Margin modes

Two independent settings decide how your collateral behaves. They are often confused because both are called “modes,” but they control different things and apply at different scopes.

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Margin mode

Cross margin pools your account collateral across every cross position. Profit on one position offsets loss on another, so an account with several uncorrelated positions can withstand more adverse movement than any of them could alone. The trade is that a large enough loss on one position can consume the collateral supporting all of them. Isolated margin allocates a fixed amount to a single position. Loss on that position cannot exceed its allocation, and cannot reach anything else you hold. The trade is that it has no help: the position cannot draw on profit elsewhere, and it liquidates when its own allocation is exhausted even if your account is otherwise healthy. Margin mode is set per market. You can run BTC isolated and ETH cross in the same account. That combination creates separate risk units — the isolated BTC position and the cross group are evaluated for liquidation independently, and one being liquidated does not touch the other. Some markets are isolated-only. Those default to isolated and cannot be switched, because the protocol will not let their risk reach shared collateral.

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Position mode

One-way means one position per market. Buying while short reduces or reverses the short rather than opening a new long. This is the default and the right choice for most people — it is what most traders assume is happening. Hedge allows a long and a short in the same market simultaneously, held and closed independently. Useful for strategies that treat the two legs separately. Position mode is set per account, not per market. Switching it changes the behavior of every market at once.

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Changing modes

Both changes require the affected scope to be completely clear — no open positions and no live orders of any kind. “Clear” is stricter than most people expect. It means no open position, no resting orders, no conditional orders, no take-profit or stop-loss, and no reduce-only orders — anything that could become a position counts. The scope differs by setting:

• Margin mode checks only the market you are changing. Other markets can hold whatever they hold.
• Position mode checks every market in the account, because it changes how all of them behave.

The reason is straightforward: an in-flight change would leave positions opened under one set of rules being evaluated under another, and there is no correct way to interpret the result.

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Leverage is different

Unlike the two modes above, leverage can be changed with open positions and live orders. It is per market, and changes take effect immediately. Lowering leverage raises the initial margin requirement on what you already hold, so it is only permitted when you have enough free margin to cover the recalculated requirement. Raising it is constrained by the position’s size tier — larger positions cap out at lower leverage. See Leverage.

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Defaults

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Choosing

Cross if you hold several positions that are not all the same directional bet, and you want them to support each other. Understand that a failure in one can consume the collateral behind the others. Isolated if you want a hard ceiling on what one position can cost, or if you are running a strategy whose loss you want bounded regardless of what else happens in the account. Hedge mode only if a strategy genuinely requires holding both directions. It doubles the number of things that can be liquidated independently, and it is a common source of surprise for traders who expected the legs to net.

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