Contracts and instruments INSTRUMENT Updated 2026-10-13 By Ivo Renner

Gold and silver perpetuals: where the price comes from and what the weekend does to it

Between 22 July and 13 October 2026, the gold perpetual XAUUSDT settled funding 500 times. Longs paid at 206 of those settlements, and shorts paid at none. That one-sided record says more about how a gold perp differs from a stock perp than any product page does, and it sits on top of a different index, a different trading week, a different funding schedule and far higher leverage. This guide takes those four in turn for gold and for silver (XAGUSDT), then shows how far the six other commodity contracts depart from them, using Binance’s notices and its public contract data read on 13 October 2026.

What the XAUUSDT price index is built from

Binance’s launch announcement describes the gold contract as tracking gold priced in US dollars, and says the price index aggregates data from multiple vendors. Which vendors is a question the announcement leaves open. The answer sits in Binance’s public index data, which lists each constituent and its weight. Here is what it showed for gold on 13 October 2026.

Three things in that list are worth knowing before you hold the contract.

• The reference is spot gold, not a futures month. The vendor quotes are XAU/USD, the over-the-counter dollar price of an ounce. Our contract list records the launch description in the same terms. A COMEX gold futures price for December delivery can sit above or below spot, so comparing your perp with a futures chart will show a gap that is not an error.
• Every quote is converted from dollars to USDT. Binance’s TradFi FAQ says a USDT/USD conversion has applied to commodity contracts since 16 July 2026 at 08:00 UTC, and each constituent in the index data carries that conversion. When USDT trades slightly away from one dollar, the index moves by that amount even if gold does not.
• Another perpetual feeds about a tenth of the index. The Apple contract’s index on the same day drew on dxFeed, Kaiko and Pyth Pro with no other derivatives venue in the mix. Gold includes a Hyperliquid market at 10.4%, so part of the reference price for one perp comes from another perp.

The weights are Binance’s to change and carry no announcement requirement that we have found. If the composition matters to your trade, open the Index page in the futures data section, choose XAUUSDT, and read the current list rather than this table.

Gold perpetual trading hours: when the index follows the market

A stock perpetual spends most of its week on smoothed or order-book prices, because the stock’s regular session covers 32.5 of the week’s 168 hours. Gold works the other way round. Binance’s notice of 15 September 2026, effective that day at 21:00 UTC, sets the commodity schedule as follows:

That regular window runs 119 hours, about 71% of the week. The same notice applies it to every commodity contract on the platform, naming platinum, palladium, copper, WTI and Brent crude and natural gas alongside gold and silver.

The schedule mirrors the electronic market most gold traders already know. CME Group lists COMEX gold futures on Globex from Sunday to Friday, 6:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. New York time, with a 60-minute break each day beginning at 5:00 p.m. Binance’s notice does not mention a daily break. Its FAQ does say that, during a daily maintenance period, the index leaves standard mode, but it gives no hour for commodities. If you trade gold between 17:00 and 18:00 New York time on a weekday, watch whether the index on the contract page keeps updating rather than assuming either way.

Holidays are the other open edge. The notice says public holidays use the weekend mode and does not say whose holidays. CME publishes a holiday calendar for its metals contracts; that calendar is a reasonable guess for when the vendor quotes will thin out, though Binance has not said it follows it. Our session clock shows the weekly boundary in your own time zone.

What a gold perpetual does on the weekend

From Friday 17:00 to Sunday 18:00 New York time, Binance treats the vendor feeds as unavailable (the FAQ’s wording is that no external data is available) and switches the index to its own order book. In Orderbook EWMA mode, the FAQ says, the index takes the impact mid price of the contract’s order book (the average of the prices at which a standard-sized buy and sell would fill), smooths it with an exponentially weighted moving average, and limits how far it can move. The mark price keeps its normal calculation on top of that index.

Put plainly, the weekend price of the gold perp is whatever the people trading the gold perp make it, slowed down. Nobody else is quoting gold in volume at that time to check it against.

The return to standard mode is fast. The FAQ describes a blend from the old index to the new one that completes within a minute. Suppose, hypothetically, that the perp has drifted to 4,150 over a quiet weekend and the vendor quotes open on Sunday evening at 4,230. Within about a minute of 18:00 New York time the index has walked from one to the other, and the mark has followed within its band. A position sized for the weekend’s calm order book takes the full gap at that point, inside sixty seconds.

This arrangement dates from 8 May 2026. Before then, commodity contracts used fixed mode on weekends: the index froze at Friday’s last value, as the January launch announcement described. Older explanations of gold perps that talk about a frozen weekend index describe the earlier rule.

Gold perpetual funding rate: four-hour settlements, a ±0.50% cap, and who has been paying

Gold and silver settle funding every four hours, with a cap and floor of ±0.50% per settlement. The US stock and ETF contracts settle every eight hours with a ±2% cap, as the funding guide sets out. The metal parameters arrived through two notices on the same day, 30 January 2026:

1. At 12:15 UTC, gold and silver moved from four-hour to eight-hour funding, and the cap came down from ±0.375% to ±0.05%.
2. At 18:15 UTC, gold, silver, platinum and palladium moved back to four hours, with the cap raised to ±0.50%.

The second notice also exempts these contracts from Binance’s rule that shortens a funding interval to one hour after a settlement hits its cap. So the schedule stays at six settlements a day however stretched funding gets. Binance’s public funding data on 13 October 2026 still showed four hours and ±0.50% for all eight commodity contracts, and an interest-rate input of zero for gold and silver.

The history is where the asymmetry shows. The table counts the most recent 500 settlements in Binance’s public funding history, covering 22 July 00:00 UTC to 13 October 04:00 UTC 2026.

Read in money: a long gold position held at a steady 10,000 USDT of notional through all 500 settlements would have paid roughly 150 USDT in funding, and the matching short would have collected it. Silver comes to roughly 162 USDT. The real figure moves with your notional at each settlement, which changes with the price. Run your own numbers in the funding cost calculator.

Two cautions keep that table honest. First, 83 days in which longs did all the paying is a record, not a forecast; the formula can turn negative whenever the perp trades below its index for long enough. Second, the largest single rate in the window was under a tenth of the ±0.50% cap, so the cap played no part. The cost came from small payments, six times a day.

For a sense of scale outside the crypto world: State Street lists a gross expense ratio of 0.40% a year for SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), a large US gold ETF. Over the same 83 days that comes to about 0.09%. If the window’s funding pace held for a full year, which nothing guarantees, a long gold perp would pay around 6.6%. The ETF and the perp do different jobs, but a holder thinking in months should know which side of that gap they are on.

Gold and silver perpetual leverage: 100× in the first bracket

Binance’s public leverage brackets on 13 October 2026 gave gold and silver the same ladder, and the six other commodity contracts matched it.

For comparison, the first bracket on AAPLUSDT that day was 25× with a 2% maintenance rate, and SPYUSDT 50× with 1%. The leverage and liquidation guide explains how the brackets interact with position size.

A higher cap is easy to read as a sign of lower risk. What it actually buys is a shorter distance to liquidation. Take a hypothetical 50,000 USDT gold long in isolated margin, at an assumed price of 4,200 per ounce. Ignoring fees and funding, liquidation comes close to the point where the loss has eaten the initial margin down to the 0.50% maintenance requirement.

At 100× a move of roughly 21 dollars an ounce closes the position. Compare the row against moves you can measure yourself: pull up a daily gold chart and note the distance between the high and low on a handful of recent sessions, and between Friday’s close and Sunday evening’s first prices. Pick the leverage whose liquidation distance sits well outside those, with room for the weekend reopen described above. Our liquidation price calculator does the arithmetic for your own size.

Silver perpetual vs gold perpetual: same rules, rougher edges

Silver shares gold’s schedule, index sources, funding parameters and brackets. It differs in three places, all pointing the same way.

• A wider price band. Binance’s contract settings on 13 October 2026 allowed silver order prices within 3% of the mark price, against 2% for gold. The market-order protection limit was set the same way, 3% against 2%.
• A coarser tick in relative terms. Both contracts move in steps of 0.01. With gold’s mark near 4,202 and silver’s near 60.68 that day, one tick was about 0.0002% of the gold price and about 0.016% of the silver price. On silver, a market order that crosses the spread costs proportionally more.
• Slightly heavier, less one-sided funding. Over the same 500 settlements silver summed to 1.62% against gold’s 1.50%, and it had one negative settlement where gold had none.

None of the three calls for a different set of rules. Together they argue for using silver at lower leverage than gold, if you trade both.

Platinum, copper, crude oil and natural gas perpetuals: same hours, different sources

Six more commodity contracts share gold’s weekly schedule, its four-hour funding with a ±0.50% cap, and its leverage brackets. Their indexes and their funding records look nothing alike, and anyone who learned the gold contract first should not assume the rest behave the same way.

Three rows deserve a second look.

Brent crude takes 96% of its index from a single Hyperliquid market listed as xyz:BRENTOIL. In practice the price you are measured against on BZUSDT is mostly another venue’s perpetual. If that market pauses or misprices, the index has little else to lean on.

On WTI crude and natural gas, the two Pyth Pro quotes carry contract-month labels (WTI_DEC and WTI_NOV_A, NATGAS_DEC and NATGAS_NOV_A). Our reading, which Binance has not confirmed, is that these indexes follow futures months rather than a spot price. Binance has not published how its index moves from one month to the next, so a step in the index around a futures roll date cannot be ruled out.

Funding on the energy contracts runs at a different scale from gold. Natural gas longs paid a combined 15.48% across the 500 settlements, ten times gold’s figure, while Brent and WTI shorts paid 11.56% and 7.79%. Single settlements on CLUSDT and BZUSDT reached −0.41% and −0.42%, close to the −0.50% floor. On these contracts the floor is within reach, and holding for weeks on the paying side can cost more than the move you were trading.

Gold perpetual vs gold futures vs a gold ETF

Three common ways to hold a view on gold, set side by side on the points that change the trade rather than on every feature.

The perp wins on access and size: a few USDT, any hour, no roll dates. It loses on certainty over time, because its holding cost is set every four hours by the crowd on one order book, and on weekends its price is set by that crowd alone. For a trade measured in hours or days that trade-off often favours the perp. For a position meant to sit for a year, the funding table above deserves a hard look first. If you are still deciding whether this kind of contract suits you at all, what a TradFi perpetual is covers the instrument from the start.

Before you open a gold or silver perpetual

1. Read the index composition. Open the Index page in Binance’s futures data section and select the contract. If the sources or weights differ from the table here, the rest of this guide still holds, but note the change.
2. Find Sunday 18:00 New York in your own time. The weekly reopen falls at 22:00 UTC until 1 November 2026 and at 23:00 UTC after. For readers in the Gulf that is early Monday morning; in Buenos Aires, Sunday evening.
3. Decide about the weekend on Friday. Holding through means accepting a price set by the contract’s own order book for two days and a re-pricing within a minute on Sunday evening. Size for the reopen, not for the quiet Saturday.
4. Check funding before you enter. The contract header shows the current rate and a countdown to the next of the six daily settlements. A positive rate means a long pays.
5. Choose leverage from a measured move. Use the bracket table and your own chart check above. The 100× ceiling applies to the first 50,000 USDT of notional only, and its liquidation distance is about half a percent.
6. Hold it in isolated margin while you learn the contract. A gap on gold then stops at the margin you assigned. The trade-offs are in margin modes.