What crypto funding rates tell you
Perpetual futures never expire, so exchanges use funding payments to keep their price anchored to spot. Every few hours, traders on one side of the market pay traders on the other. Positive funding means longs pay shorts — the market is leaning long. Negative funding means shorts pay longs — the market is leaning short. Extreme readings often appear before sharp moves, which is why traders watch them.
How to read this page
- Highest and Lowest (24h): the exchanges paying the most and the least for the same coin, with the rate normalised to 24 hours.
- Gap (24h): the difference between them — the daily return of a delta-neutral position that shorts the highest and longs the lowest.
- Average and Venues: the mean rate across every connected exchange and how many of them list the coin.
Search any ticker to open its funding page with every exchange side by side: the current rate, settlement interval, countdown to the next payment, 24-hour rate, APR, mark price and premium to the index.
Why rates are normalised to 24 hours
A 0.01% rate paid every hour is eight times more than 0.01% paid every 8 hours. Comparing raw numbers across exchanges is misleading, so ArbiLayer converts every rate to a 24-hour value first. Example: 0.01% every 8 hours is 0.03% a day; 0.01% every hour is 0.24% a day.
Funding rate arbitrage
When the gap between two exchanges is wide, you can short where funding is high and go long where it is low. Price moves cancel out and you earn the difference at each settlement. Watch the trading fees, the spread between the two perpetuals and how stable the gap is — the arbitrage scanner shows the price spread and the funding difference for every pair together.