Several people told me to try phoenix.trade as a second or better option than Hyperliquid, let’s take a look at it step by step.
This guide is not what I wish I had read before depositing my first USDC: what exactly is Phoenix Trade, how does it differ from a classic Solana DEX for spot token exchange, how to make your first trade without losing money out of ignorance, how much does it cost in practice, what are the risks that no one tells you clearly, and -of course- what is happening today with the much-discussed Phoenix Trade airdrop.
We’ll see it all together,
Open an account at Phoenix.Trade here.
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What is Phoenix Trade?
Let’s get something straight first, because it confuses a lot of people: Phoenix Trade is not a token exchange DEX like Jupiter or Raydium, where you swap SOL for USDC.
It’s a non-custodial decentralized perpetual futures exchange, built on Solana, where you don’t buy the asset itself but open a leveraged position on its price – long or short, with an expiration date that essentially doesn’t exist.
Spot vs Perpetuals: the difference you need to understand before clicking “Buy”
If you’re coming from the world of simple spot trading that is, you buy SOL, hold it in your wallet, hope it goes up Phoenix Trade works differently at a fundamental level. In spot, you buy the asset itself. In perpetuals, you buy synthetic exposure to its price.
This means three things that are completely game-changing:
First, your profit or loss is not determined by whether you own the token, but by the difference between the entry price and the current “mark price” of the contract.
Second, because you use leverage, both profits and losses are multiplied.
Third, because perpetuals have no expiration date, a mechanism is needed to keep their price close to the real market this is called funding, and we’ll explain it in detail below, because it’s something that many new traders ignore until they see their account lose value without the price even moving.
There is a fourth difference, less obvious but equally important: in spot trading, you can never lose more than you put in, the worst-case scenario is the token going to zero. In leveraged perpetuals, time plays an active role against you or in your favor through funding, even if the price of the underlying asset remains completely static. This is something no one thinks about when they first see a “25x” button next to a token they know well from spot trading.
Why someone chooses Phoenix Trade instead of Hyperliquid or Drift
If you’ve been following the space for a while, you know that the on-chain perpetuals market is currently dominated by Hyperliquid, which holds the largest share of the total decentralized derivatives volume worldwide. Solana has its own history in this space, with protocols like Drift or Jupiter Perps already having a significant presence. The question I asked myself, and you might be asking yourself, is why do we need another perp DEX.
The answer, after my research and initial testing, is that Phoenix Trade is not simply trying to copy the model of existing players, but to specifically solve the problem of execution costs at scale. The team’s public goal is to achieve a price impact of 3 to 5 basis points on $1 million worth of trades, compared to the 15 basis points or so we often see on existing Solana perp DEXs.
If these goals are consistently confirmed in production conditions, we are talking about a protocol that can truly “steal” volume from competitors, especially from medium and large-sized traders who feel every additional basis point price impact on each of their trades.
How to open an account at Phoenix Trade
First you will need to enter the official Phoenix Trade website here and it will take you to the page to open your account,
There you will see the options to open an account with a wallet (Metamask, Phantom, Ronin and others).
I will choose the Phantom wallet.
Then, if you are asked to sign up using a referral code (5BZCL222), enter this code to unlock all the benefits.
and that was it, your account is ready, just be careful, you must not lose your Phantom account that you logged in to (you will need to secure the Seed Phrase).
How to make a deposit at Phoenix Trade
After you have successfully completed opening your account, it is time to make your first deposit.
First we will need to have purchased Solana or USDC and transfer (solana network) them to the Phantom wallet.
If you don’t know where to buy Solana or USDC, you can do it from the Bybit Global exchange or from Bybit EU if you live in Europe.
After you transfer the USDC from the exchange, you will press the Deposit button and enter the USDC you want to have,
To trade, a good account for a beginner is $300 USDC, And you will press the Submit Deposit button.
And that was it, you have deposited your money in Phoenix Trade and you can analyze it immediately because your money is in your wallet.
How to do Perpetual Trading at Phoenix Trade
Let’s now see step by step how to do perpetual trading.
If you have experience in trading the menu is very easy
- Cross, Isolated- You will always choose Isolated especially if you are a beginner
- Short, Long – Here you will have to choose if you believe that the market will go up or down.
- Market, Limit – In the market the order will open immediately at the limit you will have to put a better price that you can open later.
- Order size (SOL, USDC) – Here you will choose the money you want to trade and from below it will also give you the initial leverage.
- Take profit . Stop Loss – Here you will set the price to reach your target and close your trade with a profit, in Stop loss you will set the price at which you will automatically stop losing if the market goes in the opposite direction
- and finally you will press the Place Order button.
Be careful in perpetual trading most people lose money because they don’t know what they are doing. You always have to risk 2% of the money you have deposited for each trade.
And the transaction will appear below, but if you do it with a limit it will appear in open orders.
Rewards, incentives and the Phoenix Trade Flight Club
Beyond its pure trading functionality, Phoenix Trade has run incentive programs to attract liquidity and active traders. The most recent, Flight Club, is a four-week program that distributes a total of 420,000 USDC to traders, with $15,000 being distributed each day based on four factors: how much you trade, how large and consistent positions you keep open, how much volume your referred users bring, and how consistently you use the platform over the course of the day. Rewards are credited daily in USDC, with no lockup or lock-in period you can claim them directly from the rewards page once they’re distributed.
Alongside temporary programs like Flight Club, there is also the permanent referral program, which operates on two levels: if you directly refer a user, you earn 20% of the trading fees they generate, and if they in turn refer someone else, you earn an additional 10% from the second level. Earnings are calculated weekly in USDC, with a minimum claim limit of $1, and the referral page unlocks once you exceed $10,000 in total trading volume.
To create your own referral code, you also need to have reached this volume limit – meaning someone can’t open an account and immediately start “selling” referral codes without any actual trading activity, which keeps the system healthier.
Phoenix Trade Airdrop: what’s really going on today
Let’s talk about this clearly, because it is the topic that brings the most search traffic around the project and at the same time the topic where the most misinformation is circulating.
The truth, based on the official texts of the protocol: Phoenix Trade has not announced a token, does not have an active points program, and there is no official commitment to an airdrop.
The protocol’s Terms of Use themselves are clear on this: no incentive program – neither the current rewards, nor any future ones – creates any contractual rights, no guarantees, no “legitimate expectations” on future distribution.
However, all similar projects have done airdrops and historically, those that were not supposed to give an airdrop, gave the biggest ones.
Now if you make a trade, you can try it and you also create a history of trading volume so that when an airdrop happens, you have collected good volume.
The downsides and risks you need to know before you deposit
It would be dishonest to write you a guide full of enthusiasm without clearly mentioning the negatives, because they exist, and they are significant.
The first and most important: this is beta software. The terms of use themselves explicitly state this – the application is in the testing and evaluation phase, it may contain bugs, instabilities, and its features are subject to change without notice. This is not “production-ready” software that you should rely on for time-critical trading decisions. If something goes wrong due to a software error, the damage is solely yours.
The second is the geographical risk. The protocol is not available to residents of the USA, Canada, the UK, as well as countries under international sanctions, and the company reserves the right to exclude additional jurisdictions at any time, without notice, even if you already have open positions. Before logging in, it is a good idea to read the full terms of use to make sure your jurisdiction is not restricted.
Phoenix Trade Frequently Asked Questions
Not exactly. The original Phoenix was a spot on-chain order book protocol that was also used as infrastructure by other Solana DEXs and aggregators. It has been renamed Phoenix Legacy, while today’s Phoenix Trade (or Phoenix Perpetuals) is the new perpetual futures product from the same team, Ellipsis Labs.
The protocol does not impose a fixed, published minimum deposit, but in practice you need enough capital so that the required margin comfortably covers the Solana network transaction costs and leaves a realistic safety margin before liquidation. Start with a small amount until you become familiar with the interface.
Only USDC on the Solana network at the moment, although the team has announced plans to allow other assets, such as SOL, as collateral in the future, which would reduce the need to convert to USDC before trading.
Yes, it is non-custodial, meaning it never holds your keys.
No, at least not yet. There is no announced token, nor an active points system. The only confirmed incentive is the referral program and temporary rewards programs like Flight Club, and any talk of a future airdrop remains pure community speculation.
My final conclusion
If you ask me whether it is worth trying Phoenix Trade, the honest answer is: yes, if you understand what leveraged trading means and if you have already accepted that you might lose the entire capital you put in. The product is technically impressive, the trading costs are among the most competitive you will find in a fully on-chain environment, and the team behind it has already proven that they know how to build serious infrastructure on Solana. At the same time, it remains an early-stage, beta product, with no guarantee of return of capital, no confirmed relationship with a future airdrop, and with all the risks that come with any leveraged, fully decentralized product.
If you decide to go ahead, start small: small capital, low leverage, a few positions at a time, until you are really comfortable with the logic of mark price, funding and risk tiers that we have described in this guide. This is, after all, the only way to get the benefits of a modern Phoenix DEX Solana product without paying for your education with money you can’t afford to lose.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice. Leveraged trading in perpetual futures involves significant risk, including the risk of complete loss of your invested capital. Before using any DeFi protocol, such as Phoenix Trade, please read the full, official terms of use and risk disclosures on phoenix.trade and do your own independent research (DYOR).
