Articles · The wallet
The wallet people knew as a place to keep tokens has become a trading platform: inside it you can open positions with up to fifty times leverage on bitcoin, the S&P 500, gold and oil. By volume of code this is the largest part of the app. Here is how it works, what it costs, and how it differs from a swap.
7 October 2026 · verified at publication
A perpetual future is a contract that lets you bet on a price move without owning the asset itself. An ordinary future has a settlement date; a perpetual one does not — the position is held as long as you like, as long as the collateral holds.
The main difference from a token swap is leverage. In a swap you exchange one thing for another: you hand over a hundred dollars, you get a hundred dollars of bitcoin. In leveraged trading you post collateral and open a position several times larger than it. Leverage of 10× means a hundred dollars of collateral carries a thousand-dollar position.
Hence the second feature: you can profit from a fall. A short position gains when the price goes down. Holding tokens, you cannot do that.
| Feature | Token swap | Perpetual future |
|---|---|---|
| What you own | the token itself | nothing — only a position |
| Leverage | none | up to 50× |
| Profit from a fall | no | yes, a short position |
| Can you lose more than you put in | no | no, but the collateral burns entirely |
| Rainbow's fee | 0.85% | 0.05% |
Rainbow did not become an exchange. The trading runs on Hyperliquid — a separate perpetual futures exchange with its own chain; the wallet acts as a storefront and a conduit.
Collateral is posted in the dollar stablecoin USDC and transferred into their system. In the code it is marked with a pseudo-network numbered 1337 — not a real network, but the app's internal label for Hyperliquid. No collateral asset other than USDC is supported.
Hyperliquid has a fee mechanism for apps that bring trades in. Rainbow is registered in it with its own address and rate, and a referral code RNBW is set alongside. This is where the wallet's fee on top of the exchange's own comes from.
Funds in a position sit neither in your wallet nor on Base, but on Hyperliquid. The platform's risks are its own, and they have nothing to do with the security of the wallet itself. That needs to be understood separately from the familiar logic of "my keys, my coins".
There are two fees and they add up. The rates are taken from the app's source code, not from marketing.
| To whom | For what | Rate | In percent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyperliquid | market order (taker) | 4.5 bps | 0.045% |
| Hyperliquid | limit order (maker) | 1.5 bps | 0.015% |
| Rainbow | any order | 5 bps | 0.05% |
A developer note sits beside these in the code: these are base rates, accounts with higher volume get lower ones, and they ought to be taken from the exchange's API. So what is listed is a ceiling, not an exact figure for everyone.
The fee is charged on the position, not on the collateral — and that is the whole difference. At 10× leverage, a hundred dollars of collateral opens a thousand-dollar position, and 0.05% is taken from the thousand, that is fifty cents. Against the collateral that is already 0.5%. The greater the leverage, the higher the fee relative to the money you put in, even though the rate does not change.
For comparison with a swap. The wallet's fee on a swap is 0.85%, seventeen times larger by rate. But a thousand-dollar swap requires a thousand dollars, while a thousand-dollar position requires a hundred. The rates cannot be compared directly: different money stands behind them.
A few thresholds worth knowing before your first trade. All of them are readable in the source.
| Parameter | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum order | about $10 | measured by position size, not collateral |
| Default slippage | 5% | tolerance for the execution price |
| Maintenance margin | 0.6% | the level below which the position is force-closed |
| Collateral | USDC only | the app accepts no other asset |
Maintenance margin of 0.6% is the most important number in that table. If collateral falls below that share of the position, it is force-closed and what you put in is gone. At 50× leverage this means a price move of roughly 1.4% against you wipes the position out entirely. The higher the leverage, the closer the edge.
The usual exchange instruments are available: limit orders, stop-loss and take-profit, long and short positions. This is a full trading terminal, not a simplified button.
By volume of code, perps are the largest part of the app. This is not an experiment behind a flag, nor groundwork.
| Section of the app | Files | Volume of code |
|---|---|---|
| Perpetual futures | 122 | 2,283 KB |
| ENS names | 95 | 1,308 KB |
| Event betting (Polymarket) | 170 | 599 KB |
| Rainbow Cash | 118 | 550 KB |
| RNBW staking | 41 | 163 KB |
Counted over the repository file tree on 7 October 2026. The first commit in the perps directory is dated 6 October 2025 — the work is exactly a year old.
The feature is on for everyone. In the app's remote configuration the default value is perps_enabled: true. For contrast, Rainbow Cash, Solana and the membership screen all have false there, meaning they are closed off. Perps are open.
The headline on the wallet's own website now reads "Trade Any Market from Your Phone". Not "store your crypto".
Next to perps in the same menu sit bets on event outcomes through Polymarket — elections, sport, rate decisions. That works too, and it is also on by default.
For an RNBW holder there is a direct consequence here. Rainbow's site promises that "every trade earns you $RNBW", and on the top tier, "up to 100% of your trading fees auto-compounded". So cashback covers not only swaps but trading as well.
This cannot be checked from outside: trading rewards are computed by Rainbow's server, not by a contract on the blockchain. The app asks it for a balance and receives a signed authorisation to pay out; the address and key of that interface are build-time secrets. So we are reporting what we see in the code and on the company's site, not a verified figure.
It works symmetrically in both directions. If the position is ten times the collateral, a one percent price move changes your result by ten. This is not fine print, it is the instrument's defining property.
At high leverage the liquidation boundary lies within one and a half percent of the entry price. An ordinary daily swing in bitcoin easily covers that distance.
Collateral is held neither in the wallet nor on Base, but inside Hyperliquid's system. The familiar "my keys, my coins" does not apply to those funds, and the platform's risks are added to the market's.
With high leverage and frequent trading, fees eat a noticeable share of the collateral even when the price stands still. A rate of 0.05% looks like small change right up until it is multiplied by leverage and by the number of trades.
This text describes how the instrument works and is not advice to use it. Leveraged trading is a way to lose what you put in faster than by any other route inside the wallet.
Every number here comes from the app's open source code, not from promotional material.
| What to check | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Fee rates | src/features/perps/constants.ts |
| Thresholds and collateral | same file: MIN_ORDER_SIZE_USD, SUPPORTED_COLLATERAL_TOKENS |
| Whether the feature is on | src/features/config/stores/remoteConfig.ts |
| Order types | src/features/perps/types.ts |
| What is changing in the code right now | the Pulse page |