Crypto PnL cards: what they show, what they hide, and why they became the flex
A field-by-field reading of the image traders post after a win, a worked example of how leverage turns a 2% price move into +100%, and a table of how three exchanges define the same words differently.
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A PnL card is an image an exchange generates from one position so it can be shared: the pair, long or short, the leverage, the entry and mark or exit price, and a large ROI percentage, usually with a referral code. The ROI is measured on that position's margin, not on the account, so leverage multiplies it, and the card says nothing about position size, fees, liquidations or the trades that lost.
What is PnL in crypto?
PnL means profit and loss: what a position has made or lost, counted in the currency it settles in. Exchanges report it in two states. Unrealized PnL belongs to a position that is still open and changes with every price update. Realized PnL is what remains once the position is closed. For a futures contract settled in USDT, the core arithmetic is the same everywhere: the quantity times the gap between exit price and entry price for a long, the reverse for a short.
The details are where venues differ, and a PnL card inherits them. Binance's help center computes unrealized PnL on the mark price, the reference price it uses for open positions, and realized PnL on the last traded price. A card generated from an open position can therefore show a figure that does not match the last trade on the chart at that second. Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions.
Anatomy of a PnL card, field by field
A PnL card is the image an exchange renders from a single position when you press its share button, sized for a social feed. Layouts vary by venue, but the fields repeat. Here is an illustrative card, not a real trade:
- BTCUSDT Perpetual, Long, 50x
- ROI: +100.00%
- Entry price 100,000.0, mark price 102,000.0
- A referral code and a QR code in the corner
Read it from the top. Each field says something precise, and each leaves a question open.
| Field | What it actually says | The question it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Pair or symbol | The market and the contract. BTCUSDT Perpetual is a perpetual future settled in USDT, not bitcoin held in a wallet. | Was this the only position open? |
| Side | Long gains when the price rises, short when it falls. | None. This field is complete. |
| Leverage | Position value divided by the margin posted. At 50x, 100 USDT of margin carries a 5,000 USDT position. | How close was the liquidation price? |
| ROI % (sometimes ROE) | The PnL divided by the margin of this one position. | What is it as a share of the whole account? |
| PnL amount | The gain in USDT, when the poster leaves it on. | Before or after fees and funding? |
| Entry price | The average fill price of the position. | One fill, or several averaged together? |
| Mark or exit price | The mark price for an open position, the closing price for a closed one. | Was the gain ever taken? |
| Timestamp | When the image was generated. | What happened after? |
| Handle and avatar | Who posted it, according to the poster. | Is the account theirs? |
| Referral code and QR | The poster's code at that exchange. | Is the poster paid when you sign up and trade? |
Some share screens let the poster drop the amount or the size before saving the image. The percentage stays, because the percentage is the point of the card.
Worked example: how leverage turns a 2% move into +100%
The ROI on a card is the PnL divided by the margin of that one position, and the margin is the position's value divided by the leverage: Binance's own formula writes the initial margin rate as 1 divided by the leverage. So the same price move produces an ROI that scales with the leverage chosen, while nothing else about the trade changes.
One illustrative trade: a long on the BTCUSDT perpetual from 100,000 to 102,000 USDT, a 2% rise, with 100 USDT of margin. Fees are 0.05% per side, the regular taker rate in Binance's published fee schedule for USDT-margined futures, charged on the value of the position, not on the margin. Funding is left out.
| Leverage | Position value | Gross PnL | ROI on the card | Fees, both sides | Net PnL | Net ROI | Move against you that erases the margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1x | 100 | 2.00 | +2% | 0.10 | 1.90 | +1.9% | 100% |
| 10x | 1,000 | 20.00 | +20% | 1.01 | 18.99 | +19.0% | 10% |
| 50x | 5,000 | 100.00 | +100% | 5.05 | 94.95 | +95.0% | 2% |
| 100x | 10,000 | 200.00 | +200% | 10.10 | 189.90 | +189.9% | 1% |
All amounts are in USDT. Four things fall out of the table.
- Divide the ROI by the leverage and you get the price move. +100% at 50x is a 2% move. +200% at 100x is the same 2%.
- Fees grow with leverage, measured against the margin. A round trip at the taker rate costs about 0.1% of the position's value: about 5% of the margin at 50x, about 10% at 100x, before the price has moved at all. Funding on a perpetual adds to that, or offsets it, for every funding payment the position is held through.
- The downside is the mirror image, with a cliff. At 50x the margin is 2% of the position, so a 2% move the other way erases it. Exchanges do not wait that long: Binance starts liquidation once the position's collateral, unrealized PnL included, falls below the maintenance margin, and charges a liquidation clearance fee unless the position is bankrupt. The 2% that makes a +100% card in one direction makes no card in the other.
- The card measures the position, not the trader. If 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 reads +100%, or +95% if fees are counted. All three numbers are true. Only one describes the account.
One more wrinkle. Binance lets the user choose whether the ROI in the positions tab uses the entry price or the mark price. On the entry price, this trade's margin is 100 USDT and the ROI is +100%. On the mark price, its formula values the margin at 102 USDT and the ROI comes out at +98.0%. Same position, same moment, two ROIs.
For scale: when ESMA restricted contracts for difference sold to retail clients in 2018, it capped leverage on crypto CFDs at 2:1. At 2:1, the trade above is a +4% ROI before fees.
Same words, different math: how exchanges define PnL and ROI
A card prints PnL and ROI as if each word had one meaning. Three help centers, read in October 2026, answer the question that matters most (are fees and funding in the number?) three different ways.
| Exchange | Unrealized PnL | Realized PnL | Fees and funding |
|---|---|---|---|
| Binance | On the mark price | On the last traded price | The help page says its ROI% now includes commissions, funding fees and insurance clearance fees |
| Bitget | On the mark price | The closing profit plus trading fees and funding fees | Both are in realized PnL |
| Kraken | On the mark price, without the entry fee, which leaves the balance at opening | Exit price minus entry price, times the size, minus entry and exit fees | Trading fees are in; funding is not, it is booked separately in the ledger |
Bitget's own worked example shows the size of the gap. A long of 1 BTC from 90,000 to 94,000 USDT closes 4,000 USDT up. After two trading fees at 0.02% and one funding payment at 0.1%, the realized PnL is 3,873.20 USDT. A card showing the first number and a card showing the second describe the same trade.
The practical rule: before comparing two cards, find out which venue made each one and what that venue counts. Two cards reading +80% from two exchanges are not necessarily the same result.
What a PnL card does not show
Every field on a card can be accurate and the card can still mislead, because of what is not on it.
- Size. +100% on 100 USDT and +100% on 100,000 USDT render identically. With the amount hidden, a reader cannot tell a coffee from a car.
- The account. The card says nothing about what else sits in the account, or what has left it this month.
- The other trades. One card is one position. The losing positions of the same week could produce cards too; they are just not posted.
- Fees and funding, depending on the venue, as the table above shows.
- Liquidations. A liquidated position ends with most or all of its margin gone. Nobody presses share on it.
- What happened next. A card from an open position is a snapshot of unrealized PnL at the mark price. The position may have closed lower, or at a loss.
- Whose account it is. 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 depictions of investment accounts rapidly increasing in value and providing large returns are often fake. A genuine card is not fake. It is incomplete in exactly the places a reader would need.
Why PnL cards became the crypto flex
A flex is a display of status (flex culture has the longer history of the word). The PnL card became crypto's standard one for reasons that are documented rather than mysterious.
The exchange built the share button and put a referral code on it
Binance's futures referral guide describes the mechanism plainly: tap the share icon in Futures and you get an image with a QR code that friends can scan to sign up. The same program advertises up to 30% commission on referred friends' trading, and a 10% fee discount for the friend. A card that travels is an advertisement, and the person posting it is paid when it works.
Leaderboards turned results into rankings
Kraken's futures leaderboard, announced in February 2024, ranks the top 50 traders by realized and unrealized PnL over seven days and offers a shareable Performance Card to show a rank on social media. When the venue frames results as a competition, the card is the trophy.
Leverage manufactures big numbers
The worked example shows the mechanism: the percentage on a card depends on the leverage chosen as much as on the market. A three-digit ROI is ordinary on a leveraged position. It only becomes remarkable when it is read as a return on someone's money.
People post their wins
Finance research has a name for it. Han, Hirshleifer and Walden call it self-enhancing transmission: investors like to recount their victories more than their defeats, and listeners do not fully correct for that selection. In their model, the bias favors high-variance, active strategies, because those produce the most striking reports. High leverage is a high-variance strategy that prints its best results as images.
Then there is the format. A percentage shows a win without showing a wallet, which suits a culture where status and privacy pull in opposite directions. A card says "I was right" without saying "I am rich", and it can be posted from an account of any size.
PnL card design: why every card looks alike
Cards from different venues share a grammar, and the grammar follows the job. The percentage is the largest element, in green for a gain, because it has to read in a feed at thumbnail size. The background is dark. The venue's logo, and often a mascot or an illustration, make the source recognizable at a glance. The QR code sits in a corner, where it does not compete with the number but waits for the viewer who wants in.
A card built to travel puts one number first. Position size, account balance and fees paid would each shrink that number's effect, so they sit lower in the hierarchy when they appear at all. That is not a conspiracy. It is a marketing asset doing what marketing assets do: one message, one action. Read the card as an ad first and a result second, and its design stops being persuasive.
How to read a PnL card critically
- Divide the ROI by the leverage. That is the price move. If it is a fraction of the pair's ordinary daily range, the card is about leverage, not foresight.
- Check the prices against the chart. The entry and mark or exit prices must sit inside the range the pair actually traded around the card's timestamp. A price the market never printed did not come from that market.
- Ask whether the position was open or closed. Unrealized PnL at the mark price is a snapshot. Realized PnL is a result.
- Ask what the venue counts. Fees and funding are in on some exchanges and out on others.
- Ask about the account, not the trade. Some exchanges report account-level results: 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. That figure includes the losers. A picture of it is still a picture, but it is the right question.
- Read the QR code as a disclosure. It tells you the poster may earn from your sign-up and your fees.
- On an on-chain venue, ask for the address. Hyperliquid documents a public endpoint that returns, for any address and with no login, its open positions with entry price, size, leverage, liquidation price, unrealized PnL and return on equity. That turns a card into a claim anyone can check. A centralized exchange keeps accounts private, so a viewer has nothing equivalent to query.
Crypto PnL screenshot or PnL card?
A PnL card comes out of the share button. A crypto PnL screenshot is a capture of the working screen itself: a positions tab, a trade history, a PnL page. The screenshot usually carries more context than the card, because it was not designed to be shared. It is still an image of a screen, and it fails in the same way: nothing in the pixels ties it to an account a viewer can see.
The checks that work on a wallet screenshot work here too. Arithmetic first (the quantity times the price move should equal the PnL shown), then timestamps, then whether the prices existed. How to spot a fake crypto wallet screenshot walks through them, and its conclusion carries over: the only check that settles a claim is one that does not go through an image.
A wallet screen is not a PnL card
We make a larp wallet, so the distinction is worth stating from our side. My Larp 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, no entry price, no leverage, no ROI and no PnL card, and it holds no funds and connects to no blockchain.
That is also why neither kind of image proves much about a trader. A balance says what is in a wallet at one moment, not how it got there; a card says 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, the rented car), day trading larp picks up where this page stops.
Sources
- Binance, How to Calculate Profit and Loss for Futures Contracts, 2026
- Binance, Binance Futures Fee Structure and Fee Calculations, 2026
- Binance, Binance Futures Liquidation Protocols, 2026
- Binance, How to Use the Binance Futures Referral Program, 2026
- Binance, How Are PNL Calculated on Binance Futures and Options PNL Analysis, 2026
- Bitget, How to Calculate P&L on Futures Trading?, 2025
- Kraken, PnL Calculations, 2026
- Kraken Blog, Rise through the ranks with our new Futures Leaderboard, 2024
- Hyperliquid Docs, Info endpoint: Perpetuals, 2026
- U.S. SEC, Social Media and Investment Fraud: Investor Alert, 2022
- ESMA, ESMA agrees to prohibit binary options and restrict CFDs to protect retail investors, 2018
- NBER, Han, Hirshleifer and Walden, Social Transmission Bias and Investor Behavior, 2018
Questions
What does PnL card mean in crypto?
A PnL card is a shareable image an exchange generates from one position: the pair, long or short, the leverage, the entry and mark or exit price, and a large ROI percentage, often with the poster's referral code and a QR code. It is built to be posted on social media, which is why it shows one trade rather than an account.
What is PnL in crypto?
Profit and loss: what a position has made or lost. Unrealized PnL belongs to an open position and moves with the price; realized PnL is what remains once the position is closed. Whether trading fees and funding are deducted depends on the exchange.
Why is the ROI on a PnL card so high?
Because it is measured against the margin of the position, and the margin is the position's value divided by the leverage. A 2% price move at 50x is +100% on margin before fees, about +95% after taker fees on both sides. Divide the ROI by the leverage to get the actual price move.
Is a PnL card proof that someone is a profitable trader?
No. It shows one position, not the account, and leaves out position size, the losing trades, liquidations and, on some venues, fees and funding. Account-level results over a full period, or positions on an on-chain venue that anyone can look up by address, say far more.
What is the difference between realized and unrealized PnL?
Unrealized PnL is the result of a position that is still open, usually computed on the exchange's mark price, and it can still disappear. Realized PnL is locked in when the position closes. A card generated from an open position shows unrealized PnL.
Can a crypto PnL screenshot be verified?
Not from the image. You can check its arithmetic and whether the prices it shows were actually traded around its timestamp, which catches careless edits. Confirmation needs a source outside the image: the exchange's own account statement or, on an on-chain venue, the address itself.
Compose the screen instead of describing it
Your tokens, your amounts, your accent, laid out in the browser, then opened on your phone at your own address. A mockup, and we never pretend otherwise.
- Unlimited tokens, amounts and accents
- Add it to your home screen; it opens like an app
- Live market prices that keep moving
- Your own address, mylarpwallet.com/you
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