Crypto funding rates

What a funding rate is

A perpetual future has no expiry, so nothing forces its price back to the spot price. Funding is the mechanism that does it instead: at every settlement, one side of the market pays the other a small percentage of their position. When the perp trades above spot, longs pay shorts and the rate prints positive. When it trades below, shorts pay longs and the rate prints negative.

That makes funding the cleanest continuous reading of positioning there is. A high positive rate is a market paying a premium to be long, a negative rate is a market paying to be short, and a rate pinned at a venue's default is a market with nothing to say. None of that predicts the next move. It tells you which side is crowded, and crowded sides are the ones that get hurt fastest when the move comes.

How to read the table

Every venue quotes its rate per settlement period, and the periods differ: mostly eight hours, four on some pairs, one hour on Hyperliquid. A raw comparison flatters the hourly venue, whose prints are roughly an eighth the size for the same annual cost. So the table normalises: the toggle shows either an 8h-equivalent print or an annualised rate, and the average column is always computed on annualised rates before display.

The colouring is deliberate. Negative funding reads green because it is the anomaly worth noticing: someone is paying to be short. Elevated positive funding, above 0.03% per 8h, which is over 30% a year, reads red, because that is a crowded long paying heavily to stay in the trade. The default 0.01% print most venues rest at is not a signal, it is the absence of one.

The spread between venues is a reading of its own. When one exchange prints far from the pack, its own traders are positioned differently from the rest of the market, and arbitrage desks are usually already closing that gap.

How to read the heatmap

Each row is an asset, each cell one UTC day, and the colour is that day's average settled funding on Binance, the venue with the deepest history. Green is positive funding, red negative, and the scale toggle sets how hard the colour saturates: tight for reading the everyday texture, wide for keeping the extremes in range.

What to look for is not any single cell but the bands. A row that stays warm for weeks is a persistent long bias being paid for daily. A row that flips red in a selloff and stays red is a market that has actually repositioned rather than just repriced. And a column of red across every row is the whole market paying to be short at once, which is the sort of day that tends to get a name.

What this cannot tell you

• Funding is not a forecast: It measures who is paying to hold a position, not who is right. Crowded trades can stay crowded, and expensive shorts can keep being the correct ones, for months.
• The print is per venue, per period: An APR shown here assumes the current rate repeats all year, which it never does. It is a comparison unit, not an expected return.
• The heatmap is one venue: Binance is the deepest market but not the whole one, and assets that migrated liquidity elsewhere, HYPE above all, are only partially described by it.
• The prints are second-hand: each venue is read and republished; a print here can trail the exchange's own screen by a minute or two, and a pair we do not track (Toncoin, for one) is not on this page at all.
• Extreme prints are often mechanical: Rate caps, listing incentives and thin books all produce dramatic numbers that mean less than they look like they mean.