Hyperliquid and AsterDEX paid twice the funding of Binance and Bybit

In short: you want to know if funding rates, the payment between the two sides of a perpetual (a bet on price with no end date), are really higher on decentralised exchanges. Over the 1,187 days all four exchanges cover, Hyperliquid and AsterDEX paid about twice what Binance and Bybit did: 14.5% on BTC against 7.3% and 7.5%. But the rate is paid on the size of the position, not on the money you put in, so at two times leverage 14.5% comes to under 10% on your own money, before costs.

We keep daily funding rates from four perpetual venues on BTC and ETH, going back as far as September 2019. They are stored separately and never averaged.

Over the 1,187 days all four cover, the two decentralised venues paid roughly twice what the two centralised ones did.

  asset    Binance   Bybit   AsterDEX   Hyperliquid
  BTC         7.3%    7.5%      14.5%         14.5%
  ETH         7.4%    7.4%      15.3%         14.6%

Now the part that deflates it#

A funding rate is quoted on notional, not on capital, and the gap between those is where most of this apparent edge goes.

The delta-neutral carry is holding the coin and shorting the perpetual. The short needs margin. At two times leverage your capital is one and a half times the notional, so a venue paying 14.5% on notional returns under 10% on what you actually put in, before any costs at all.

Read a funding figure as a rate on the position, never as a return.

Why we hold this at all#

It is there to answer questions: the agent can tell you what a venue has actually paid over a window you name, rather than quoting you a rate from this minute and calling it a yield.

It is read, never traded on. Nothing in this system executes against a perpetual venue. The perp steps in a plan are instructions for a person, and this data is what makes those instructions worth following rather than a guess. We provide the analysis, and you do the execution.

The venues are kept separate for the same reason. Binance and Bybit correlate around 0.85 on BTC, and where two venues disagree the disagreement is the information. An average would smooth away exactly the days worth knowing about.