Derivatives

Basis carry, annualised (%)

The annual interest collected by someone long spot and short the perpetual — the one number in this whole project that is contractual income rather than a forecast.

Why it matters

Perpetual futures never expire, so to keep them pinned to spot the exchange charges a "funding" payment every 8 hours: if there are more leveraged longs than shorts, the longs pay the shorts. Someone who holds real bitcoin and is simultaneously short the perpetual has no exposure to price direction — what they gain on one leg they lose on the other — but they collect that funding. That is not a prediction about anything: it's someone paying a fee. Which is why it's published live: the opportunity opens and closes, and this number says which of the two it is today.

Build it yourself

Drag the funding rate per settlement (in basis points) and watch what it becomes over a year — and, below, whether that beats leaving the money still.

Annualised carry % = rate per settlement × 3 settlements/day × 365 × 100
Annualised carry (on notional)

Excess over the risk-free rate, on capital deployed:

The 8.78% zone cut is 2026's 10-year yield (4.39%) doubled, because the headline result is quoted on notional and holding it needs twice the capital.

Illustrative example numbers for practice — not real data.

How it's calculated, step by step

  1. The connector stores every real Binance funding settlement (one every 8 hours) exactly as the exchange publishes it.
  2. For each day the mean of that day's real settlements is computed — the mean, not any single settlement, so the number stays comparable day to day regardless of which UTC hour the data happened to land at.
  3. Since it settles 3 times a day, the daily cash flow is 3 × that mean. Annualised: × 365. And × 100 to express it as a percentage.
  4. The result is quoted on NOTIONAL. A real position needs roughly twice that in capital (the spot leg plus margin for the short), so halve it before comparing against what a deposit pays.
Descriptive. It is not a direction signal and doesn't pretend to be: it's a measurement of whether there is money on the table. Measured 2020-2026 it went from +14.9%/yr in 2021 to +0.5%/yr in 2026 — the trade has been competed down below the US 10-year, so over the last 365 days the excess over the risk-free rate is −3.45%. It remains the cleanest income the project has found (Sharpe above 10 in every single year) and simultaneously isn't worth doing today. Both are true.

Chart

This is real Bitcoin data, computed from the blockchain — not the illustrative example above.

Data last updated on 2026-09-09.

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