Funding Rate

Data to 2026-09-12. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

Perpetual futures have no expiry, so a periodic payment keeps them tethered to spot. Positive funding means longs pay shorts: leveraged traders are crowded on the upside. Sustained, strongly positive funding indicates a leveraged market vulnerable to a liquidation cascade.

How it's calculated

The rate exchanged between long and short perpetual-swap positions, typically settled every eight hours, driven by the spread between the perpetual price and the spot index.

What it did in past cycles

The record runs from 2023-07-09 and is by far the shortest on this site — worth stating plainly, because it means the usual cycle framing does not apply.

Within that window the extremes are 0.00088 on 2024-03-05, during the post-ETF-approval run, and −0.00015 on 2026-02-07, in the drawdown that followed the October 2025 peak. The March 2024 high is the more instructive one: funding at that level means longs were paying roughly 1% a month simply to hold the position, which is a crowded trade by any measure.

At the October 2025 peak it read 0.000077 — positive but unremarkable. Whatever drove that top, an obviously over-levered perpetual market was not the visible cause.

What it doesn't tell you

Funding describes derivatives positioning, not spot demand. It varies by exchange and can be distorted by basis trades that are directionally neutral — a desk holding spot against a short perpetual shows up as bearish positioning while being nothing of the sort.

The series here begins in July 2023, so it has seen one cycle top and no completed bear market. Every statement about how it behaves at turns is drawn from a single observation, which is not enough to calibrate anything.

Reading it with other metrics

Funding is most useful as a warning that a move is levered rather than spot-driven. Read it against realized volatility: high funding and compressed volatility is the setup that precedes liquidation cascades, since it means crowded positioning in a market that has stopped moving.

Fear & Greed covers the same sentiment question from the survey-and-social side; where the two disagree, funding is the one with money behind it.