Contracts and instruments Instrument Updated 2026-10-12 By Ivo Renner

Korean, Chinese and Hong Kong equity perpetuals

Twenty-three of Binance’s TradFi perpetuals track a listing outside the United States: thirteen Hong Kong stocks, eight Korean names and two Shanghai listings. Their home markets are open while Europe sleeps and while America is at dinner. For a Western trader that inverts the usual problem — instead of a few hours of estimated pricing overnight, you get estimated pricing through most of your waking day.

The 23 non-US contracts

On 2 June 2026 Binance listed its first equities outside the US market: SKHYNIXUSDT, SAMSUNGUSDT and HYUNDAIUSDT, all on the Korea Exchange, all at a maximum leverage of 20×. The launch times were the first tell: 03:00, 03:10 and 03:20 UTC, ten minutes apart, in the middle of the European night. In Korean time that is 12:00, 12:10 and 12:20 — the middle of the Korean trading day. Binance launched them when the underlying was liquid, which tells you which clock this product runs on.

Hong Kong followed from 17 July: MiniMax and Zhipu first, then Tencent, Xiaomi and Pop Mart within a week, all at 25×, and later Gigadevice, Kuaishou, Meituan, ZhongJi Innolight, SHEIN, BYD and Lenovo at 20×. Five more Korean names, including Samsung's KODEX 200 index fund, came on 14 August. CXMTUSDT, listed on 18 August 2026 at 05:00 UTC at 20×, tracks CXMT Corporation on the Shanghai Stock Exchange under code 688825. Again the launch time is aligned: 05:00 UTC is 13:00 in Beijing, the exact reopen of the mainland afternoon session. UNITREEUSDT, on Unitree Robotics (688836), followed on 19 August.

A large share of the list is memory and semiconductors. SK Hynix, Samsung, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Hanmi, CXMT, Gigadevice and ZhongJi Innolight sit in the same supply chain that DRAMUSDT, RAMUSDT, the two CSOP leveraged products and the SanDisk-linked SNXXUSDT also touch. Hold several of these and you are less diversified than the symbol list suggests.

Korea, Hong Kong and Shanghai trading hours in UTC

Binance's FAQ lists non-US session hours in local time. Local time is useless when you are deciding whether to leave a position open, so here they are converted. None of these markets observes daylight saving, so the UTC column is fixed all year.

The Korean session is a single continuous block with no lunch break, running from midnight UTC to 06:20 UTC. The Hong Kong and mainland sessions are split by a lunch break with no US analogue. And the mainland session is startlingly short: under four hours a day, against six and a half for the US regular session. A Chinese-listed underlying is available to price the perp for less than a sixth of the day.

The mainland close of 14:57 is three minutes before the exchange's stated 15:00 close. The natural reading is that Binance is excluding the closing call-auction window from the period it treats as continuously priced. We did not find that stated explicitly in the FAQ, so treat it as our inference rather than as Binance's explanation.

Asian market hours in London, Frankfurt and New York time

Now put those UTC windows into the day of someone actually trading them. The table below uses northern-summer offsets, which apply until Europe changes its clocks on 25 October 2026 and the US on 1 November.

Read the London and Frankfurt columns and the picture is clear: the Korean market shuts at 07:20 London time, 08:20 in Frankfurt. By the time a European trader has opened a laptop, the underlying is closed for the day. The only overlap is the tail of the Hong Kong afternoon, ending 09:00 London and 10:00 Frankfurt.

For a US trader the mismatch is close to total. Every one of these sessions falls between the previous evening and the small hours. When New York opens, Asia has been closed for hours and will not reopen until that evening.

The winter shift matters too. Europe and the US move their clocks; Korea, Hong Kong and mainland China do not. From 25 October in Europe and 1 November in the US, the whole grid slides one hour earlier in local terms — the Korean close lands at 06:20 London rather than 07:20. If you have built a routine around the summer overlap, it will move under you. The session clock tracks the current state rather than a printed table.

Most of your waking day is a smoothed price

This is the central point of the page, and it is a matter of arithmetic rather than opinion.

Binance builds its price index differently depending on what the underlying market is doing. During regular hours the index is a weighted average of constituent prices, updated every second. When external data is unavailable, current Korean, Hong Kong and mainland-China equity contracts use Orderbook EWMA mode: Binance averages the contract book's impact bid and impact ask, then smooths that impact mid price. The index can move while the home cash market is closed. On exiting that mode, the index transitions to the new calculation over a weighted window completed within about a minute. The index and mark price guide covers the machinery in full.

Now apply it. A US contract such as AAPLUSDT has its underlying open for six and a half hours, plus extended-hours sessions Binance tracks separately. A European trader is awake for a good share of that; a US trader for all of it.

CXMTUSDT has an underlying that is open for three hours and fifty-seven minutes, entirely between 01:30 and 06:57 UTC. If you are in London, Frankfurt or New York, essentially every hour you spend at your desk is an hour in which the index behind that contract is an estimate. Not a bad estimate, not a broken one, but a smoothing function or an order-book derivation, not a market price for the underlying.

A second-order effect follows. With the underlying shut for most of the day, arbitrage against it is impossible for most of the contract's life, so funding does nearly all the work of tethering the perp to its index — with a 0% interest component, and since September on a four-hour clock for every one of the 23. SK Hynix, Samsung and Hyundai moved to four hours with a ±0.50% cap on 14 July; Unitree to four hours with ±2% on 19 August; the other Korean names, CXMT, ZhongJi and the CSOP products to four hours with ±1% on 4 September; nine Hong Kong contracts on 10 September; and SHEIN, BYD and Lenovo launched on those terms. A persistent premium or discount on these contracts is normal, not an anomaly to trade against.

The ETF route to the same exposure

The contract list offers a second way into Asian equity risk, with the opposite session profile. EWTUSDT tracks the iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF (NYSE Arca, listed 1 June 2026 at 20×) and KSTRUSDT tracks the KraneShares SSE STAR Market 50 Index ETF (NYSE Arca, listed 2 July 2026 at 25×). Both are Asian exposure delivered through a US-listed fund, which means they price on US market hours and get US session handling from Binance's index.

The trade-off runs both ways. A US-listed Asia fund is priced when you are awake, but it is priced by US investors trading a fund whose underlying market closed hours earlier, so during the US day the fund is itself an estimate of Asian value, expressed through arbitrage and flows rather than live Asian prices. You have not removed the stale-underlying problem; you have moved it into an instrument with better liquidity and a clock you can watch. See the ETF perpetuals guide for what else these fund-based contracts carry.

The Hong Kong quanto structure

Binance's FAQ documents a quanto design for Hong Kong contracts. It is worth understanding, because the term is used loosely elsewhere.

A quanto is a derivative on a foreign-currency asset whose settlement uses a fixed conversion rate set by the contract rather than the prevailing exchange rate. Binance's Hong Kong convention is one-for-one: 1 HKD is treated as 1 USDT for margin and settlement. A stock quoted at HK$100 is marked as if it were 100 USDT.

What that removes. Exchange-rate translation risk. If you hold a foreign stock through an ordinary USD-settled instrument, your P&L has two moving parts: the stock's move in its home currency and the currency's move against the dollar. You can be right about the company and lose money on the currency. Under a quanto, that second term is gone. Every one-point move in the Hong Kong-dollar price is one USDT of P&L per contract unit, regardless of where HKD/USD trades. Your exposure is clean, single-factor, and easy to size.

What that does not remove. Rather more.

• The underlying's own price risk is untouched. A quanto is a currency convention, not a hedge on the stock.
• The one-for-one rate is a scaling convention, not a statement of value. One Hong Kong dollar has not been worth one US dollar at any point in the modern era. Treating them as equal means the contract's USDT notional is a fixed multiple of the true economic exposure, running in the direction of more USDT notional per unit of underlying value. Size from the contract specification in front of you; do not read the USDT figure as a dollar valuation of the shares.
• Regime risk on the peg is not hedged. The Hong Kong dollar is managed against the US dollar within a band. The quanto convention makes your P&L independent of movements inside that band — which is why the design works for HKD and would not for a free-floating currency. It does not protect you if the arrangement governing the band were ever changed.
• Gap risk, session risk and liquidation mechanics are unaffected. A quanto contract on a market that is shut for eighteen hours a day is still a contract on a market shut for eighteen hours a day.

The FAQ also uses the quanto case to draw a distinction on corporate actions: a quanto holder's dividend treatment reflects the local-currency amount under the one-for-one convention, while a USDT-priced contract reflects an FX-converted amount, and splits adjust contract units proportionally in both. The company still pays you nothing; what the dividend methodology specifies is a one-time special funding settlement on the ex-date, shorts paying longs, sized by these quanto-versus-USDT rules — the corporate actions guide covers the mechanism in full.

The currency layer under a won-priced contract

The same asymmetry runs through the currency question. Every contract in the table above margins and settles in USDT, and none of the underlyings is priced in dollars — the Korean names trade in won, the Hong Kong names in Hong Kong dollars, CXMT and Unitree in yuan. A foreign-currency stock held through a dollar instrument is two positions at once, the stock in its home currency and that currency against the dollar, and both arrive in one unlabelled number. The order ticket shows none of it. A name can be up in Seoul and flat in USDT the same session, because the won moved.

The launch notices answer part of this. For the two Shanghai contracts, CXMT and Unitree, the notices call the contract USDT-priced and add that “a USDT/CNH FX rate is applied, as provided by a third party vendor and updated on a real time basis”. So the second factor is live there: you hold the yuan against the dollar as well as the stock. The four Hong Kong contracts labelled quanto use the documented one-for-one convention instead; the other Hong Kong contracts are labelled USDT-priced. For Korea the launch notices are thinner (the 2 June notice has no contract-type row at all), but Binance’s TradFi FAQ now settles it: a USDT/KRW conversion has been applied to the Korean equity contracts since 7 August 2026, and a USDT/HKD conversion to the Hong Kong ones since 22 July. On a Korean contract you therefore hold the won against the dollar as well as the stock, and the same is true of the Hong Kong dollar on the USDT-priced Hong Kong contracts. The quanto contracts are the exception, by design.

Holidays and long closures on Asian equity perpetuals

The weekly totals are not the difference. Five Korean sessions of six hours twenty minutes come to under nineteen per cent of the hours in a week, almost exactly what a US regular session produces; mainland China is the outlier, at under twelve.

Holiday calendars that do not line up. A US equity perp sits idle on roughly nine or ten US market holidays a year, and you know all of them. Korea and mainland China observe different calendars entirely, including multi-day national closures that have no equivalent in the US market, and the largest of those follow a lunar calendar, so their dates move each year, and these contracts sit on three such calendars rather than one.

When a home market is shut, these equity-perp indices use Orderbook EWMA mode while the perpetual continues to trade 24/7. A Korean contract can therefore spend several consecutive days using a smoothed impact price from Binance's own contract book while news accumulates; when the cash market returns, vendor-based prices are blended back in over a short transition. That is the weekend mechanic stretched from hours into days, on a date nobody outside the region has diarised. Check the exchange's published holiday calendar before you hold one of these across a week you have not thought about.

Lunch breaks and price limits

Price limits and halts. Mainland Chinese exchanges operate daily price-limit and trading-halt regimes that constrain how far a stock can move in a session. We did not verify the specific band applicable to code 688825 and will not guess it — check the exchange's rules for the board the stock is listed on. The structural point is what matters: if the underlying is limit-locked and cannot trade, the perpetual has no live price to track and no way for a genuine repricing to complete in one session. A move a US stock would express in one afternoon can take several sessions in Shanghai, with the perp free-floating in between.

The lunch break. Hong Kong closes 12:00–13:00 and mainland China 11:30–13:00 local time. Nothing in the US session does this. Binance's FAQ states that Hong Kong uses orderbook EWMA over the lunch break, so during that hour the index is derived from Binance's own book with exponential smoothing rather than from vendor prices. That is a scheduled, hour-long window, recurring every trading day, in which the contract's reference price comes from Binance's own order flow. The FAQ treats mainland China the same way: its 11:30–13:00 break, like the Korean overnight closure from 15:20 to 09:00, is listed as Orderbook EWMA.

If you trade them anyway

1. Trade inside the home session, or accept you are not trading the underlying. The only hours in which these contracts track a live market are those in the UTC column above. Outside them you are trading Binance's index construction and other participants' positioning — a legitimate thing to do, but a different trade deserving a different size.
2. Set alarms in UTC. The home sessions are fixed in UTC year-round; your local offset is not. Anchor the routine to the UTC window and let local time float.
3. Check the parameters panel for the actual leverage tier. The 20× and 25× caps above are launch-day maximums. Binance revises margin tiers after listing, and the panel inside the trading interface governs, not this page.
4. Treat the reopen as the risk event. For a US name the dangerous moment is the 09:30 New York open. For these it is 00:00 UTC (Korea) or 01:30 UTC (Hong Kong and mainland), when an order-book-derived index begins its blended transition back to live constituent prices. Read the out-of-hours guide for how that handover behaves.
5. Do not stack the memory names. SK Hynix, Samsung, Hanmi, CXMT, Gigadevice and the DRAM-linked contracts move on the same supply-chain news. Holding several is one position, not a book.

Finally, availability. Every announcement carries the line that products "may not be available in your region", and the FAQ separately notes EEA restrictions on unauthorised stablecoins under MiCA. A contract can be listed and still be closed to your account — every listed contract and its caveats are on the contract list, and how to check your own position is in the availability and eligibility guide.