcomes are defined to be objectively verifiable rather than decided by the venue's judgment.

What you hold: a contract that pays a fixed amount if the specified outcome occurs, and nothing if it does not.

How the price forms: from traders' aggregate view of probability. A 62¢ Yes price means the market currently prices a 62% chance — it is a market estimate, not a forecast from the platform, and it can be wrong.

What you can lose: the entire amount paid for the contract, which is the defining risk of the instrument. There is no partial residual value in the losing outcome. Prices can also swing hard as settlement approaches, and event definitions and settlement rules — what exactly counts as the outcome, and when — are part of the product and worth reading before trading. Event contracts are also subject to specific regulatory restrictions in some jurisdictions.

The Three Questions, Side by Side

If you can fill in this row from memory for the product in front of you, you know what you are trading. If you cannot, the product page and risk disclosures are the place to start — not the order button.

FAQ

What Is the Main Difference Between Spot and a Perpetual?

Spot is ownership of the asset with no leverage. A perpetual is a margined derivative position that tracks the asset's price without holding it, with liquidation rules and no expiry date.

Does Trading a Gold CFD Mean I Own Gold?

No. A CFD provides price exposure only. There is no ownership of, or claim to, the physical metal, and the position's risk is governed by margin rules rather than by holding an asset.

What Does an Event Contract's Price Mean?

It is the market's implied probability of the outcome, expressed in cents, with Yes and No prices summing to 100¢. It is a live market estimate, not an official prediction, and it can move sharply near settlement.

Which of These Instruments Can Lose More Than the Price Decline of an Asset?

Margin products — perpetuals and CFDs — can generate losses faster than an unleveraged holding because of leverage and liquidation mechanics. An event contract can lose 100% of the amount paid when the outcome resolves against it.