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Intention is a perpetual futures exchange. You post collateral, take a long or short position on an asset’s price, and close it whenever you like. There is no expiry date and you never hold the underlying asset. What makes it different from most exchanges is where the exchange runs. Matching, margin, liquidation, and funding are not a company’s servers sitting beside a blockchain — they execute inside the blockchain, in the same step that produces a block. Your order is not a request to a matching engine somewhere; it is a transaction, and its result is chain state anyone can verify.
Intention is currently on testnet. The exchange runs at trade.intention-testnet.xyz, collateral comes from a faucet and has no monetary value, and balances may be reset without notice.This is the only place in the Help Center that says so. Every other page describes how the exchange works, and that behavior is the same on testnet and on mainnet — the mechanics do not change when the money becomes real. Mainnet beta is planned for 1 November 2026; see Milestones.

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What you can do

Connect a wallet

Sign in with a wallet you already control. No account, no password.

Get collateral

Fund the account you trade from.

Place your first trade

A worked example, start to finish.

Close a position

Take the profit, or stop the loss.

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What a perpetual is

A perpetual future is a contract that tracks an asset’s price without ever settling. A traditional future has an expiry date; a perpetual does not, so a position can be held indefinitely. Three consequences follow, and they are most of what you need to understand before trading: You are trading price, not the asset. Going long BTC on Intention does not give you bitcoin. It gives you exposure — you profit if the price rises and lose if it falls. Your collateral and your P&L are both in USDC. Leverage multiplies both directions. Posting 100ofcollateralat20×controlsa100 of collateral at 20× controls a 2,000 position. A 1% move in your favour makes 20;a120; a 1% move against you loses 20. At high leverage, a small adverse move can consume your entire margin — see Liquidations. Holding costs or pays funding. Because nothing forces a perpetual’s price to converge on the spot price, a periodic payment between longs and shorts does that job instead. It is a transfer between traders, not a fee the exchange collects, and depending on which side you hold it can be income.

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What keeps it honest

The reason all of this runs on-chain rather than beside it: Nobody has to trust an operator’s word about what happened, because the record is the same one every validator produced independently.

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Before you trade anything

Leveraged trading can lose your entire deposit, and on a fast move it can happen in seconds. Liquidation is automatic, gives no warning, and is not a stop-loss — it does not guarantee a price. Read Risk disclosures before trading with money you cannot afford to lose.

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Where to go next

The trading screen

A tour of the interface, panel by panel.

FAQ

Common questions about the protocol and the exchange.

Glossary

Terms you will meet on the trading screen.

Fees

What a trade costs.