Funding Rate

Bitcoin’s funding rate plots the volume-weighted 8-hour funding payment across the major perpetual-futures venues, as a daily close. The y-axis is symmetric around zero; rust fill above the baseline marks settlements where longs paid shorts, slate fill below marks the reverse. The right axis shows native percent per 8 hours, capped symmetrically at the 99th percentile of absolute funding in the window. A muted Bitcoin price line sits behind the funding area for cycle context.

Today’s reading is −0.0030% — Neutral. The 7-day rolling mean is −0.0016%; the 30-day mean is −0.0027%; the chart spans 1,000 daily observations. The figure refreshes overnight; spot in the reading row above auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser.

The canonical perpetual-funding formula across the major venues is identical in shape, with only minor variations in clamp magnitude and settlement cadence. Provenance is documented on the data sources page; the formula is reproduced verbatim in the methodology:

F = P + clamp(I − P, −0.05%, +0.05%)

where F is the funding rate per 8-hour interval, P is the time-weighted average premium of the perpetual price over the index price across the window, and I is a fixed interest baseline of +0.01% per 8 hours on USD-collateralised contracts. The clamp bounds the (interest minus premium) differential to plus or minus five basis points; an outer cap then bounds F itself. The most useful decomposition for reading the chart is to remember that in flat markets, with the perp tracking spot tightly, the premium is zero and funding settles to the interest baseline alone — a structural +0.01% positive bias the chart cannot escape.

Two consequences of the structural bias. First, a “neutral” reading is not zero — it is centred on the interest baseline. Anything within a few basis points of +0.01% per 8h is the formula clearing its throat. Second, deeply negative readings are mechanically harder to produce than deeply positive ones: the perp has to trade persistently below spot for the (interest minus premium) term to drag the rate negative through the clamp. Sustained negative funding stretches are concentrated around cycle-bottom panic windows for that reason. The 2025 Q3 derivatives report from the perpetual’s original venue framed it cleanly: The perpetual swap formula has a built-in interest component, forcing rates to cluster around 0.01% (positive bias).

Three settlements per day at 00:00, 08:00 and 16:00 UTC; we aggregate the three into one daily close so the series is comparable to the rest of the site. For intraday funding spikes during a flush, the upstream venue’s live feed is the right surface; this chart is the nightly summary.

Three regimes resolve. Above +0.03% per 8h, longs are paying meaningful yield to stay in — an annualised carry north of +3,285.0%. That is expensive, and any reversal can snowball as leveraged longs unwind to avoid the cost. Below −0.02%, shorts are paying longs — the regime that historically brackets squeeze setups, when bearish positioning crowds into a shrinking pool and a small spot rally cascades into short cover. The middle band, around the +0.01% structural baseline, is the formula at rest.

Six anchors since the start of our daily series make the regime rotation visible. Each row pins a cycle-anchor date; the funding-rate cell and the spot price are pulled from the same daily snapshot powering the chart above. Every cell recomputes overnight, so the table is a live read of the indicator’s recent record.

The framing matters more than any single reading. Arthur Hayes, who co-founded the venue that launched the original Bitcoin perpetual swap, framed the mechanism plainly in his 2021 essay on perp carry: the perpetual swap exchanges a funding rate — an interest income — between longs and shorts every 8 hours. The unit of analysis is the payment, not the sentiment. A single basis-trade desk that shorts the perp against spot can move funding without expressing any directional view; the chart records the carry, not the conviction.

Hayes returned to the framing in his 2025 retrospective with a worked example: if the perp traded at an average 1% premium to spot over the last eight hours, if you held a position at the funding period timestamp, longs pay 1% to shorts. The perp’s premium drives the payment, full stop. Reading funding as “people are bullish” or “people are bearish” mistakes the formula for a poll. Read it instead as: at this rate, this is what it costs to be on the crowded side of the book.

The shape of the funding distribution shifted after November 2022. Pre-FTX, extreme positive funding readings — multiple settlements per cycle north of +0.10% per 8h — were a regular feature; the basis-trade ceiling, where cash-and-carry desks short the perp into spot until the premium compresses, was thin and often disappeared in panic windows. Post-FTX, that ceiling has thickened. The 2025 Q3 derivatives report framed the structure: the large pool of undeployed capital acts as a ceiling for funding rates – preventing it from staying high for long. Extreme positive funding still happens, but it persists for hours, not days.

The corresponding floor — sustained negative funding — behaves differently. The post-FTX market-structure literature documented that a venue’s disappearance can collapse the basis market that normally clears the perp’s premium against spot; in those windows, both extremes show up at once on different venues, and a volume-weighted aggregate looks artificially neutral. The 30-day rolling mean on this chart smooths through that distortion; the daily print still records the micro-regime.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. Functionally none. Funding is a tactical-positioning lens that resolves on day-to-week horizons, below the timescale a steady weekly buy operates on. Skim the regime line for cycle texture; otherwise this chart is not for you.

For a cycle-timing trader. Treat extremes as setups, not directional triggers. Sustained funding above +0.05% per 8h is annualised carry north of +5,475.0% — a real cost the long side is paying to stay in. That cost has to be earned back through spot appreciation, and historically it has not been. Pair with open interest for scale — rising OI plus persistent positive funding is the canonical leverage-flush precursor — and with the liquidation heatmap for the geometry of where the unwind sits.

For a researcher. The series, the rolling means, the regime classifier and the daily timestamps are the only inputs. The methodology page lists every choice — venue weighting, settlement cadence, clamp magnitudes, daily-close aggregation — and flags the small structural positive bias that the formula imposes on every reading.

The regulated leg is invisible. Quarterly cash-settled Bitcoin futures — the regulated venue’s leg of the book — do not have a funding mechanism; they settle on contract expiry instead. During cycles where regulated capital drives marginal price action (the post-spot-ETF era is the clearest example), perp funding can decouple from spot behaviour because the leg moving the tape is not in this chart. The open-interest stack is where the regulated leg shows up.

Venue dispersion during dislocations. The post-FTX market-structure analysis documented that a week after the collapse, we noticed that global crypto liquidity had halved — a window in which one venue’s funding feed simply stopped publishing while panic shorts crowded into surviving books. A volume-weighted aggregate across that window averaged a stale cell with live feeds; the daily print misread the dispersion as neutrality. We drop the affected days from the source feed where we can; the broader lesson is that funding readings during venue-discontinuity events deserve the sceptical reading.

The structural floor anchors readings positive. The formula’s +0.01%-per-8h interest baseline biases the chart toward positive readings even in flat markets. A casual reading of “funding is slightly positive, longs must be euphoric” misreads the formula clearing its throat. Always interpret the print against the +0.01% floor, not against zero. The 2025 Q3 derivatives report walks through the anchor-and-ceiling structure if the floor mechanics deserve a longer treatment.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” block for bitcoin funding rate, answered against the data on this page.