Bybit EU Has No USDT Perpetuals: What the Live API Actually Returns

A customer in Greece wrote in this week trying to point his signal feed at Bybit. He had done everything right and it still would not work. The answer turned out not to be a setting, a permission, or a version of our software. It was a line drawn by two European regulations, and the only way to be certain about it was to ask Bybit's own servers.

What I measured

Bybit publishes an unauthenticated endpoint, /v5/market/instruments-info, that returns every tradable instrument in a given category. It needs no API key and no account. I queried all four categories against all six Bybit hosts on 17 September 2026. These are the raw counts.

That is the whole article in one table, but three details inside it are worth pulling out.

The zeros are real zeros. Not an error, not a permissions response, not an empty page of a longer list. The endpoint returns success with an empty array. Bybit EU is a spot-only venue today.

EU demo and EU testnet mirror EU live exactly. This closes off the workaround most people reach for. If you were hoping to rehearse perpetual strategies on an EU test environment and go live later, there is nothing to rehearse against.

Global demo is identical to Global live. Same 873 perpetuals, same 28 inverse contracts, same 538 spot pairs. That matters more than it looks, and I will come back to it.

Bybit is two companies, not one company with a European skin

This is the part that trips people up, including me before I looked properly. Bybit Global and Bybit EU are separate legal entities with separate licences, separate instrument lists and separate account bases. They happen to run identical V5 API software, which is why the only thing that changes between them is the hostname.

There are six hosts in total, three per entity:

Any software that talks to Bybit is talking to exactly one of those six. If it only knows about api.bybit.com and api-testnet.bybit.com, which was true of our own app until this week, then an EU customer has no host to point at even if their keys are perfectly valid.

How to tell which one you are on

Log in and read the address bar. bybit.eu means you have been moved to the EU entity. bybit.com with USDT perpetuals visible in the interface means you are still on Bybit Global.

EEA residents are being migrated across progressively rather than all at once, and the timing depends on residency and verification history. Two traders in the same country can be on different entities this month. Check rather than assume, because everything else follows from it.

Why there are no derivatives

Two separate regulations are doing the work here, and conflating them is what makes the situation confusing.

MiCA covers the venue. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation is what allows Bybit to operate a licensed crypto exchange across the EEA, and what the EU entity is authorised under. MiCA is largely about spot trading, custody and stablecoin issuance.

MiFID II covers the derivatives. Crypto derivatives for retail clients are financial instruments in EU law, and offering them requires an investment firm permission that is separate from a MiCA licence. That is a different application, a different supervisory regime and a different timeline. A venue can be fully MiCA-authorised and still have no route to listing a perpetual.

USDT is a third, unrelated problem. MiCA requires stablecoin issuers serving EEA clients to be authorised, and Tether has not sought that authorisation. The consequence is blunt: a MiCA-licensed venue cannot offer USDT to EEA clients at all. That is why the EU entity has no USDT pair even on the spot side, where derivatives permissions are irrelevant.

So a USDT perpetual on an EEA account fails two independent tests at once. Even if the derivatives permission arrived tomorrow, the settlement asset would still be unavailable.

The detail most coverage gets wrong

If you search for this, a lot of the commentary tells you that MiCA-compliant euro and dollar stablecoins are the EU entity's replacement for USDT. That is a reasonable thing to expect. It is not what the tradable pair list currently shows.

Here is the actual composition of those 127 EU spot pairs, by quote currency:

api.bybit.eu   spot pairs = 127

  USDC-quoted   106
  EUR-quoted     17
  PLN-quoted      4

  USDT symbols    0
  USDQ symbols    0
  EURQ symbols    0

The EU entity settled on USDC. Circle holds an EU e-money institution licence, which puts USDC and its euro counterpart EURC on the right side of the stablecoin rules, and 106 of the 127 pairs are quoted in it. EURC appears too, but only as a base coin in two pairs, EURCUSDC and EURCEUR. As of the measurement date there is no symbol on the venue with USDQ or EURQ in it at all.

Announcements and listings are not the same event, and this is a good illustration of the gap between them. If you are configuring software rather than writing commentary, the instrument list is the only thing that counts, and it is public.

The seventeen EUR-quoted pairs are worth knowing about if you are in the EEA and want fiat settlement without a stablecoin in the middle: ADA, AVAX, BTC, DOGE, ENA, ETH, HYPE, LINK, LTC, ONDO, PEPE, SHIB, SOL, XRP, USDC and EURC all have one. The four PLN pairs cover BTC, ETH, SOL and USDC.

What this means if you copy signals

Most crypto signal services publish USDT perpetual calls. That is the deepest market on Bybit Global by a wide margin, 805 of the 873 perpetuals are USDT-quoted, and it is the default assumption behind almost every published entry, stop and target.

Route those calls at an EU account and there is no like-for-like destination. Not a smaller position, not a different leverage setting. The instrument is absent. Even where a symbol looks superficially similar, a spot pair and a perpetual behave differently enough that treating one as a substitute for the other is a decision, not a copy.

There is a design question hiding in there that applies to any crypto copy trading setup, and we changed our answer to it this week. When a copier receives an order it knows the destination cannot accept, it has two options. It can forward the order and let the exchange reject it, which produces a symbol error and sends the user auditing a symbol mapping that is perfectly fine. Or it can refuse the order itself and name the actual reason.

The second is better and it is not close. A rejection that says "this account is on the EU entity, which lists no derivatives" ends the investigation. A rejection that says "invalid symbol" starts a wrong one. Trade Dispensary 4.7.0 now declines a derivative order routed to an EU account before it is sent, and says which of the two boundaries it hit. The same principle sits behind how we handle size and instrument mismatches generally: fail early and name the cause.

Demo Trading beats Testnet, and not only in the EU

The customer who prompted all this also asked how to rehearse the full chain without risking money, given that Global Testnet is not available in his region.

Testnet is worth being honest about. It is a separate registration on a separate network with its own API keys, and its order books are thin. Look back at the table: Global testnet shows 792 spot instruments against 538 on live, because a test network accumulates listings that were never cleaned up. The instrument list is not the same list, and the liquidity behind it bears no relation to the real thing. Fills there tell you your code works. They tell you very little about what will happen to your orders.

Demo Trading is the better environment and it is easy to miss. It runs on your existing mainnet account with simulated funds, and it uses the real instrument list. That is the identical 873 / 28 / 808 / 538 line in the table above. No separate registration, no separate identity check, and order book behaviour that actually resembles what you are rehearsing for.

The catch is that Demo Trading needs its own API key, created from inside the demo environment, and that key only works against api-demo.bybit.com. Software that does not know the demo host exists cannot use it, which is exactly the gap we closed in 4.7.0.

Rehearsing the chain when Bybit cannot be part of it

If you are on the EU entity and your signals are perpetuals, you can still prove most of the pipeline. Point the source at an MT5 demo account as the destination instead. A demo account from any MT5 broker takes a few minutes and costs nothing.

That exercises signal detection, message parsing, entry and stop and target extraction, symbol mapping, position sizing and your copy rules. It is the large majority of what actually goes wrong in an automated setup, and none of it is Bybit-specific. Only the final leg is left unproven, and you can test that separately at minimum size once everything upstream is behaving.

This staged approach is worth doing even when nothing is blocking you. Debugging a parsing problem and an exchange connectivity problem at the same time is considerably harder than debugging them one after the other, which is a point we made at more length in the Telegram signal automation guide.

Reproduce this yourself

None of these figures need trusting. The endpoint is public, it needs no key, and the whole check takes under a minute. Swap the host and category and you have the entire table.

# EU entity, perpetual futures
curl -s "https://api.bybit.eu/v5/market/instruments-info?category=linear&limit=1000"

# Global entity, same question
curl -s "https://api.bybit.com/v5/market/instruments-info?category=linear&limit=1000"

# categories: linear | inverse | option | spot
# hosts: api.bybit.com api-demo.bybit.com api-testnet.bybit.com
#        api.bybit.eu  api-demo.bybit.eu  api-testnet.bybit.eu

Read result.list for the instruments and result.nextPageCursor for the next page if there is one. The spot and option categories on Global both run past a single page, so a count taken from one request will be short.

A general point, and the reason this article exists at all. I started this by searching, got a confident answer, and the confident answer was partly wrong. Four API calls settled it properly and produced numbers precise enough to quote to a customer. When a vendor publishes the data, ask the vendor.

Summary

Bybit EU lists no derivatives of any kind and no USDT pair at all. Its 127 spot pairs are quoted in USDC, EUR and PLN. Bybit Global lists 873 perpetuals, 805 of them USDT-quoted. The two are separate legal entities and the difference is a licensing boundary, not a configuration.

If you are in the EEA, find out which entity you are on before you plan around either. If you are still on Global and want to rehearse, use Demo Trading rather than Testnet. If you are on the EU entity and your signals are USDT perpetuals, the honest position is that those calls have no destination on that account, and the useful next question is what you want to trade rather than how to configure it.

Risk warning. Trading cryptocurrency derivatives carries substantial risk of loss and leverage increases both gains and losses. Copy trading multiplies whatever the source account does, including its losses. This article reports publicly available exchange data measured on 17 September 2026 and is general information, not trading, legal or regulatory advice. Instrument lists and licensing positions change, so verify current availability with Bybit directly. Always run any new software or strategy on a demo or simulated account until you are satisfied with its behaviour before connecting it to live funds, and never risk money you cannot afford to lose.