What the rest of your account is exposed to

Moon caps your loss at the wager without asking you, and Hyperliquid makes you choose. On one venue the most you can lose is the $100.00 you wagered, with no setting to get wrong. On the other you can lose more than the position unless you chose isolated margin before entry, and a backstop liquidation engages at 0.83 per cent of notional at a 40x cap.

The loss cap is the largest difference

Fee basis, maintenance rate and carry rate each move your outcome by some measurable amount. The loss cap changes what you have at stake. On one venue it belongs to the instrument, and on the other to a setting you chose before entry. Until your position fails the two behave identically, so the divergence is all in what liquidation does to the balance you never meant to risk.

A cap at the wager needs no election

Moon states that a bet cannot take your account below zero and closes your bet once it has lost the wager. The registry records the loss cap as the wager with the note: Loss is capped at the wager. No margin-mode setting is attached, so a $100.00 wager at 1000x risks $100.00 for the same reason one at 2x does. A 0.00 per cent maintenance rate leaves the whole 0.10 per cent of room at the top to your wager.

What the cap will not do is slow your loss down. Your distance to liquidation at 1000x is 0.10 per cent, smaller than the worst one-minute move against you on every market tracked here. At that multiplier the cap binds inside the first minute of an ordinary move.

placing a first bet for the cap, Moon on how leverage works for the distance. The one-minute comparison is against the 95th-percentile adverse excursion per market.

Isolated margin confines your loss, cross margin does not

Hyperliquid records its loss cap as isolated margin, with the note: Isolated margin confines loss to that position. Cross margin does not, and a backstop liquidation below two thirds of maintenance margin does not return the maintenance margin. Under isolated margin the collateral you assign is all that position can lose, and liquidation closes it without reaching the rest of your account. Under cross margin your account margin backs every open position jointly, so one liquidation settles against shared collateral.

You make that election before you open, and it is the election that confines the outcome. You and another holder can sit at the same multiplier on the same notional and face different worst cases, yours the assigned margin and theirs the whole balance.

Hyperliquid liquidations, margin modes and the maintenance margin requirement.

The backstop sits below the maintenance margin

Hyperliquid documents a backstop liquidation that engages when your account value falls below two thirds of the maintenance margin requirement. At a 40x cap that rate is 1.25 per cent of notional, so your threshold is 0.83 per cent of it, or $33.33 on a $100.00 stake. Below it your cross positions and cross margin go to the liquidator, and the maintenance margin is not returned.

The test is on your account value rather than on the position, so a second position can push you through the threshold while the first still sits inside its own room. The maintenance margin you might have read as a buffer is consumed rather than refunded, so your worst case under cross margin runs larger than that requirement suggests.

Strict isolated margin removes the top-up path

Ordinary isolated margin still lets you add margin after you open, which moves your liquidation price away from entry and puts more at risk than you assigned. Strict isolated margin fixes the assignment, so the liquidation price you saw at entry is the one you get and your worst case equals your initial margin.

That is the closest the notional-basis venue comes to a cap at the wager, and two differences survive. You set strict isolation position by position, where the wager cap covers every bet without an election. The 1.25 per cent maintenance rate also stands between you and the full 2.50 per cent of room the same multiplier carries where no buffer applies.

Hyperliquid liquidations, isolated and cross margin behaviour.

The worst case, dimension by dimension

Loss caps and notes are the registry's own fields, read through venues.loss_cap(). The backstop threshold is two thirds of venues.maintenance_rate() at the asset cap. Market counts are venues.universe_counts() across the 50 tracked markets: 50 listed against 18, so the classes outside crypto have one venue and no margin-mode choice at all.

Which set of properties matches your trade

Sizing a short hold above 40x leaves you one venue and a cap at the wager. Holding self-custodied collateral across several positions gets you a published carry rate, a 1.25 per cent maintenance buffer and a margin-mode election to make before entry. Match those two sets against the hold you have in mind before you pick one.

where the room comes from, what carrying the position costs, the full dimension table.

Registry 2026-08-28a, reviewed through 2026-11-28. Rebuilt 2026-08-28 06:26 UTC.

Figures on this page were rebuilt 2026-08-28 by the MarketMoves editorial desk, from the sources named in the methodology. Nothing here is a forecast, and none of it is advice.