Crypto funding rate history: what 30 days of payments show

A funding rate in a table is one moment: the rate an exchange is quoting right now. It doesn't say whether that rate has held all month, has been climbing for days, or turned negative this morning. The payments behind it do. Every coin's perpetuals page on the site charts them, exchange by exchange, for the last 7 or 30 days, under Funding history.

What is funding rate history?

Funding is paid between longs and shorts on a schedule: every hour on some exchanges, every 8 hours on others, continuously on a few. Each payment has its rate, and the history is the list of them. The site turns every payment into a rate a year, so an hourly exchange's line reads beside an 8-hourly one's (why), and draws each payment across the hours it was for. Above zero, longs paid shorts. Below it, shorts paid longs.

Each line is read from the exchange by your own browser, and the chart asks again once the next hour's payments are out.

How to find it and read it

1. Open a coin's perpetuals page, Bitcoin's for example, and find Funding history under Open interest & funding.
2. Choose 7 days or 30 days. A week shows how today compares with the last few days; a month shows the longer pattern behind it.
3. Read the averages under the chart: each exchange's average over the days shown, with "since" and a date where it has listed the market for less time than that.
4. Click an exchange's average to take its line off the chart, and again to bring it back. One exchange's spike can squash everyone else's lines flat; taking it off lets the others spread out again.

Under the chart, the site names the exchanges on the page that publish no funding history a browser can read. Their rates now are still on the page. There's just no past to draw.

What a month of payments shows that a rate can't

Example patterns, not market data.

• Whether a rate is normal for that market. 20% a year can be an ordinary month on one coin and a spike on another. The average under the chart says which, and the perpetuals index puts each rate beside its 7-day average for every coin at once (funding rate spikes).
• How long spikes last. Some markets spike for an hour and settle. Others stay high for days. The history shows which kind you're looking at before you hold a position through it.
• Which exchange runs high or low. If one exchange's line sits above the others all month, the gap between them isn't a blip. That gap is what the funding spread trade is built on.
• How often funding turns negative. A market whose line dips below zero now and then pays its longs at times. Negative funding rates has more on that.

Why hourly and 8-hourly lines look different

An hourly exchange's line moves in small steps, one an hour. An 8-hourly exchange's moves in long flat steps, as each payment covers 8 hours. Both are rates a year, so they compare level for level, but the 8-hourly line is slower to show a change: it moves only when its next payment is made.

What the history leaves out

• Not every exchange publishes it. Some exchanges' history can't be read by a browser at all, and they're named under the chart.
• An average isn't what you'd have paid. If you held a position for two days of the month, your cost was those two days' payments, not the month's average.
• A rate a year is a scale, not a bill. A spike drawn at 100% a year may last an hour, and costs an hour's worth.
• It's the past. The history says how funding has behaved, not what it will do next.

Not financial advice. Rates move while you read them.