What do you actually do with a funding rate?
Exchanges pay a recurring fee to one side of every perpetual futures market, to keep the perp's price pegged to spot. Collecting that fee — without betting on price at all — is called funding rate arbitrage. Here is the entire workflow, start to finish.
On a £1,000 hedged position: £0.58 per cycle, about £1.75 a day — entry and exit costs recovered after 3.9 cycles.
Find
The board ranks every tracked pair across six venues by net annualised yield — after each exchange's real taker fees and slippage walked against live order-book depth at your position size. The gross number everyone else publishes is the starting point, not the answer.
Verify
A big rate that appeared an hour ago is a very different bet from one that has held for a week. Click any row for its 7-day history, check the breakeven cycles figure (how many funding payments repay your entry and exit costs), and confirm the liquidity badge — the largest advertised rates often live in books too thin to actually fill. The Top Performer chart shows what pairs actually paid, averaged, not what they advertised.
Hedge
On the exchange (FundScan never touches your funds), open the two legs at the same time: buy the asset in the spot market, and short the same value in the perpetual. If the price doubles or halves, one leg's gain cancels the other's loss. Price no longer matters — you hold a market-neutral position.
Collect
Every funding cycle — hourly on some venues, every 8 hours on others — the exchange transfers the funding payment from longs to shorts. Your short leg collects it. The first few payments repay your costs (that's the breakeven figure); everything after is yield on a position that cannot lose to price moves.
Watch
Rates change constantly — that's the whole game. Star a pair to watch it, and set a Telegram alert so FundScan pings you when your threshold is crossed or a held position's rate collapses. This replaces keeping six exchange tabs open and checking by hand.
Exit
The yield belongs to whoever leaves when the rate compresses — not whoever holds hoping it comes back. When funding no longer covers its costs (or flips negative, so shorts pay instead of earn), close both legs: sell the spot, buy back the perp. Then the board shows you the next one.
What can go wrong — honestly
- Rates flip. The same pair can swing from strongly positive to strongly negative funding within weeks. While it's negative, a held position pays instead of earns. The exit discipline in step 6 is where the yield is actually made or lost.
- The biggest numbers are the riskiest. Triple-digit APYs cluster in small, meme-heavy pairs precisely because the hedge is hardest to keep alive there — delistings and vanishing liquidity can break one leg of the position.
- Size changes everything. A rate that clears fees at £1,000 can be unfillable at £25,000. That's why the board re-ranks by net yield at your position size.
- Access depends on where you live. Some jurisdictions restrict retail access to crypto derivatives — check what applies to you before planning a trade.
See what's paying right now
Every rate on six venues, ranked by what you'd actually keep. Free tier, no exchange API keys, no custody.
Begin with the free tierFigures on this page and the board are estimates derived from public exchange data and a standardised cost model — net annualised yield after per-venue taker fees and a slippage provision, benchmarked against the 3-month T-bill rate. Nothing here is financial advice or a projection of future returns. DYOR.