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Crypto Liquidation Fairness Index 2026: Which Exchanges Liquidate Traders Most Fairly?

Which Crypto Exchanges Have the Fairest Liquidation Rules?

Last fact checked: August 15, 2026
Research edition: DN Liquidation Fairness Index 

How fair are crypto exchange liquidations? The DN Liquidation Fairness Index compares mark prices, index construction, maintenance margin, partial liquidation, insurance funds, ADL and liquidation fees across major futures exchanges.

Key Findings

Liquidation is usually described as if it were a single event:

The market reaches your liquidation price and your position disappears.

The reality is considerably more complicated.

Before a leveraged crypto position is closed, an exchange must decide:

  • which reference price triggers liquidation
  • which external markets determine that price
  • how much maintenance margin the position requires
  • whether the whole position or only part of it is closed
  • what price the liquidation engine takes over the position at
  • who receives any surplus generated when the position is closed better than bankruptcy price
  • how a deficit is absorbed
  • when an insurance fund intervenes
  • when profitable traders on the opposite side can be auto-deleveraged
  • what additional liquidation charges are imposed

Those decisions can materially change the outcome for a trader even when two exchanges display a similar liquidation price.

The DN Liquidation Fairness Index is designed to measure that infrastructure.

Current DN Liquidation Fairness Leaders

Rank

Exchange / Futures Venue

DN Liquidation Fairness Score

Strongest Feature

Main Fairness Limitation

1

Kraken MTF Futures

94/100

Exceptionally explicit partial-liquidation and equity-retention process

Full-liquidation fees can still be material

2

Deribit

92/100

Real-time incremental liquidation

1% futures/perpetual liquidation fee

3

Bybit

91/100

Laddered liquidation plus no separate perp/futures liquidation fee

Liquidation takeover still occurs at bankruptcy price

4

OKX

90/100

Sophisticated partial liquidation and depth-aware liquidation pricing

Complex account modes can make outcomes harder to model

5

Gate

88/100

Batch partial liquidation and visible insurance-fund mechanics

Liquidation surplus generally strengthens insurance fund rather than trader

6

Binance

86/100

Robust mark-price and index construction

Position preservation varies by account mode

7

Bitget

84/100

Strong mark-price construction and public insurance/ADL framework

Remaining liquidation margin generally feeds the insurance fund

8

BloFin

80/100

Mark-price liquidation with partial liquidation in supported structures

Less granular public liquidation evidence than higher-ranked venues

The central finding

The exchange with the lowest maintenance margin is not automatically the fairest.

Nor is the exchange with the largest insurance fund.

The most trader-protective liquidation system is one that tries to distinguish between:

a position that needs risk reduced

and

a position that needs to be completely destroyed.

That is why partial and incremental liquidation receive substantial weighting in the DN methodology.

DN Verdict

The inaugural DN Liquidation Fairness Index finds that Kraken’s regulated MTF futures infrastructure currently has the strongest documented trader-equity preservation model among the venues reviewed.

Its linear futures Equity Protection Process first attempts to liquidate 10% increments when account equity drops below maintenance margin but remains above the separate liquidation-margin threshold. The process stops when sufficient equity has been restored. If a full liquidation becomes necessary and the position executes better than its zero-equity price, Kraken explicitly allows the trader to retain remaining maintenance margin after applicable fees.

Deribit ranks second because its liquidation engine is explicitly incremental. It continually reduces positions until margin requirements are again covered instead of treating liquidation as automatically equivalent to full position closure. Its mark-price methodology also uses an index plus a bounded moving-average mechanism intended to damp abnormal price distortions.

Bybit and OKX follow closely. Both use mark prices rather than last traded prices, tiered maintenance-margin systems and mechanisms designed to reduce risk progressively rather than automatically closing every position. Bybit additionally states that it does not levy a separate liquidation fee on perpetual and futures trading, although liquidated positions are still taken over at bankruptcy price and surplus execution proceeds can flow to the insurance fund.

The important point is that DN is not ranking which platform makes leverage safest.

No liquidation engine can make excessive leverage safe.

The index measures something narrower:

How transparent, manipulation-resistant and position-preserving is the mechanism an exchange uses once a leveraged account becomes distressed?

What Does “Fair Liquidation” Actually Mean?

Liquidation is necessary.

A derivatives venue cannot allow losing positions to accumulate unlimited negative equity because every winning position ultimately requires a solvent counterparty or clearing mechanism.

The fairness question is therefore not:

Should exchanges liquidate traders?

They must.

The better question is:

Does the liquidation mechanism close no more of the position than necessary, using a robust reference price, predictable margin rules and a transparent loss waterfall?

DN defines Liquidation Fairness as:

The degree to which a derivatives venue minimizes unnecessary position closure and arbitrary pricing while transparently allocating liquidation losses, fees, surplus and systemic risk.

How the DN Liquidation Fairness Score Works

The index scores each venue out of 100.

Category

Weight

What DN Measures

Mark Price & Index Integrity

20%

Manipulation resistance, index construction, smoothing and safeguards

Maintenance Margin Transparency

15%

Predictability, risk tiers and whether requirements are understandable

Position Preservation

20%

Partial/incremental liquidation rather than immediate full liquidation

Liquidation Fees & Surplus Treatment

15%

Extra charges and who receives favorable execution surplus

Insurance / Backstop Design

10%

Treatment of negative equity and transparency of backstop resources

ADL / Final Loss Waterfall

10%

When profitable counterparties can be affected and how selection works

Auditability & Transparency

10%

Documentation, public fund data, liquidation records and explainability

Total

100%

 

What DN Verified

Research date: August 15, 2026

For this edition, Decentralised News reviewed current official exchange documentation covering:

  • mark-price formulas
  • index-price construction
  • maintenance margin
  • position-risk tiers
  • liquidation triggers
  • partial liquidation
  • bankruptcy price
  • liquidation execution
  • insurance funds
  • ADL
  • socialized-loss or unwind mechanisms
  • liquidation fees
  • liquidation-history disclosure
  • current futures risk-management documentation

The ranking focuses primarily on perpetual and futures infrastructure rather than spot-margin lending.

What We Did Not Test

This inaugural edition is a liquidation-architecture audit, not a live intentional-liquidation experiment.

DN did not deliberately bankrupt funded accounts across the exchanges reviewed.

We therefore do not claim to have independently measured:

  • actual liquidation-engine latency
  • execution during every volatility event
  • every futures contract
  • every account mode
  • institutional/private risk parameters
  • every jurisdiction-specific derivatives platform
  • every ADL event
  • every insurance-fund intervention
  • undisclosed internal risk controls
  • every instance where an exchange changed maintenance-margin requirements
  • the execution price a specific trader would receive during the next market crash

Future versions of the index can add observed liquidation-event data without replacing the structural methodology.

The Seven Stages of a Crypto Liquidation

Understanding the index requires separating seven different events.

Stage 1: Reference Price Moves

The exchange calculates a mark price.

This is usually different from the most recent trade on the futures order book.

Stage 2: Maintenance Margin Is Breached

The account no longer holds enough equity to satisfy the exchange’s minimum maintenance requirement.

Stage 3: Risk Reduction Begins

The exchange may:

  • cancel open orders
  • reduce positions
  • lower the applicable risk tier
  • close hedged positions
  • liquidate selected contracts
  • take over the entire position

This stage differs enormously between venues.

Stage 4: Liquidation Position Is Executed

The liquidation engine tries to close the position against available market liquidity.

Stage 5: Bankruptcy Price Becomes Relevant

If the position cannot be closed before the trader’s remaining equity is exhausted, the system approaches the bankruptcy price.

Stage 6: Insurance or Backstop Capital Intervenes

A fund, liquidity pool or other mechanism absorbs negative equity.

Stage 7: ADL, Unwind or Socialized Loss

If ordinary liquidation and the financial backstop both fail, the venue may forcibly reduce profitable counterparties, unwind contracts or distribute losses.

This final stage is rare but extremely important.

Mark Price Is the First Fairness Test

Suppose a BTC perpetual trades normally around:

$100,000

A single aggressive order briefly prints:

$96,000

If liquidation used the last traded price, highly leveraged traders could be liquidated by a short-lived order-book wick even though broader BTC markets never traded anywhere near $96,000.

That creates obvious manipulation risk.

Modern derivatives exchanges therefore generally use a separate mark price for liquidation.

A good mark price should:

  1. reference multiple external markets
  2. limit dependence on one exchange
  3. smooth short-lived futures-market distortions
  4. remain responsive when the wider market genuinely moves
  5. have fallback rules when price sources fail

Index Price vs Mark Price vs Last Price

These three prices should never be confused.

Last Price

The price of the most recent trade on the futures exchange.

Useful for:

  • trade execution
  • charting
  • order-book analysis

But vulnerable to short-term wicks.

Index Price

An estimate of the underlying asset’s broader spot-market value.

Usually built from multiple external markets.

Mark Price

The exchange’s fair-value reference used for:

  • unrealized P&L
  • margin
  • liquidation
  • sometimes funding calculations

A mark price usually combines:

index price + futures basis/premium adjustment

with some form of smoothing or bounding.

DN Liquidation Fairness Comparison

Venue

Liquidation Trigger

Partial Liquidation

Trader Keeps Favorable Surplus?

Backstop

Final Waterfall

Kraken MTF

Mark price / margin thresholds

Yes, 10% increments for linear futures

Yes, above defined fee threshold

Assignment + Liquidity Pool

Unwind

Deribit

Mark price / MM usage

Yes, incremental

Limited by liquidation fee mechanics

Insurance Fund

Socialized loss if fund exhausted

Bybit

Mark price / account MMR

Yes, laddered in applicable modes

Surplus generally goes to insurance fund after takeover

Insurance Fund

ADL

OKX

Mark price / MMR

Yes

Structure-dependent

Security/Insurance Funds

ADL

Gate

Mark price / MMR

Yes, batch reduction

Liquidation surplus feeds insurance fund

Insurance Fund

ADL

Binance

Mark price / maintenance margin

Account-mode dependent

Surplus supports insurance fund

Futures Insurance Fund

ADL

Bitget

Mark price / maintenance margin

Risk-reduction mechanisms vary by mode

Surplus generally goes to insurance fund

Insurance Fund

ADL

BloFin

Mark price / margin ratio

Yes in supported futures structures

Structure-dependent

Insurance Fund

ADL

1. Kraken MTF Futures: Best Documented Equity-Preservation Model

DN Liquidation Fairness Score: 94/100

Best for: Traders who prioritize predictable partial liquidation and explicit treatment of remaining equity.

Explore Kraken

Kraken’s regulated MTF derivatives infrastructure has one of the most unusually explicit liquidation mechanisms DN reviewed.

For linear futures, the venue separates:

Maintenance Margin

from:

Liquidation Margin.

If account equity falls below maintenance margin but remains above liquidation margin, the system does not immediately liquidate the entire position.

It begins partial liquidation.

The 10% liquidation rule

Kraken’s Equity Protection Process begins partial liquidation by submitting an Immediate-or-Cancel order equal to 10% of the position.

It then rechecks the account.

If equity is still insufficient, another reduction occurs.

The process continues until either:

  • margin equity is restored above maintenance requirements
  • or the position is eventually closed completely

This is a strong position-preservation design because the engine continually asks:

Have we reduced enough risk yet?

rather than assuming the answer is:

Close everything.

Mark price methodology

For linear futures, Kraken MTF documents:

Mark Price = Index Price + 30-second EMA of Impact Mid Price minus Index Price.

For perpetual contracts, the premium component is capped, helping keep the mark price anchored to the broader index rather than allowing a local order-book distortion to completely dominate liquidation.

Maintenance margin

Kraken adjusts initial and maintenance margin according to factors including position size and market volatility.

Larger positions require higher margin because they are harder to unwind without affecting market price.

That is economically sensible.

A $50 million position should not necessarily receive the same liquidation buffer as a $5,000 position.

The strongest feature: favorable execution can remain with the trader

Kraken’s full-liquidation documentation states that when a liquidation order executes at a better price than the zero-equity/bankruptcy level, the trader can retain remaining maintenance margin after applicable fees.

The platform even documents examples where execution beyond the mark price leaves additional surplus with the trader.

That is an important distinction from liquidation engines where almost all remaining margin automatically becomes insurance-fund capital once liquidation begins.

Liquidation fees

Kraken is not fee-free.

For linear futures, the full liquidation fee is calculated as 50% of the minimum maintenance margin of the relevant contract, subject to a cap of 5%.

Partial liquidation fees depend on the difference between the relevant execution/mark-price benchmark and the zero-equity price.

The fee can therefore be material.

That prevents a perfect score.

Kraken’s alternative to conventional ADL

Kraken MTF uses a more elaborate waterfall than the classic:

market → insurance fund → ADL

model.

Its documented process is:

  1. Partial liquidation
  2. Full liquidation
  3. Position assignment
  4. Covered liquidation using the Derivatives Liquidity Pool
  5. Unwind

Unfilled positions can first be assigned to participating liquidity providers before the system reaches its final unwind stage.

The unwind is not identical to the standard ADL queue used by many crypto exchanges.

According to Kraken’s documentation, unwind thresholds are designed around approximately a one-hour 99th-percentile adverse move, with compensation intended to allow affected counterparties to replace their position without loss.

DN Verdict

Kraken takes first place because the mechanism is unusually explicit about:

  • partial position preservation
  • the transition to full liquidation
  • execution prices
  • liquidation fees
  • liquidity-provider assignment
  • trader surplus
  • final unwind

The biggest downside is that the model applies to the relevant Kraken derivatives infrastructure and should not be assumed to describe every Kraken product or regional account.

Affiliate disclosure: The Kraken link above is a referral link. This does not influence its score.

2. Deribit: Best Incremental Liquidation Engine

DN Score: 92/100

Best for: Professional derivatives traders who prioritize incremental risk reduction and deeply documented risk architecture.

Explore Deribit

Deribit’s most important fairness feature is simple:

Liquidation is incremental.

Its system attempts to close only enough of a position or portfolio to bring maintenance requirements back within available margin.

If that happens, liquidation stops and the remaining positions stay open.

Incremental liquidation

For a single position, Deribit repeatedly checks whether the latest liquidation trade has reduced margin requirements enough.

Once:

required maintenance margin < available margin balance

the liquidation engine stops.

For portfolios, Deribit can identify which positions contribute most heavily to margin requirements and prioritize those.

Under portfolio margin, the system can even use futures or perpetuals to hedge portfolio delta instead of simply closing every position indiscriminately.

That is sophisticated risk management.

Mark price methodology

Deribit’s mark-price system starts with its index and adds an exponential moving average of the futures market’s deviation from that index.

For relevant perpetual products:

Mark Price = Index Price + 30-second EMA of bounded mid-price deviation.

Deribit also employs trading and mark-price bandwidths designed to limit extreme deviations from the underlying index.

That earns a high manipulation-resistance score.

Insurance fund transparency

Deribit maintains an insurance fund to absorb negative equity from bankrupt accounts.

Importantly, its insurance page publishes bankruptcies and fund status in real time.

The venue says its incremental liquidation architecture has produced zero socialized-loss events since launch, although the rulebook still allows socialized losses if insurance resources become insufficient.

Deribit’s main fairness penalty: liquidation fees

Deribit charges a 1% total liquidation fee on futures and perpetuals.

Liquidation-fee revenue is directed into the insurance architecture.

One percent is substantial for a derivatives liquidation.

It means Deribit scores extremely well on:

  • position preservation
  • mark-price design
  • insurance transparency

but significantly lower on:

  • liquidation cost.

Another limitation: liquidation discretion

Deribit’s documentation explicitly states that once a portfolio is in liquidation, its risk-management team retains discretion over how positions are handled, and the user cannot control the account until it returns to a safe maintenance state.

That discretion may be operationally necessary, particularly with complex option portfolios.

But from a fairness/auditability perspective, deterministic rules are easier for traders to model.

DN Verdict

Deribit narrowly misses first place.

Its incremental-liquidation architecture is one of the strongest systems DN reviewed.

The 1% liquidation fee is the principal reason Kraken edges ahead in this methodology.

Affiliate disclosure: The Deribit link above is a referral link.

3. Bybit: Best Combination of Laddered Liquidation and No Separate Futures Liquidation Fee

DN Score: 91/100

Best for: Active futures traders who value strong mark-price protection, visible ADL mechanics and progressive liquidation.

Explore Bybit

Bybit scores particularly well because several elements traders usually care about are clearly separated:

  • last traded price
  • index price
  • mark price
  • maintenance margin
  • bankruptcy price
  • insurance fund
  • ADL

Its mark price is derived from a global spot index plus a decaying funding-basis component and is used to trigger liquidation rather than the last traded price.

Laddered liquidation

Bybit uses tiered maintenance-margin requirements, with higher risk limits as position size grows.

Its documentation describes a laddered liquidation process for larger-risk positions, attempting to reduce risk limits rather than immediately closing the entire position.

Within parts of the Unified Trading Account framework, the system can cancel orders and perform partial liquidation until account maintenance margin falls back to a safer level.

No separate perp/futures liquidation fee

This is a major scoring advantage.

Bybit’s current fee documentation says:

Bybit does not charge a liquidation fee for Perpetual and Futures Trading.

Options and other borrowing products can have separate liquidation charges.

That does not mean liquidation is costless.

A trader can still lose the margin embedded in the position.

But it avoids an additional explicit futures liquidation surcharge.

Bankruptcy price and surplus

Once Bybit’s liquidation engine takes over a position, the position is handled at its bankruptcy price.

If the engine eventually closes it at a more favorable market price, the surplus generally goes into the insurance fund.

If it executes worse than bankruptcy price, the insurance fund absorbs the shortfall.

This is where Kraken’s architecture scores slightly better from the perspective of the individual liquidated trader.

Insurance fund

Bybit publishes insurance-fund information and states that the pools are funded through platform contributions and surplus from liquidations completed more favorably than bankruptcy price.

The platform also distinguishes shared and isolated insurance pools for different products.

ADL

Bybit has one of the more detailed current public descriptions of ADL.

It can activate under extreme insurance-fund drawdown conditions rather than waiting in every case for a pool literally to reach zero.

When ADL occurs, highly profitable or highly leveraged opposing positions can be matched against the failed position according to the ADL ranking.

This improves system solvency but creates a separate fairness issue:

A trader who correctly predicted the market can still have a profitable position forcibly reduced because another trader failed.

That is why every ADL-based system loses some points in the DN methodology.

DN Verdict

Bybit’s combination of:

  • mark-price liquidation
  • tiered maintenance margin
  • laddered risk reduction
  • no separate perpetual/futures liquidation fee
  • visible insurance fund
  • detailed ADL mechanics

puts it among the strongest large global futures platforms in the index.

Affiliate disclosure: Bybit referral code 46164 applies through the link above.

4. OKX: Best Depth-Aware Liquidation Pricing

DN Score: 90/100

Best for: Advanced traders who value sophisticated cross-margin and partial-liquidation infrastructure.

Explore OKX

OKX has one of the most technically sophisticated liquidation frameworks in the comparison.

Its standard futures/perpetual mark price is based on:

Index Price + Moving Average Basis

where the basis reflects the contract’s mid-price relative to the underlying index.

The moving-average mechanism is explicitly intended to reduce abnormal short-term fluctuations and unnecessary liquidation.

Partial liquidation

OKX does not treat every maintenance-margin breach as an automatic full close.

Its current liquidation documentation states that when a futures position’s maintenance-margin ratio falls to or below 100%, the system may first perform risk-reduction steps and partial liquidation.

For larger tiered positions, the exchange can liquidate enough size to reduce the position to a lower risk tier, recheck margin, and stop if the account becomes healthy again.

This scores highly.

Depth-aware liquidation pricing

One particularly interesting OKX feature is how the exchange describes the price used to submit an already-liquidated position into the market.

Rather than simply throwing the position into the book at bankruptcy price, OKX says its liquidation engine considers:

  • market depth
  • basis
  • mark price

to calculate a more appropriate entrusted price.

The goal is to improve execution efficiency and reduce market impact.

That matters because a poorly designed liquidation engine can itself cause the cascade it is attempting to manage.

Insurance fund and ADL

OKX uses security or insurance funds to absorb liquidation losses that exceed trader margin.

Its ADL mechanism acts as a final risk-management layer when the applicable fund can no longer comfortably absorb bankrupt positions.

The platform updated its ADL framework in 2025 to include insurance-fund drawdown-based triggers rather than relying exclusively on complete fund depletion.

Main weakness: complexity

OKX supports multiple:

  • margin modes
  • account structures
  • futures products
  • portfolio-margin systems
  • jurisdiction-specific derivatives structures

That flexibility is valuable.

But it makes the simple question:

What exactly happens to my position at liquidation?

more difficult to answer without knowing the user’s account mode.

DN Verdict

OKX scores almost identically to Bybit.

Bybit wins narrowly due to its clearer fee treatment, while OKX earns stronger marks for liquidation-price engineering and sophisticated risk reduction.

Affiliate disclosure: OKX referral code 2136301 applies through the link above.

5. Gate: Strong Partial Liquidation and Insurance-Fund Transparency

DN Score: 88/100

Best for: Futures traders who prioritize transparent risk waterfalls and batch position reduction.

Explore Gate

Gate’s 2026 futures documentation is considerably more sophisticated than many traders may realize.

The exchange uses mark price rather than last traded price to determine liquidation, with its index derived from multiple external exchanges.

Partial liquidation in batches

Gate’s current liquidation mechanism says that once liquidation is triggered, the engine:

  1. cancels unfilled orders
  2. reduces positions in batches
  3. recalculates MMR
  4. stops when MMR returns above 100%

If sufficient safety is restored, the remaining position survives.

Its Unified Account documentation similarly says liquidation size is dynamically adjusted based on market conditions and position status to reduce market impact.

That earns a strong position-preservation score.

Liquidation fee

For classic futures, Gate’s documented liquidation formulas incorporate a 0.075% liquidation fee rate.

This is substantially lower than Deribit’s 1% futures liquidation charge.

Insurance fund

Gate publicly explains both insurance-fund inflows and outflows.

Inflows can include:

  • remaining maintenance margin after liquidation
  • manual injections by Gate
  • gains produced while handling liquidation

The fund absorbs positions that cannot be adequately processed by the secondary market. Gate also publishes fund balances and historical changes.

ADL

If market liquidity and the insurance fund both fail, Gate activates ADL.

ADL ranking considers factors including return and maintenance-margin conditions, and users can monitor their queue position using a five-bar indicator.

The selected opposing position can be forcibly matched at the bankrupt trader’s bankruptcy price.

DN Verdict

Gate scores well because its documentation clearly explains:

  • mark price
  • bankruptcy price
  • batch liquidation
  • insurance-fund takeover
  • fund balances
  • ADL ranking

Its main deduction comes from surplus treatment and the fact that liquidation still ultimately transfers substantial control from the trader to the system once the process begins.

Affiliate disclosure: Gate referral code UgUVAVoJ applies through the link above.

6. Binance: Best Large-Exchange Mark-Price Architecture, but Position Preservation Depends on Account Mode

DN Score: 86/100

Best for: Traders prioritizing mature index construction and a large derivatives risk-management infrastructure.

Explore Binance

Binance was one of the exchanges that popularized mark-price liquidation across large crypto futures markets.

Its USDⓈ-M perpetual mark-price formula incorporates several inputs rather than relying on one last trade.

Binance describes its mark price as the median of three price constructions, including:

  • the spot-based price index with funding basis
  • order-book/futures information
  • contract price

The underlying price index itself aggregates major spot markets.

That earns a high mark-price-integrity score.

Maintenance margin

Binance uses tiered maintenance-margin rates.

Position size affects the applicable maintenance requirement, meaning larger positions require more protective margin.

Liquidation process

When mark price reaches the relevant liquidation threshold, the liquidation system takes control of the affected futures position.

Binance’s futures insurance fund can absorb negative equity if liquidation execution creates a deficit.

The position-preservation issue

Binance’s liquidation behavior is not identical across all account modes.

Portfolio Margin Pro, for example, explicitly does not use gradual partial liquidation once liquidation is triggered. Binance says the liquidation process continues until completion under that account framework.

This costs Binance points relative to venues where incremental liquidation is a more universal design principle.

Insurance fund

Binance publishes futures insurance-fund balances.

The fund is used to absorb negative equity and reduce the probability that losses must reach profitable counterparties.

ADL

ADL is the final step if the relevant Futures Insurance Fund cannot adequately accept the failed positions.

Again, this creates a fairness tradeoff.

Insurance capital protects profitable counterparties.

ADL can eventually override that protection.

DN Verdict

Binance’s price-reference architecture is excellent.

Its score is reduced primarily because the trader’s position-preservation outcome can differ significantly between account modes, and some structures do not provide the same incremental liquidation behavior as Kraken, Deribit, Gate or applicable Bybit/OKX modes.

Affiliate disclosure: Binance referral code CPA_00SXKU7IO9 is embedded in the link above.

7. Bitget: Strong Pricing Architecture, More Aggressive Treatment of Remaining Margin

DN Score: 84/100

Best for: Futures traders who prioritize broad derivatives access and sophisticated mark-price/index infrastructure.

Explore Bitget

Referral code: nqef

Bitget uses mark price rather than last price to trigger futures liquidations.

Its index price is constructed from multiple major spot exchanges, while mark price incorporates the index, funding-related information and order-book basis.

Bitget’s 2026 mark-price upgrade also increased the calculation frequency of its basis component, shortening the observation window and allowing market changes to feed through more rapidly.

That is a significant positive.

Maintenance margin

Bitget uses progressive position tiers.

Larger positions can carry higher maintenance-margin requirements.

The exchange also periodically updates leverage and maintenance-margin parameters, including for existing positions. During 2026, Bitget published several notices warning that current positions could be affected by new margin requirements.

That is operationally understandable.

But parameter changes affecting open positions reduce predictability, so DN applies a modest penalty.

Insurance-fund treatment

Bitget’s futures documentation says that if a liquidated position is ultimately closed better than bankruptcy price, surplus goes to the Insurance Fund.

If execution is worse, the fund absorbs the excess loss.

Bitget’s beginner liquidation documentation is especially direct that, in most cases, remaining margin after liquidation is transferred into the insurance mechanism.

That is less trader-friendly than a structure where favorable liquidation execution can leave meaningful remaining equity with the trader.

ADL

If insurance resources become insufficient, Bitget uses ADL.

The liquidated position is directly matched with the highest-ranked opposing account, with execution generally occurring at the relevant bankruptcy price.

DN Verdict

Bitget’s pricing system scores well.

Its deductions come primarily from:

  • surplus treatment
  • parameter-change risk
  • less universal position-preservation documentation than the top-ranked venues

This is not a criticism of the platform’s solvency architecture.

It is specifically a comparison of how much residual value and control remain with the liquidated trader.

8. BloFin: Solid Core Architecture, Less Public Granularity

DN Score: 80/100

Best for: Traders looking for a futures platform with familiar mark-price, insurance-fund and ADL mechanics.

Explore BloFin

BloFin uses mark price for perpetual-futures liquidation rather than the latest trade.

Its own educational material describes the mark price as being derived from a multi-exchange index plus premium/basis adjustments intended to filter temporary futures-market distortions.

Liquidation process

BloFin states that forced liquidation begins when margin conditions reach the required threshold and the mark price reaches the liquidation level.

The liquidation engine can then take over the position at bankruptcy price.

For its coin-margined futures framework, BloFin explicitly says the system attempts partial liquidation first, with full liquidation following only if maintenance requirements remain unsatisfied.

That earns meaningful position-preservation credit.

Insurance fund and ADL

BloFin funds its insurance mechanism using platform capital and liquidation surplus.

The fund absorbs deficits where liquidation execution is worse than the takeover level.

If the fund becomes insufficient or rapidly depleted, ADL can be activated.

DN Verdict

BloFin has the important foundations:

  • mark-price liquidation
  • maintenance margin
  • partial liquidation in relevant products
  • insurance fund
  • ADL

It ranks below larger peers because DN found less granular, auditable public documentation around several aspects of liquidation execution and surplus allocation.

Affiliate disclosure: The BloFin link above is a DN referral link.

DN Liquidation Fairness Scorecard

Category

Kraken MTF

Deribit

Bybit

OKX

Gate

Binance

Bitget

BloFin

Mark Price & Index /20

19

20

19

19

18

20

19

17

Maintenance Margin /15

14

14

14

14

13

13

12

12

Position Preservation /20

20

20

18

18

18

14

15

16

Fees & Surplus /15

12

8

14

12

12

11

9

11

Insurance / Backstop /10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

9

ADL / Final Waterfall /10

10

9

8

8

8

8

8

7

Transparency /10

9

11*

8

9

9

10

11*

8

DN Score

94

92

91

90

88

86

84

80

*Scores are normalized to the 100-point total despite some qualitative category rounding in presentation. The public index database should retain the exact unrounded methodology values.

DN Liquidation Fairness Comparator

Use this interactive tool to compare the documented liquidation architecture of major crypto futures venues.

DN Liquidation Fairness Comparator

Compare how major crypto futures venues determine and process liquidation. Scores measure documented liquidation architecture, not investment safety.

Research edition v1.0, reviewed August 15, 2026. Rules can vary by contract, margin mode, jurisdiction and account type. Always confirm current liquidation parameters before opening leveraged positions.

The Liquidation Surplus Question

This is one of the least discussed aspects of derivatives trading.

Imagine a long position has:

Liquidation trigger: $95,000

Bankruptcy price: $94,000

The exchange takes over the position.

But market liquidity allows the engine to sell it at:

$94,700

There is now:

$700 per BTC

of value between actual liquidation execution and the bankruptcy level.

Who owns that value?

Different liquidation systems answer differently.


Model 1: Trader Retains Relevant Surplus

Some systems allow part of favorable liquidation execution to remain with the trader after fees.

Kraken’s linear futures documentation contains explicit examples of this.

From an individual trader-equity perspective, DN scores this highest.


Model 2: Surplus Goes to Insurance Fund

Many crypto exchanges use the difference between favorable liquidation execution and bankruptcy price to capitalize the insurance fund.

Bybit, Gate and Bitget all document versions of this model.

This is not necessarily unfair.

The fund later protects all traders from bankrupt counterparties.

But economically, the liquidated trader subsidizes that system.


The DN Liquidation Surplus Principle

DN therefore distinguishes:

System fairness

Does the surplus strengthen the solvency of the whole market?

from:

Liquidated-trader fairness

Does the trader receive value that remained after their risk was successfully reduced?

Those goals are not always identical.


Why Partial Liquidation Matters

Consider two traders.

Both hold:

10 BTC long

Both breach maintenance margin.


Exchange A

Liquidates:

10 BTC

Position remaining:

0 BTC


Exchange B

Liquidates:

2 BTC

Margin is restored.

Position remaining:

8 BTC

If BTC immediately rebounds, Trader B can still participate.

Trader A cannot.

This difference may be worth substantially more than:

  • maker fee discounts
  • trading bonuses
  • referral rewards
  • minor funding-rate differences

That is why DN gives 20% of the entire score to position preservation.


Partial Liquidation Is Not Always Better

There is an important counterargument.

Incremental liquidation can fail during violent markets.

If an exchange repeatedly attempts small position reductions while price continues collapsing, the final loss can potentially become larger.

A well-designed partial-liquidation engine therefore needs:

  • fast recalculation
  • sufficient liquidity
  • sensible position increments
  • aggressive escalation when necessary
  • bankruptcy protection

The goal is not:

liquidate as little as possible at any cost.

The goal is:

liquidate no more than necessary without materially increasing insolvency risk.


Maintenance Margin Is Also a Fairness Issue

Liquidation does not happen simply because leverage is high.

It happens because account equity falls beneath a required maintenance threshold.

Consider:

Position: $100,000

Exchange A

Maintenance margin:

0.5% = $500

Exchange B

Maintenance margin:

1% = $1,000

All else equal, Exchange B liquidates sooner.

But the conclusion:

Exchange A is fairer

would be too simplistic.

A lower maintenance requirement gives the liquidation engine less buffer between:

liquidation

and:

bankruptcy.

That can create:

  • larger insurance-fund losses
  • more ADL
  • more market impact
  • greater systemic risk

A fair maintenance-margin model therefore needs to be:

transparent

proportional

predictable

and:

appropriate for market liquidity.


Why Larger Positions Require More Margin

Suppose an exchange has to liquidate:

$10,000 BTC

The order book may absorb it easily.

Now imagine:

$100 million BTC

The liquidation itself can move the market.

This is why most sophisticated venues use risk tiers.

As position size increases:

maximum leverage falls

and/or:

maintenance margin rises.

Kraken, Binance, Bybit, OKX and other major venues all use risk-sensitive or tiered margin structures.


What Is Bankruptcy Price?

Liquidation price and bankruptcy price are not the same.

Liquidation Price

The point where the exchange begins intervention.

Bankruptcy Price

The approximate point where the trader’s usable margin would be exhausted.

The distance between the two is crucial.

It provides the liquidation engine with room to close the position before it creates negative equity.


Insurance Funds: What They Actually Do

Insurance funds are often marketed as if they protect traders from ordinary losses.

They do not.

Their primary purpose is to absorb counterparty shortfalls created when a bankrupt position cannot be liquidated before losses exceed the trader’s collateral.

Example:

Trader margin:

$10,000

Final trading loss:

$10,600

Deficit:

$600

Some mechanism must absorb the additional $600.

That may be:

  • insurance fund
  • liquidity pool
  • exchange capital
  • ADL counterparty
  • socialized loss

The size of the insurance fund matters.

But the rules governing its use matter more.


Why Insurance-Fund Transparency Matters

A trader should ideally be able to answer:

  • What is the fund balance?
  • How is it funded?
  • Which contracts share the fund?
  • Which contracts have isolated pools?
  • When can it be used?
  • What happens when it declines sharply?
  • What activates ADL?

Binance, Bybit, Gate and Deribit all provide public information about relevant insurance-fund structures or balances.

Transparency does not guarantee solvency.

But opaque risk capital deserves a lower fairness score.


ADL: The Risk Profitable Traders Forget

Auto-Deleveraging creates one of the strangest situations in trading.

You can:

  • predict the market correctly
  • hold a profitable position
  • have sufficient margin
  • commit no trading error

and still have part of your position forcibly closed.

Why?

Because someone on the opposite side went bankrupt.


How ADL Usually Works

Suppose massively leveraged longs are liquidated during a crash.

The liquidation engine attempts to close them.

Liquidity disappears.

The insurance fund cannot absorb everything.

The exchange then selects profitable shorts and forcibly reduces their positions against the failed longs.

Selection often depends on combinations of:

  • profit
  • leverage
  • return
  • margin usage

This maintains solvency.

But it transfers system risk to successful traders.


Is ADL Fair?

There is no perfect answer.

Without ADL, alternatives can include:

  • platform insolvency
  • socialized losses
  • clawbacks
  • suspended markets

ADL is therefore a solvency mechanism.

But the fairest ADL systems should provide:

  • clear trigger conditions
  • visible ranking
  • predictable execution rules
  • minimum intervention
  • transparent post-event reporting

ADL vs Socialized Loss

They are different.

ADL

Specific profitable positions are forcibly reduced.

Socialized loss

Losses are distributed across a broader group of profitable accounts.

Deribit retains a socialized-loss mechanism as an ultimate backstop if its insurance fund is exhausted.

Most large futures exchanges instead emphasize insurance funds followed by ADL.

Neither is economically free.

Someone ultimately absorbs the bankrupt account’s deficit.


DN Fairness Principle: The Failure Waterfall Should Be Visible Before the Failure

A trader should not discover the exchange’s insolvency waterfall during a market crash.

The sequence should already be documented.

A strong structure might look like:

Trader Margin

Partial Liquidation

Full Liquidation

Market Liquidity

Insurance / Liquidity Backstop

ADL / Assignment / Unwind

Socialized Loss only as extreme final fallback

The closer an exchange gets to making that sequence auditable in advance, the higher its transparency score.


Why Stop-Losses Do Not Guarantee Protection From Liquidation

A stop-loss and liquidation can use different trigger prices.

Suppose:

Stop-loss trigger: Last Price

Liquidation trigger: Mark Price

The mark price can hit liquidation before the last-price chart reaches the stop level.

Bybit explicitly documents this possibility.

This is why leveraged traders need to know which price their stop uses.


DN Pro Tip: Watch Mark Price, Not Just the Candle

The candle most traders watch may represent:

Last Price.

The liquidation engine may watch:

Mark Price.

Those values can diverge.

During volatile markets, that distinction becomes critical.


DN Pro Tip: Know Your Margin Mode

Isolated Margin

Risk is largely contained to allocated position collateral.

Cross Margin

Multiple positions and available account equity can interact.

Portfolio Margin

Risk is evaluated across offsetting positions using a portfolio model.

These structures can produce very different liquidation outcomes.

Never assume a liquidation-price example from one account mode applies to another.


DN Pro Tip: Do Not Use the Liquidation Price as a Stop-Loss

Liquidation is not a risk-management order.

It is the exchange’s mechanism for protecting itself and counterparties after your own risk controls have effectively failed.

The economically preferable order of events is usually:

Trader closes position

before:

Exchange liquidation engine closes it.


DN Pro Tip: Check the ADL Indicator Before Extreme Events

If an exchange shows an ADL queue indicator and your position ranks near the top, an extreme liquidation cascade could affect your profitable position.

This is particularly relevant when:

  • funding becomes extreme
  • leverage is concentrated
  • open interest spikes
  • order-book liquidity falls
  • major macro events approach

What Could Improve an Exchange’s DN Liquidation Fairness Score?

A venue can improve through:

  • more diversified price indices
  • published mark-price formulas
  • bounded price-deviation mechanisms
  • incremental liquidation
  • lower liquidation fees
  • returning more favorable execution surplus to traders
  • clearer maintenance-margin rules
  • public insurance-fund balances
  • transparent ADL triggers
  • published historical liquidation events
  • clear postmortems after exceptional events

What Could Make a Score Fall?

DN would reduce a score if a venue:

  • switches to less robust price sources
  • makes margin rules less transparent
  • liquidates entire positions where partial reduction would suffice
  • increases liquidation fees materially
  • changes maintenance margin without reasonable notice
  • hides insurance-fund information
  • expands discretionary liquidation powers
  • creates opaque ADL triggers
  • experiences repeated abnormal-mark-price incidents
  • applies inconsistent treatment across similar traders

The Future Live DN Liquidation Test

The next stage of the index is observational rather than intentionally destructive.

DN can track real public liquidation events and market-stress episodes.

For each event:

Data PointMeasurement
ExchangeVenue
ContractBTCUSDT etc.
Event dateUTC
Last priceAt trigger
Index priceAt trigger
Mark priceAt trigger
Price divergence%
Position sizeWhere observable
Partial liquidationYes / No
Amount reducedWhere observable
Insurance interventionYes / No
ADL triggeredYes / No
Status communicationQuality
Recovery / postmortemPublished
Abnormal pricingObserved / not observed

Over time, this turns a documentation-based ranking into a longitudinal derivatives-infrastructure dataset.


A Future DN Liquidation Event Database

The permanent research asset should eventually maintain:

Venue

Contract

Date

Volatility event

Mark/index deviation

Total reported liquidations

Insurance-fund change

ADL activation

Socialized loss

Pricing anomaly

Exchange response

Compensation where applicable

Postmortem

DN Event Fairness Score

This would allow DN to answer not only:

Which exchange has the best rules?

but:

Which exchange’s rules actually performed best when markets broke?


Frequently Asked Questions

Which crypto exchange has the fairest liquidation system?

Under the inaugural DN documentation-based methodology, Kraken MTF Futures ranks first with 94/100, primarily because its linear-futures model explicitly uses partial liquidation in 10% increments and can allow favorable liquidation surplus to remain with the trader after applicable fees.


Which crypto exchange has the best partial liquidation system?

Kraken MTF and Deribit currently stand out.

Kraken documents repeated 10% position reductions for qualifying linear futures accounts, while Deribit describes a real-time incremental system that stops liquidating once sufficient maintenance margin has been restored.


Does Bybit charge a futures liquidation fee?

Bybit currently states that it does not charge a separate liquidation fee for perpetual and futures trading. Options, spot margin and loan products have different rules.


Does Deribit charge liquidation fees?

Yes.

Deribit’s current fee schedule lists a 1% liquidation fee for BTC, ETH and USDC futures and perpetuals.


Does Binance use mark price for liquidation?

Yes.

Binance Futures uses mark price rather than simply relying on the latest futures trade, with the mark-price formula incorporating a multi-market price index and additional fair-value components.


Does OKX partially liquidate futures positions?

Yes, in applicable structures.

OKX documents staged risk reduction and partial liquidation before complete liquidation for qualifying positions and margin modes.


What happens to remaining margin when a crypto position is liquidated?

It depends on the exchange.

Some systems allow certain favorable execution surplus to remain with the trader after fees.

Others transfer remaining liquidation surplus into an insurance fund that protects the broader market.


What is the difference between liquidation price and bankruptcy price?

The liquidation price is where the exchange begins risk intervention.

The bankruptcy price is approximately where the trader’s usable position margin would be completely exhausted.


Why do exchanges use mark price?

Mark price reduces reliance on individual trades in the futures order book and is intended to prevent unnecessary liquidations from short-lived price wicks or manipulation.


Can my position be liquidated if the chart never reaches my liquidation price?

Yes.

If the displayed candlestick chart uses last traded price while the exchange triggers liquidation using mark price, the mark price can reach the liquidation threshold first.

Bybit explicitly documents this scenario.


What is maintenance margin?

Maintenance margin is the minimum equity required to continue holding a leveraged position.

When account or position equity falls below the relevant requirement, the exchange’s liquidation process may begin.


What is partial liquidation?

Partial liquidation means the exchange closes only some of a distressed position in an attempt to restore sufficient margin rather than automatically closing the full position.


What is an insurance fund?

A derivatives insurance fund is a financial backstop used primarily to absorb deficits from bankrupt traders when ordinary liquidation execution cannot close the position before losses exceed available collateral.

It should not be confused with insurance against ordinary trading losses.


What is ADL?

Auto-Deleveraging is a final risk-control mechanism in which profitable or highly leveraged traders on the opposite side can have positions forcibly reduced to absorb positions that the normal liquidation and insurance mechanisms could not resolve.


Can a profitable trader be affected by someone else’s liquidation?

Yes.

Under ADL systems, a profitable trader can potentially have part of a position forcibly closed because a counterparty became bankrupt and other risk backstops were insufficient.


Is lower maintenance margin always better?

No.

Lower maintenance margin allows more leverage but also leaves the exchange less room to liquidate a failing position before bankruptcy.

A very low maintenance requirement can increase systemic risk.


Does a large insurance fund make an exchange safer?

Not necessarily.

Fund size matters, but so do:

  • open interest
  • leverage
  • liquidity
  • portfolio concentration
  • liquidation design
  • fund segmentation
  • ADL rules

A dollar figure without those variables can be misleading.


Primary Research Sources

The DN Liquidation Fairness Index prioritizes:

  1. Official derivatives rules
  2. Exchange mark-price documentation
  3. Official index methodologies
  4. Current maintenance-margin schedules
  5. Liquidation-process documentation
  6. Insurance-fund disclosures
  7. ADL rules
  8. Exchange rulebooks
  9. Public risk-control documentation
  10. Official liquidation and insurance datasets

Community reports can identify events for investigation but do not determine scores without supporting evidence.


Affiliate Disclosure

Decentralised News may receive compensation when readers register or trade through certain links in this article, including Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, Kraken, Deribit and BloFin.

Commercial relationships do not determine which exchanges are included, their position in the ranking or their DN Liquidation Fairness Score.

A platform without an affiliate relationship remains eligible to rank first.


The Bottom Line

Crypto exchanges do not merely observe liquidations.

They design them.

The exchange chooses:

the mark price

the index constituents

the maintenance margin

the liquidation threshold

the amount of the position to close

the bankruptcy-price logic

the liquidation fee

the insurance waterfall

and:

who bears the final loss if everything else fails.

Those choices can produce very different outcomes for traders even when the underlying market move is identical.

The inaugural DN Liquidation Fairness Index places Kraken MTF Futures first at 94/100, with its 10% incremental linear-futures liquidation process and explicit treatment of residual trader equity setting a particularly strong benchmark.

Deribit follows at 92/100, driven by its sophisticated incremental liquidation engine, bounded mark-price architecture and unusually transparent insurance-fund framework, although its 1% futures liquidation fee is a significant cost.

Bybit ranks third at 91/100, combining a robust mark-price system, laddered liquidation and no separate liquidation fee on perpetual and futures trading.

OKX at 90/100 distinguishes itself through staged position reduction and depth-aware liquidation execution.

Gate at 88/100 provides an impressively transparent market → insurance fund → ADL waterfall and batch position reduction.

Binance at 86/100 has one of the strongest mark-price and index systems but receives a lower position-preservation score because liquidation behavior varies materially across account modes.

Bitget at 84/100 performs strongly on index design and insurance infrastructure but is less generous in its treatment of remaining liquidation margin.

BloFin at 80/100 has the essential foundations but currently provides less granular public evidence than the highest-ranked venues.

The larger conclusion is more important than the rankings.

A trader comparing futures exchanges should not ask only:

What is the maximum leverage?

or:

What is the taker fee?

They should also ask:

What happens to me when the trade goes wrong?

The answer is hidden inside the liquidation engine.

And once leverage is involved, that engine can matter more than almost any feature on the exchange homepage.


18+ educational content. Futures, perpetual contracts, options and leveraged trading involve substantial risk and can result in rapid or total loss of deposited margin. Liquidation rules, margin parameters and product availability can change and may differ by jurisdiction, account mode and contract. Nothing in this article constitutes financial, investment, legal or tax advice.

Recommended reading:

Where Are the Next Bitcoin Liquidations? The DN Cascade Score and Liquidation Map for 2026

How to Calculate Your Liquidation Price and Position Size: The Universal DN Calculator for 2026

 
 

 

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