How does Moon.com work?

The 60-second summary

Moon.com works like this: you pick an asset (BTC, ETH, SOL, AAPL and TSLA were live when we checked), decide whether its price will go Up or Down, choose a stake and a leverage multiplier from 1x up to 1000x, and place the bet. Your profit or loss is the price move in your direction multiplied by your leverage. $100 at 100x behaves like a $10,000 position, so a 1% move your way roughly doubles your stake. Markets run around the clock, and you can do all of it with a free play-money balance before you deposit.

You’re betting against Moon, which prices each bet with a spread in its favor, plus three fees: 1% of your wager when you open, a holding fee every 8 hours the bet stays open, and at least 10% of any profit when you close a winner. Deposits are crypto, and KYC comes before your first deposit.

• 1000x Max leverage
• 1% Opening fee
• every 8h Holding fee
• 10%+ Performance fee

The up/down mechanic

Every bet on Moon has four inputs: an asset, a direction, a stake and a leverage multiplier.

Asset. Moon lists crypto, stocks, futures and commodities. When we fetched the site the visible markets were Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Apple and Tesla. The list may have grown since; check the app for what is live today.

Direction. Up or Down. That is the whole decision. There are no strike prices, no expiry dates and no order book to read.

Stake. The amount of real (or play) money you put into the bet. This is the most you can lose on it.

Leverage. The multiplier applied to your stake to work out your exposure. $100 at 10x gives you $1,000 of exposure. $100 at 1000x gives you $100,000 of exposure. The exposure is what your profit and loss are calculated on, but the stake is what you can actually lose.

Once the bet is open, it stays open until one of three things happens: you close it yourself, the price moves against you by enough to consume your stake (liquidation), or you hit a limit set by Moon. Your running profit or loss is simply exposure × percentage move in your direction, minus fees.

A quick sanity check on the arithmetic: at 10x, a 1% move in your favor earns 10% of your stake. At 100x, the same 1% move earns 100% of your stake. At 1000x, a 1% move would earn 1,000% of your stake if it went your way, but a 0.1% move against you wipes it out first. That asymmetry is the entire story of high leverage, and we go into it properly on the leverage page.

What are you actually betting against?

Moon is not a prediction market. On Polymarket or Kalshi you buy a contract from another user, and the platform takes a fee for matching you. On Moon there is no counterparty on the other side except Moon itself.

Moon’s terms of service reserve “a spread or other pricing edge in Moon’s favour” and describe a liquidity or spread adjustment applied when a position closes. The size of that spread is not published. In plain terms: Moon sets the price you bet at, that price is tilted slightly against you in both directions, and Moon is the one paying out when you win and collecting when you lose.

Moon doesn’t describe itself as a bookmaker or a market-maker in so many words, so we’ll put it carefully: the structure described in Moon’s own terms is house-banked betting, where the house holds an edge through pricing. That is closer to a sportsbook than to an exchange. It is also why the exact liquidation point on a given bet is slightly worse than the textbook figure: the spread eats part of your buffer before the price has moved at all.

Leverage in one paragraph

Leverage multiplies both the size of your bet and the speed at which it resolves. The rule of thumb is that a move of roughly 100% ÷ leverage against you ends the bet: 10% at 10x, 1% at 100x, 0.1% at 1000x. Those figures are before spread and fees, so the real threshold arrives a little sooner. Moon lets you choose any multiplier from 1x to 1000x per bet, and the leverage guide has an interactive calculator, a tier-by-tier breakdown and the sizing rules that hold up against a live price feed.

The fee stack

Moon charges four things. Only two of them are published as numbers.

Three things to notice.

First, the opening fee is on the stake, not the exposure. A $100 bet costs $1 to open whether you pick 1x or 1000x, so the price of entry never scales with your leverage.

Second, the holding fee is the one that quietly matters. It’s assessed every 8 hours at a rate Moon adjusts and doesn’t publish. If you leave a bet open across a weekend, that’s nine assessments. Plan your close before you open and it rarely comes into play.

Third, the performance fee is a floor. Moon says “minimum 10%” of realized profit. Every example below uses 10%, which is the best case.

All figures come from Moon’s help center article on fees and the terms of service, checked on the date at the top of this page. If Moon changes them, the review will note it.

Three worked examples

Each example uses the simple formula (exposure × move) and applies the two published fees. Holding fees are excluded because the rate isn’t published; assume every bet below is opened and closed inside 8 hours. Spread is excluded because its size is undisclosed; in reality it makes every outcome slightly worse than shown. We list the opening fee as a separate cost rather than deducting it from the stake; the total is the same either way.

Example 1: $100 at 10x on Bitcoin, price rises 2%

You bet Up on BTC with $100 at 10x. Bitcoin climbs 2% and you close.

Stake	$100
Leverage	10x
Exposure	$1,000
Move	+2% in your favor
Gross result	+$20.00
Opening fee (1% of stake)	−$1.00
Performance fee (10% of $20 profit)	−$2.00
Net	+$17.00

A 2% move on Bitcoin turned into a 17% return on your stake after fees. Fees took 15% of the gross win. Had BTC dropped 2% instead, you’d be down $21 (a $20 loss plus the $1 opening fee) with $80 of stake still in the bet. Liquidation at 10x needs a 10% move against you, which on Bitcoin can take days or hours depending on the week.

Example 2: $100 at 100x on Tesla, price falls against you

You bet Up on TSLA with $100 at 100x. Tesla drifts down 0.5% in the first few minutes, then keeps going.

	At −0.5%	At −1.0%
Stake	$100	$100
Leverage	100x	100x
Exposure	$10,000	$10,000
Move	−0.5% against you	−1.0% against you
Gross result	−$50.00	−$100.00 (liquidated)
Opening fee	−$1.00	−$1.00
Performance fee	$0	$0
Net	−$51.00	−$101.00

The first column shows how quickly half the stake goes: a 0.5% dip is a rounding error on a Tesla chart, and it has cost you $50. The second column is the liquidation. On paper it takes a 1% move; because Moon’s spread is built into the price, the real trigger sits somewhere short of that. Tesla routinely moves 1% inside a single trading hour, so at 100x you are betting on the next few minutes, not the day.

Example 3: $50 at 1000x, a 0.05% move

You bet $50 at 1000x on any of the listed assets. The price moves 0.05%, one twentieth of one percent.

	Move in your favor	Move against you
Stake	$50	$50
Leverage	1000x	1000x
Exposure	$50,000	$50,000
Move	+0.05%	−0.05%
Gross result	+$25.00	−$25.00
Opening fee	−$0.50	−$0.50
Performance fee (10% of $25)	−$2.50	$0
Net	+$22.00	−$25.50

A 0.05% move is half your stake in either direction. Another 0.05% against you and the bet is liquidated: that’s a total move of 0.1%, which on Bitcoin can happen between two refreshes of the page. The spread makes it tighter still, because a portion of your 0.1% buffer is already spent the moment the bet opens.

Play-money mode

Moon’s homepage invites you to “try it with play money” before betting real funds. The demo balance lets you place bets on the same markets, at the same leverage settings, and watch them play out. Two practical uses:

• Learn the liquidation feel. Put a play bet on at 1000x and watch it. Most people are surprised by how fast it ends. That lesson costs nothing in demo mode and $50 in real mode.
• Test a sizing plan. Decide your stake and leverage rules in advance, run them on play money for a few days, and see whether you’d actually have kept any money.

Use it to learn the mechanics rather than to build confidence: a strategy that works in demo still needs to survive the losing streaks with real stakes.

From sign-up to first bet

The account flow has a deliberate order: verification comes before money.

1. Register. Create an account on moon.com with an email and password. Moon applies a restricted-country list at sign-up; the FAQ has the current version.
2. Complete KYC before you deposit. Moon requires a government-issued ID (front and back) and proof of address before your first deposit, not just before withdrawal. Higher-risk accounts may be asked for source-of-funds documents.
3. Deposit crypto. Moon only accepts cryptocurrency deposits, and your balance is usable once the network confirms. Moon hasn’t published a full list of supported coins, so check the deposit screen for what’s accepted rather than sending anything blind.
4. Bet. Choose the asset, Up or Down, stake and leverage. The 1% opening fee is charged on your stake at this moment.
5. Withdraw. Withdrawals go through AML checks and are subject to minimum and maximum limits plus network fees. KYC has to be complete here too.

Two things to know before step 3. There is no welcome bonus at the time of writing; what you get through our link is the VIP track and rakeback on fees, covered on the promo code page. And Moon has no native app: it runs in the browser, with add-to-home-screen on mobile, so if you find an “official Moon app” in a store, be suspicious.

What happens at liquidation

Liquidation is Moon closing your bet for you, because the price has moved against you by enough that your stake can no longer cover the loss.

What you lose. The stake you put into that specific bet, plus the opening fee you already paid. Any holding fees already assessed are gone too.

What you don’t lose. Anything beyond the stake. Moon’s structure means your maximum loss on a bet is the money you put into it; there is no margin call asking you to top up, and no negative balance to repay. That is a genuine difference from leveraged trading on some exchanges.

When it happens. Approximately when the move against you equals 100% ÷ leverage. Moon has not published its exact liquidation engine, and the spread is applied to the price, so treat that figure as an upper bound on how much room you have. At 1000x the difference between “0.1%” and “a bit less than 0.1%” is a few price ticks, and that is the difference between a bet that survives and one that doesn’t.

What it feels like. Fast, and with no warning. There is no intermediate state where Moon asks whether you’d like to add funds. The position is simply closed and your balance is lower.

The live page draws the biggest open positions on Moon as their distance from liquidation, which is the quickest way to see how little room 1000x leaves.

If you take one thing from this page, make it this: the stake is the only number you control that also limits your downside, and leverage decides how quickly you reach it. Spread, holding fee and performance fee make the trip a little shorter than the arithmetic suggests. The leverage guide goes deeper on sizing and time-in-bet, the review covers the platform as a whole, and the play-money mode is the right first stop.