Gate has launched a new product called Event Contracts, and it's a genuinely simpler way to trade short-term price direction compared to the leverage and margin mechanics most derivatives products require.

The concept itself is straightforward. Instead of opening a leveraged long or short position, users simply pick a timeframe, say a 5-minute BTC or ETH window, and choose whether they think the price will be higher or lower at the end of that window than it was at the start. Contracts are priced between 0.01 and 0.99 USDT, a pricing structure that reflects the market's own probability estimate for that outcome at any given moment, similar to how prediction market contracts work. The minimum to participate is just 1.5 USDT.

The settlement mechanic is what makes this meaningfully different from traditional futures. If your prediction is correct, each winning contract settles at a flat 1 USDT with no settlement fee. If it's wrong, that contract's value simply goes to zero, again with no additional fee attached. There's no leverage involved at all, which means there's no liquidation risk and no margin call mechanism, the most you can ever lose on a position is exactly what you paid for the contract in the first place. That's a structurally different risk profile than a leveraged perpetual, where losses can compound rapidly and positions can be liquidated before the underlying prediction even has a chance to play out.

There's also flexibility built in for anyone who doesn't want to wait for the event to fully settle. Positions can be closed early at any point before the window ends, by selling back into the order book, which lets users lock in a profit or cut a loss without needing to hold until the final settlement.

For this initial rollout, Gate is supporting BTC and ETH price direction events across four time windows, 5-minute, 15-minute, 1-hour, and 4-hour cycles, with more assets and periods planned for later phases. To access it, users need app version 8.28.0 or later, then navigate to the Futures page and switch over to the Events tab.

For anyone on Gate who's been curious about short-term directional trading but wanted to avoid the liquidation risk that comes with leveraged futures, this product is worth a look specifically because the maximum downside is capped and known upfront, the price paid for the contract, rather than being exposed to margin calls or slippage during fast moves. It's still worth treating this as a genuine trading decision rather than a low-stakes game, since short 5 and 15-minute windows on assets as volatile as BTC and ETH are inherently difficult to predict consistently, and the simplicity of the payout structure doesn't change the fact that most participants in this kind of binary, short-horizon format tend to lose more often than they win over time.

https://www.gate.com/announcements/article/100686

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