Bybit has launched USDT-settled perpetual contracts tracking EUR/USD, GBP/USD and USD/JPY, giving crypto traders a way to trade the world’s largest currency pairs around the clock with leverage up to 100x. The Dubai-based exchange announced the three contracts on Tuesday, and they are live now on the platform.
How the contracts work
The new products, tickers EURUSDUSDT, GBPUSDUSDT and USDJPYUSDT, follow their respective spot exchange rates. They have no expiration date, and profits and losses settle in USDT. Traders never own the underlying currencies. Funding rates and dynamic leverage, mechanisms borrowed from crypto perpetual markets, keep contract prices close to their reference rates.
Bybit integrated the contracts with its Unified Trading Account. The pitch is straightforward: traditional forex markets close on weekends, and these contracts do not. A trader can react to a central bank statement or a geopolitical headline on a Sunday without waiting for the FX market to reopen.
EUR/USD and USD/JPY are the two most traded currency pairs globally and together account for a large share of daily foreign exchange turnover. GBP/USD is closely watched around Bank of England policy decisions. Global over-the-counter FX turnover averaged $9.6 trillion per day in April 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements, the market Bybit is now plugging into.
Part of a wider TradFi push
The FX contracts sit inside Bybit’s TradFi Perpetuals suite, which the exchange launched in April and says now covers more than 200 assets spanning equities, commodities, exchange-traded funds and pre-IPO companies. Crypto exchanges have been competing to bridge traditional and digital asset markets on a single account, and derivatives are the fastest lane.
Bybit is not the first to offer forex perpetuals. Kraken launched five forex perpetual futures with up to 50x leverage in April 2025. BitMEX introduced six pairs with up to 100x leverage in April 2026, though that exchange is now winding down and will shut permanently on September 23 after an 11-year run. The question for Bybit is whether it can pull liquidity into a category where its predecessors never built deep books.
| Exchange | FX perps launch | Max leverage |
|---|---|---|
| Kraken | April 2025 | 50x |
| BitMEX | April 2026 | 100x |
| Bybit | September 2026 | 100x |
Why exchanges want forex
For crypto-native venues, forex derivatives solve a real business problem. Crypto perpetual volumes are cyclical and competition on the major coins is brutal, while foreign exchange is the largest and most liquid market in the world. A crypto exchange with 24/7 availability and crypto collateral can offer something traditional FX brokers cannot: weekend trading and instant settlement in USDT, all on one account.
The same features that attract traders concentrate risk. 100x leverage on a currency pair that often moves half a percent in a day means small swings can wipe out a position quickly, and funding costs on a perpetual contract can quietly erode a longer-term currency view. A trader who holds a USD/JPY short through a surprise Bank of Japan intervention can face a move far larger than anything the crypto majors produce on a quiet day.
Bybit encourages users to review contract specifications and risk disclosures before trading. Liquidation mechanics on the FX perps mirror the exchange’s crypto contracts, with the insurance fund absorbing positions that cannot be closed at the bankruptcy price before auto-deleveraging kicks in.
The regulatory patchwork
There is also a regulatory dimension that will shape how far this category grows. Leveraged FX products for retail clients face strict limits in major jurisdictions including the UK and the EU, where regulators cap leverage and ban bonuses. Crypto venues offering these contracts operate across a patchwork of licenses, and classification can differ market by market: a contract that counts as a derivative in one country may be treated as a synthetic exposure product in another.
Bybit’s Dubai base puts its derivatives business under VARA oversight, and the exchange has been expanding its regulated footprint as it pushes into traditional finance products. Kraken’s earlier FX perps ran under its own regulatory umbrella, and BitMEX’s wind-down shows how quickly a venue and its product lineup can disappear. Traders building strategies around these contracts face platform risk on top of market risk.
For now the launch is a product bet: that crypto traders want macro exposure on their existing accounts, settled in USDT, at crypto-style leverage, without opening a brokerage account. Whether real volume follows the listing will show up in the next few weeks of funding rates and open interest data. If the books stay thin, the contracts become a niche add-on. If they thicken, expect the other major exchanges to copy the format within months, as they did with stock perps earlier this year.
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