Most people meet silver as a price on a screen, and the chart looks much the same whichever product sits behind it. A coin comes with a dealer's markup and a safe to keep it in, a futures contract on a regulated exchange covers thousands of ounces, and a fund share needs a brokerage account funded in dollars.
Those products differ in ways the chart never shows, because every one carries its own rules. Two contracts can show nearly the same price on screen while one hands you metal at the end and the other only ever pays you in a token. The size of a position, the hours it trades, the cost of keeping it open and the point at which it is closed for you all sit in the fine print, and the chart shows none of them.
Crypto exchanges answer the access problem with perpetual contracts on commodities. A perpetual follows a price without ever expiring, settles gains and losses in a stablecoin, and lets you size a position down to a fraction of an ounce. On several exchanges, metals now sit in the same futures menus as Bitcoin.
On BloFin, silver trades as the XAGUSDT Perpetual, a USDT contract that allows leverage of up to 100x. Its terms decide what a silver position on the exchange is worth, what it costs to keep open, and how big a move against you ends it.
What is the XAGUSDT perpetual?
The XAGUSDT Perpetual is BloFin's silver futures contract: it tracks silver through an index, has no expiry date, and pays every gain and loss in USDT. Each contract covers 0.01 XAG, a hundredth of a troy ounce, and leverage runs from 1x to 100x. Every four hours, one side pays the other a funding fee.
XAG is the code that the international currency-code standard, ISO 4217, gives to silver, and each of the standard's precious-metal units is one troy ounce of the metal (source: ISO 4217 on Wikipedia). BloFin counts order size in XAG, and the smallest order it accepts is 0.01 XAG (source: BloFin XAG contract details). So a 1 XAG position carries the price exposure of one troy ounce, and the smallest order carries a hundredth of that. The USDT half of the name is the currency the contract is margined and paid out in.
BloFin listed the contract on January 8, 2026, at 6AM UTC, and classes it as linear, which means the profit and loss moves in a straight line with the price. Each 1 USDT change in the silver price moves a 1 XAG position by exactly 1 USDT, whatever the price level. Say you hold a 10 XAG long, which is 1,000 contracts, and silver rises from 50.00 to 51.00 USDT. Your position gains 10 USDT, and the same fall would cost you 10 USDT.
The word "perpetual" describes the missing expiry date: a dated futures contract ends on a set day, and its price closes in on the spot price as that day nears. A perpetual has no such day, so it needs another way to stay near the price it follows, and that is the job of funding (source: He, Manela, Ross and von Wachter, Fundamentals of Perpetual Futures). Bullion, fund shares and mining stocks are the other routes to silver as a tradable asset, and each of them puts metal or a company behind your money, which the perpetual never does.
XAGUSDT Perpetual contract terms
The XAGUSDT Perpetual settles in USDT, its price moves in 0.01 USDT steps, and leverage runs from 1x to 100x. One order can carry up to 35,000 XAG as a limit order or 3,500 XAG at market.
Term | XAGUSDT Perpetual |
|---|---|
Margined and settled in | USDT |
One contract covers | 0.01 XAG |
Smallest order | 0.01 XAG (one contract) |
Price step (tick size) | 0.01 USDT |
Leverage | 1x to 100x, falling as the position grows |
Largest limit order | 35,000 XAG |
Largest market order | 3,500 XAG |
Funding | settled every 4 hours |
Expiry | none |
The contract page lists the settlement currency, tick size, leverage range, order caps and minimum order, along with the funding schedule and the insurance fund (source: BloFin XAG contract details).
Small contracts keep the arithmetic small. At the 50.16 USDT mark price on November 3, 2026, one contract was worth about 0.50 USDT, and one tick moved its value by 0.0001 USDT. A position of 1 XAG moves 0.01 USDT per tick, and a full 3,500 XAG market order at that mark was worth about 175,560 USDT.
The order caps matter mainly to large traders, because a beginner placing a 1 XAG or 10 XAG order will never meet them. A larger order has to be split into several market orders above 3,500 XAG, or rest in the order book as limit orders.
You can watch the live price, the order book and the contract's funding details on the XAGUSDT Perpetual trading page before you size an order.
How the contract follows the silver price
The XAGUSDT Perpetual follows an index price for silver, and its mark price is built on that index. The last traded price is a third reading. Every order must also sit inside a price band set around the index, which stops an order filling far away from it.
The index is the reference price, and BloFin uses it to limit how far an order may be priced from the market (source: BloFin XAG contract details). BloFin works out your unrealized profit and loss and your liquidation point from the mark price (source: BloFin index, mark and last price FAQ). The last price is only the latest fill in BloFin's order book. The gap between it and the mark price can widen in a fast market, as mark price and last price shows.
None of these is the same reading as spot silver, the dollar price of silver bought for delivery now. The index follows the metal's price but is quoted in USDT, so a small gap to a dealer's dollar quote is normal. How the silver price is set follows the benchmark auction and the futures market that the wider silver price comes from.
Buy orders can go no more than 3% over the index and sell orders no more than 3% under it. A two-minute average premium, a measure of how far the contract trades from the index, can pull either limit closer to the index (source: BloFin XAG contract details).
Buy ceiling = index × 1.03; sell floor = index × 0.97 (before the two-minute premium adjustment).
Say the index stands at 50.00 USDT. A buy limit order can then be priced no higher than 51.50 USDT and a sell no lower than 48.50 USDT. A sell typed at 45.00 USDT by mistake falls outside that band, so it cannot fill 10% below the market.
What an XAGUSDT position gives you
An XAGUSDT position gives you silver's price movement, paid in USDT, and nothing physical. There is no bar, no vault allocation and no delivery date. Your margin, gains, losses and funding payments are all balances of USDT in your BloFin account, so the position is a claim on the exchange that runs the contract.
That is the main difference from a fund that holds metal. The iShares Silver Trust reported 506,677,774.50 ounces in trust on November 2, 2026, and its shares are intended to reflect the price of the silver the trust holds (source: iShares Silver Trust). A perpetual has no such pool behind your position: what keeps its price near silver is the index and the funding payments between traders.
The currency is the second difference, because USDT is a stablecoin that Tether pegs one to one to the US dollar and backs with its own reserves (source: Tether). A peg can slip, though: on May 12, 2022, USDT fell as low as 95 cents on some crypto exchanges, and it traded at $0.998 by the afternoon (source: CNBC).
For a silver position that means two prices are always in play. Your profit is counted in USDT, so if silver rose while USDT slipped below a dollar, part of the gain would vanish when you turned it back into dollars. At 95 cents, a 1,000 USDT balance would have been worth $950.
Ownership rights belong to other routes, since a coin in your hand and a fund share in a brokerage account are both yours to sell or transfer outside BloFin, while the perpetual exists only on the exchange. If holding the metal itself is the point, buying silver with crypto sets out which route gives you what.
Position tiers and maximum leverage
The 100x maximum on the XAGUSDT Perpetual applies only to small positions. Up to 400 XAG you can use 100x, and the maintenance margin is 0.50% of what the position is worth. Larger positions move through nine more tiers, and above 1,000,000 XAG leverage falls to 1x with a 50% maintenance rate.
Maintenance margin is the floor your margin can drop to before liquidation, stated as a percentage of the position. BloFin states the rule in one line: larger positions generally take a higher tier, a lower maximum leverage and a higher maintenance margin rate (source: BloFin XAG position tiers).
Tier | Position size (XAG) | Maintenance margin | Highest leverage |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | up to 400 | 0.50% | 100x |
2 | 400.01 to 3,000 | 0.65% | 75x |
3 | 3,000.01 to 9,000 | 1.00% | 50x |
4 | 9,000.01 to 30,000 | 2.00% | 25x |
5 | 30,000.01 to 70,000 | 2.50% | 20x |
6 | 70,000.01 to 300,000 | 5.00% | 10x |
7 | 300,000.01 to 700,000 | 10.00% | 5x |
8 | 700,000.01 to 900,000 | 12.50% | 4x |
9 | 900,000.01 to 1,000,000 | 25.00% | 2x |
10 | 1,000,000.01 to 3,000,000 | 50.00% | 1x |
At the same 50.16 USDT mark, the top of tier 1 was a position worth about 20,064 USDT, which at 100x needs about 200.64 USDT of initial margin. Most first trades sit far inside that tier.
The tier table also shows how thin a 100x position is. At 100x your initial margin is 1% of the position, and the maintenance margin takes half of it, so a move of about half a percent against you can close the position, before fees are even counted. Silver leverage and margin works out liquidation prices at each leverage level, and leverage and liquidation covers the general rules.
Funding on the XAGUSDT Perpetual
Funding on the XAGUSDT Perpetual is a fee that changes hands between longs and shorts every four hours, at 12AM, 4AM, 8AM, 12PM, 4PM and 8PM UTC (source: BloFin XAG contract details). Each payment is the position's value times the funding rate, and when the rate is positive, longs pay shorts, as how funding rates work shows (source: BloFin funding rates FAQ).
The payment is how a perpetual stays close to the price it follows. The rate rises as the contract trades further over the underlying price, and the flow reverses when the contract sits under it (source: Fundamentals of Perpetual Futures). BloFin limits each XAGUSDT rate to 3% either way.
In practice the rates are far smaller than that cap. Over 50 consecutive settlements between October 26 and November 3, 2026, every XAGUSDT rate was positive, from 0.0021% to 0.0418% per four hours, with an average of about 0.0164% (source: BloFin XAG funding history). Since the rate was positive each time, longs paid shorts at every settlement in that stretch.
The silver perpetual funding rate turns those rates into the cost of holding a position for a day, a week or a month, and shows who pays when the sign flips.
The insurance fund and auto-deleveraging
The insurance fund of the XAGUSDT Perpetual is the reserve shown on its contract page, about 213,000 USDT in early November 2026 (source: BloFin XAG contract details). The pool is separate from every other USDT perpetual's, is made up mainly of money from BloFin and the surplus from liquidations, and covers losses that a liquidated position's own margin cannot (source: BloFin auto-deleveraging FAQ).
A liquidation does not always fill at the price the system aims for. In a sharp move a position can close past its bankruptcy price, the point at which its margin is fully used up. The loss beyond that point then has to be covered by something other than the trader's own margin. BloFin publishes the fund's balance beside the contract terms.
Auto-deleveraging, or ADL, is the last resort. It starts when extreme markets leave the fund too small or when it falls fast, which BloFin defines as a 30% drop from its peak within 8 hours, a threshold it can adjust. Positions on the other side of the trade are then closed at the mark price of that moment, starting with the highest-ranked one (source: BloFin auto-deleveraging FAQ). Profitable positions rank before losing ones, and higher returns and lower margin ratios rank first, so a winning position can be closed during a crash. A five-bar signal light on the page shows where your position stands in that queue. Researchers describe the same step across perpetual markets as what follows when liquidations and insurance buffers are not enough to restore solvency (source: Chitra and co-authors, Autodeleveraging as Online Learning).
XAGUSDT liquidity
Trading volume is the simplest measure of liquidity on the XAGUSDT Perpetual. Over the 24-hour window ending at 6.22AM UTC on November 3, 2026, traders swapped 2,625,963 contracts, or 26,259.63 XAG, worth roughly 1.3 million USDT at the 49.44 USDT last price. The best bid and offer sat one tick apart.
That volume is small beside the Commodity Exchange (COMEX), the CME Group market for US silver futures. Trading there averaged a record $50 billion a day in the first half of 2026, and the benchmark contract covers 5,000 ounces (source: Reuters via Kitco, August 11, 2026). A full day of XAGUSDT volume came to about 5.25 of those contracts. Put the other way, one COMEX contract holds as much silver as 500,000 XAGUSDT contracts.
Volume changes a lot from one day to the next. The same 24-hour count ranged from about 1.5 million to about 5.1 million contracts within three days. Over the 24 hours to the November 3 reading, the last price ranged from 49.30 to 51.35 USDT, a swing of about 4.16% from the low.
For a single beginner order, the spread, the distance from the top bid to the top offer, matters more than the day's total. At that reading the bid was 49.43 USDT and the offer 49.44 USDT, so buying at the offer and selling straight back at the bid cost one tick, roughly 0.02% of the price.
The XAGUSDT Perpetual through the October 30 sell-off
Silver's sell-off on Friday, October 30, 2026 showed the contract's terms under pressure. By Kitco's evening report, spot silver had dropped 6.06% on the session, against a 3.52% loss for gold (source: Kitco, October 30, 2026). A 100x position would have been liquidated after a move of about half a percent, long before silver had fallen 6.06%.
Why silver is going down traces the causes. For the perpetual, the other useful question is what the funding did.
Funding stayed positive through the fall. The six XAGUSDT settlements of October 30, in UTC, ran from 0.0120% to 0.0241%, all of them positive (source: BloFin XAG funding history). A positive rate means longs pay shorts, so longs kept paying while silver fell. Across the weekend that followed, from 12AM UTC on Saturday, October 31 to 12AM UTC on Monday, November 2, every settlement sat at exactly 0.0120%.
Account safety and parameter changes
Your position sits on BloFin, so two things matter: how the contract's rules can change, and how BloFin holds your funds. BloFin can change the contract's settings as the market changes, with no separate notice, so check them again before a large order (source: BloFin XAG contract details).
Changes that are planned in advance appear on BloFin's parameter adjustments page, which lists scheduled changes before they take effect and notes that BloFin may cancel or modify them (source: BloFin parameter adjustments). Its tabs cover position tiers, discount rates, tick size, step size, minimum order quantity and status.
Your margin is a balance on BloFin, so the safety of a silver position depends on how the exchange holds customer funds. Two BloFin guides take up that question: is BloFin safe, on the exchange's safeguards, and BloFin proof of reserves, on reserves held against customer balances.
Trading the XAGUSDT Perpetual
The XAGUSDT Perpetual can carry a long view, a short view or a hedge on silver from a USDT balance. A long gains when silver rises. A short gains when it falls, and like any perpetual the contract can be held short as readily as long, since no metal is borrowed to open it.
Trading silver on BloFin walks through a first trade from the deposit to the close, and shorting silver covers the bearish trade and the squeeze risk that comes with it.
For timing and comparison questions, silver trading hours sets the contract beside the COMEX and London sessions, and the perpetual against COMEX futures weighs funding against the cost of rolling a dated contract.
If you are still deciding whether silver belongs in your account at all, is silver a good investment weighs the arguments on both sides, and silver trading strategies shows the approaches traders run on this contract.
Looking to trade silver? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the XAGUSDT Perpetual trading page.
Frequently asked questions
How many grams of silver does one XAGUSDT contract track?
One contract tracks 0.01 troy ounce of silver, which is about 0.311 grams, because a troy ounce weighs 31.1034768 grams (source: NIST conversion factors for precious metals). A hundred contracts make one troy ounce, and a position quoted in grams elsewhere can be converted the same way: 10 grams of silver is about 0.32 troy ounce, or 32 contracts.
Is the XAGUSDT price the same as the dollar price of silver?
The two prices share a code and differ in the quote currency. The ISO 4217 code for silver is XAG, and its numeric code is 961 (source: SIX ISO 4217 currency list). Currency platforms use that code for the dollar price of one troy ounce. The XAGUSDT price is quoted in the USDT stablecoin and taken from BloFin's own order book, so it sits close to the dollar quote and moves with it, while small gaps between the two are normal.
Can you buy a silver token on BloFin?
BloFin lists no silver token or silver spot pair. Its only silver market is the XAGUSDT Perpetual, a contract that pays out in USDT. Silver tokens from other issuers trade on other platforms. Tokenized silver explains how those tokens are backed and redeemed, and how they compare with a perpetual.
How much margin does a 1 XAG position need?
To find the margin, divide what the position is worth by the leverage you pick. At the 50.16 USDT mark price on November 3, 2026, a 1 XAG position was worth 50.16 USDT, so it needed about 50.16 USDT at 1x, 5.02 USDT at 10x and about 0.50 USDT at 100x. Fees and funding come on top, and a lower leverage setting leaves more room before liquidation.
Is XAGUSDT the same as BloFin's gold perpetual?
The two contracts track different metals, and their tickers differ by one letter. In ISO 4217, silver is XAG and gold has its own code, XAU (source: ISO 4217 on Wikipedia). The XAGUSDT Perpetual follows silver, while BloFin's gold perpetual is a separate contract with a contract size of its own. One XAGUSDT contract covers 0.01 XAG, so the same number of contracts never means the same exposure on the two markets. Gold perpetual contract specs sets out the gold contract's terms.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include BloFin's XAG contract details, position tiers, funding history and parameter adjustments pages and its help pages on funding, mark price and auto-deleveraging, the SIX ISO 4217 currency list, NIST, the iShares Silver Trust, Tether, Kitco, Reuters and CNBC, with Wikipedia and research papers on perpetual futures and auto-deleveraging as background, current as of November 4, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold silver in any form. The XAGUSDT Perpetual pays out in USDT and gives you no metal, so a slip in the USDT peg or a fault at the exchange can cost you even when silver moves your way. At high leverage a single silver session like October 30, 2026 can liquidate your whole margin, and funding can charge you every four hours while you hold. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.