Crypto PnL cards decoded: the arithmetic behind the big green number

Take a PnL card apart piece by piece, replay one trade at four leverage settings, compare how three exchanges count profit, and learn the questions that tell a position from a track record.

Published: 17 October 2026 · Last reviewed: 1 November 2026

The green number in your feed

You are scrolling, and a dark image stops you: a ticker, the word Long, a multiplier, and a percentage in bright green that is three digits long. It is the most copied picture in crypto trading, and it is a good example of something true that tells the wrong story. This guide takes the image apart, replays a trade with different leverage settings so the number can be reproduced by hand, and ends with the questions worth asking before you believe one.

First the vocabulary. PnL means profit and loss, counted in the currency a contract settles in. The unrealized kind belongs to a position that is still open and moves with every price tick. The realized kind is what remains once the position has closed. For a long on a USDT-settled contract, the arithmetic everywhere is the quantity multiplied by the gap between exit and entry price, and the reverse for a short.

Venues differ on the reference price. Binance's help center values unrealized PnL at the mark price, the reference it uses for open positions, and realized PnL at the last traded price. A card made from an open position can therefore disagree with the chart's last trade at that second. Neither figure is false. They answer different questions.

A card, taken apart

When you press share on a position, the exchange renders an image sized for a social feed. Layouts differ, but the same pieces turn up again and again. The card below is invented for illustration, not a real trade: BTCUSDT Perpetual, Long, 50x, ROI +100.00%, entry 100,000.0, mark 102,000.0, with a referral code and a QR code in one corner.

The identity line

The pair says which contract was traded. BTCUSDT Perpetual is a perpetual future settled in USDT, not bitcoin sitting in a wallet. The side says whether the gain comes from a rise (long) or a fall (short). Then comes the leverage, which is the position's value divided by the margin posted: at 50x, 100 USDT of margin supports a 5,000 USDT position. Questions left open: was this the only position, and how close was the liquidation price?

The headline

The ROI, sometimes labelled ROE, is the PnL divided by the margin of this one position. Where the poster leaves it on, an amount in USDT sits nearby, and you are right to wonder whether it is counted before or after fees and funding. Many share screens let the poster hide the amount or the size before saving the image. The percentage stays, since the percentage is the point.

The two prices

The entry price is the average fill, so ask whether it was one fill or several blended together. The second price is the mark for an open position or the exit for a closed one. That distinction decides whether the gain was ever banked.

The signature

A timestamp tells you when the image was generated, not what followed. A handle and an avatar tell you whom the poster claims to be, not whether the account is theirs. The referral code and QR belong to the poster at that exchange, which raises the plainest question of all: is this person paid when you sign up and trade?

One trade, four leverage settings

Binance writes the initial margin rate as 1 divided by the leverage, so the margin is the position's value divided by the leverage. That has a direct consequence: the same price move gives an ROI proportional to the leverage chosen, while nothing else about the market changes.

The test trade is a long on the BTCUSDT perpetual from 100,000 to 102,000 USDT, a 2% rise, using 100 USDT of margin. Fees are 0.05% per side, the regular taker rate in Binance's published schedule for USDT-margined futures, applied to the value of the position and not to the margin. Funding is left out. Amounts are in USDT.

• 1x. Position of 100. Gross gain 2.00, shown as +2%. Fees 0.10, net 1.90, or +1.9%. Only a 100% fall would wipe out the margin.
• 10x. Position of 1,000. Gross gain 20.00, shown as +20%. Fees 1.01, net 18.99, or +19.0%. A 10% fall erases the margin.
• 50x. Position of 5,000. Gross gain 100.00, shown as +100%. Fees 5.05, net 94.95, or +95.0%. A 2% fall erases the margin.
• 100x. Position of 10,000. Gross gain 200.00, shown as +200%. Fees 10.10, net 189.90, or +189.9%. A 1% fall erases the margin.

What the replay teaches

• The price move hides in the quotient. A +100% card at 50x and a +200% card at 100x both describe a 2% rise in the market.
• Costs scale against the margin. A round trip at the taker rate costs roughly 0.1% of the position's value. That is about 5% of the margin at 50x and about 10% at 100x, before the price moves at all. On a perpetual, each funding payment held through adds to the cost or offsets it.
• The losing side has a cliff. At 50x, a 2% move the wrong way consumes the margin. Exchanges act sooner: Binance starts liquidating when collateral, unrealized PnL included, drops under the maintenance margin, and it charges a liquidation clearance fee unless the position is already bankrupt. The 2% that prints a +100% card upward prints nothing downward.
• The card measures a position, never a person. Suppose the futures account holds 10,000 USDT and this trade used 100 USDT of it. The trade added 94.95 USDT, which is +0.95% on the account. The card shows +100%, or +95% after fees. All three figures are true, and only one describes the account.

A final wrinkle: Binance lets users pick whether the ROI in the positions tab is based on entry price or mark price. On entry price, this trade's margin is 100 USDT and the ROI is +100%. On mark price, the formula values the margin at 102 USDT and the ROI becomes +98.0%. One position, one moment, two figures.

For scale, ESMA's 2018 restrictions on contracts for difference sold to retail clients capped leverage on crypto CFDs at 2:1. At 2:1, the same trade reads +4% before fees.

Three exchanges, three ways of counting

A card prints PnL and ROI as if each word had a single meaning. Help-center pages read in October 2026 answer the key question, whether fees and funding are inside the number, in three different ways.

• Binance: unrealized PnL on the mark price, realized PnL on the last traded price, and a help page saying the ROI% now includes commissions, funding fees and insurance clearance fees.
• Bitget: unrealized PnL on the mark price, and a realized PnL equal to the closing profit plus trading fees and funding fees.
• Kraken: unrealized PnL on the mark price, leaving out the entry fee, which already reduced the opening balance. Realized PnL is exit minus entry, times the size, minus entry and exit fees. Trading fees are in, funding is booked separately in the ledger.

Bitget's own worked example gives a sense of the gap. A long of 1 BTC from 90,000 to 94,000 USDT closes 4,000 USDT higher. After two trading fees at 0.02% and one funding payment at 0.1%, realized PnL is 3,873.20 USDT. Two cards, one with each number, would describe the same trade.

So before comparing two images, find out which venue made each and what it counts. Two cards that read +80% on two exchanges are not necessarily the same result.

Which platforms document a share button

This section keeps to what each platform's own pages say, read on 1 November 2026. "Not stated" means the page is silent, not that the feature is absent. Flexdger Wallet is not affiliated with Binance, Bybit, Kraken or Axiom, and no real trader's card is shown here.

• Binance. The Futures referral guide, last updated 2 January 2026, tells users to tap the Share icon in Futures in the app. It does not list the fields of the image. The image carries a QR code friends can scan to sign up for Binance Futures, and the guide does not mention a separate code.
• Bybit. Its Help Center has an article titled "How to Generate your Trade Summary Card". The page would not open when checked on 1 November, so nothing is stated from it.
• Axiom. The documentation at docs.axiom.trade lists migration tools, spot buys, quick sell, a Twitter monitor, wallet tracking and limit orders. It has no page on PnL cards.

The only platform that documents the button says what the image is for: a QR code that brings in sign-ups. Treat each card as a referral ad that happens to report a position.

Why this image became crypto's favourite flex

A flex is a display of status, and flex culture tells the longer story. The card's rise has causes that are documented rather than mysterious.

A button, a QR code and a commission

Binance's referral guide is blunt about the mechanism: tap share and you get an image with a code that lets friends sign up. The same program advertises a commission of up to 30% on referred friends' trading and a 10% fee discount for the friend. A card that travels is an ad, and its poster is paid when it works.

A leaderboard turns results into a contest

Kraken announced a futures leaderboard in February 2024. It ranks the top 50 traders on realized and unrealized PnL over seven days, and it offers a shareable Performance Card to show a rank. When the venue frames results as a competition, the card becomes the trophy.

Leverage makes big numbers cheap

The replay above shows it: the percentage reflects the leverage as much as the market. Three digits are ordinary on a leveraged position and only look remarkable when read as a return on someone's savings.

Winners talk

Han, Hirshleifer and Walden call it self-enhancing transmission. Investors enjoy retelling victories more than defeats, and listeners do not fully discount the selection. In their model the bias favors high-variance, active strategies, since those create the most striking stories. High leverage is exactly that, with its best moments exported as pictures.

Then there is the format. A percentage shows a win without exposing a wallet, which suits a culture where status and privacy pull apart. It says "I was right" without saying "I am rich", and a small account can post it as easily as a large one.

What no card can tell you

Every field can be correct and the whole can still mislead, because of what is missing.

• Size. +100% on 100 USDT and +100% on 100,000 USDT look alike. Without the amount, a coffee and a car are indistinguishable.
• The rest of the account. The card is silent on what else is in the account and what left it this month.
• The other positions. A week's losing trades could each produce a card. They are simply not posted.
• Costs. Whether fees and funding count depends on the venue, as seen above.
• Liquidations. A liquidated position ends with most or all of its margin gone, and nobody presses share on that.
• The sequel. A card made from an open position is a snapshot of unrealized PnL at the mark price. The position may close lower, or at a loss.
• The owner. A card is an image. It carries a handle and a referral code, not a signature.

The SEC's investor alert on social media fraud warns that pictures of investment accounts quickly gaining value and paying large returns are often fake. A genuine card is not fake. It is incomplete exactly where a reader would need it.

The visual grammar of a card

Cards from different venues share a design language, and it follows from their job. The percentage is the biggest element, green for a gain, so it reads at thumbnail size in a feed. The background is dark. A logo, often with a mascot, makes the source recognizable at a glance, and the QR code waits in a corner where it does not fight the number but is there for whoever wants in.

A card made to travel puts one figure first. Position size, account balance and fees would each blunt that figure, so they sit lower or vanish. Nothing sinister is needed to explain it: it is a marketing asset doing what such assets do, with one message and one action. Read it as an ad first and a result second, and its design loses its pull.

Seven questions before you believe one

1. Which venue made it, and what does that venue count? Fees and funding are in on some, out on others.
2. What is the leverage? Divide the ROI by it. If the result is a fraction of the pair's ordinary daily range, the card is about leverage, not foresight.
3. Do the prices fit the chart? Entry and mark or exit prices must lie inside the range the pair traded around the timestamp. A price the market never printed did not come from that market.
4. Was the position open or closed? Unrealized PnL at the mark is a snapshot. Realized PnL is an outcome.
5. What happened to the account? Some exchanges report that. Binance's PNL Analysis page shows the futures wallet's PnL by period, computed as the ending balance minus the starting balance minus net transfers in, losers included. A picture of that page is still a picture, but it answers the right question.
6. Who profits if you act? Read the QR code as a disclosure: the poster may earn from your sign-up and your fees.
7. Can anyone look it up? Hyperliquid documents a public endpoint that returns, for any address and with no login, open positions with entry price, size, leverage, liquidation price, unrealized PnL and return on equity. That makes a claim checkable. A centralized exchange keeps accounts private, so a viewer has nothing comparable to query.

Card or screenshot: the same weakness

A card comes from the share button. A crypto PnL screenshot is a capture of the working screen: a positions tab, a trade history, a PnL page. It usually holds more context since nobody designed it for sharing, yet it is still a picture of a screen, and nothing in its pixels ties it to an account a viewer can inspect.

The checks that work on wallet screenshots work here too: arithmetic first, since the quantity times the price move should equal the PnL shown, then timestamps, then whether the prices ever existed. How to spot a fake crypto wallet screenshot walks through them, and its conclusion carries over: only a check that does not pass through an image can settle a claim.

Where a wallet mockup fits

We make a larp wallet, so the distinction deserves stating from our side. Flexdger Wallet is a crypto wallet app simulator: it draws a wallet screen from tokens and quantities you type in, with live prices for SOL, ETH, BTC, HYPE and USDC. It shows holdings. It has no positions, entry prices, leverage, ROI or PnL card, holds no funds and connects to no blockchain.

That is also why neither kind of image proves much about a trader. A balance shows what sits in a wallet at one moment, not how it got there, and a card shows what one position did, not what the account did. In a video or a skit a wallet mockup belongs on screen with a visible Mockup label, and presenting it as a real balance or as proof of funds is prohibited by our terms of use. For the rest of the set, the monitors, the paper account and the rented car, the day trading larp continues where this page stops.

The card is only one of five staged screens, and the larp trading screen lines them up for comparison.

Reading list

• Binance help center on futures profit and loss, its fee structure, its liquidation protocols, its referral program and its PNL Analysis page (2026)
• Bitget guide to P&L on futures (2025)
• Kraken support page on PnL calculations (2026) and the futures leaderboard announcement (2024)
• Hyperliquid documentation, perpetuals info endpoint (2026)
• U.S. SEC investor alert on social media and investment fraud (2022)
• ESMA announcement on binary options and CFD restrictions (2018)
• Han, Hirshleifer and Walden, Social Transmission Bias and Investor Behavior (NBER, 2018)