Perpetual futures, and the funding rate that holds them to spot

The problem an expiry normally solves

An ordinary futures contract converges on the spot price because it settles on a known date. Remove the expiry and nothing forces the two together, so the contract can drift away from the asset it is supposed to track. Something else has to do that job.

That job is the funding rate

At regular intervals, one side pays the other. When the perpetual trades above spot, longs pay shorts, which makes holding a long more expensive and pulls the price down. When it trades below, the payment reverses. It is a continuous nudge rather than a settlement, and it is why the price stays close to spot without ever being forced there.

What that means if you hold one

Your profit is not only the price moving your way. If you hold a long while funding is positive, you are paying to hold it, every interval, whether or not the price moves. Over a long enough hold that cost can exceed the move you were right about. Funding is not a fee on trading, it is a cost of time.

Reading it live

The funding column below is the real, current rate on each market. Positive means longs are paying shorts right now. Watching it move is a faster way to understand the mechanism than any explanation, including this one.

How the funding payment is actually calculated

The rate is derived from the gap between the perpetual price and an index of spot prices, and it is charged at fixed intervals rather than continuously. Exactly how it is derived differs by venue, so a rate on one exchange is not directly comparable to a rate on another without checking the interval and the formula. The figures on this page are one venue's, at that venue's interval, which is why the interval is labelled next to the number.

Open interest, which the next section leans on

Open interest is the number of contracts currently open and not yet closed. It is not volume. Volume counts contracts traded in a period; open interest counts positions still standing at the end of it. Two traders opening a new position between them creates one contract and open interest rises. One opening against one closing simply transfers a contract and it does not move. Two closing removes one and it falls. So a busy day where positions mostly changed hands shows large volume and flat open interest, and that is the two numbers measuring different things rather than a contradiction.

What open interest says that the price does not

Whether a move arrived with new money or with people leaving. A price rising while open interest rises means positions were being opened into it. The same rise with open interest falling means it was substantially shorts closing out. The price change is identical in both cases and the second is the weaker of the two. One caution: the figure is denominated in contracts, and a contract is not the same size in every market, so comparing the raw number between two markets compares their specifications as much as their activity. Read a market against its own recent range, or convert to notional first.

What a very high funding rate usually means

That positioning has become crowded on one side, not that the price is about to move. A sharply positive rate means longs are paying meaningfully to remain long, which is information about traders rather than about the asset. It is most useful read alongside open interest: high funding with rising open interest is a crowded trade being built, while high funding with falling open interest is often a crowded trade being unwound.

Live, right now, on this page

Live perpetual markets with their current funding rates, read at render. Positive funding means longs are paying shorts right now. Read at 2026-10-12 12:18 UTC; accurate as of that time and not afterwards.

Common questions

See the number itself

Pages that read a live market and show what they read, updated while you look at them.

• Palantir stock price, live, on a heavily retail-held share, what unusually heavy retail ownership does to a price and to funding.
• Zcash price, live, and the shielded pool nobody quotes, a thin, sharp book where the spread matters more than the last price.
• XRP price, live from a perpetual market, the largest perpetual book of the alt majors, where positioning shows up before price does.
• HYPE perp price, live, a perpetual future quoting right now, with its funding.
• Gold price today, and silver, live from a perpetual market, a perpetual on something that is not a token at all, with the same funding mechanics.
• SpaceX stock price, and the perpetual that trades alongside it, a perpetual on a listed share, where you can watch funding pull the contract back toward a price you can check on Nasdaq.
• CrowdStrike stock, live, through the tokenised share, a share that reprices at arbitrary hours, which is the case a continuously quoted instrument answers.
• Moderna stock, live, through the tokenised share, trial readouts land outside market hours, so the out of hours quote carries real information.