A funding rate is the payment rate that each exchange — Binance, Bybit, OKX, Hyperliquid and others — sets on crypto perpetual futures (perps) such as BTC, ETH, SOL. This page collects what the words used across the screens mean, and how to read the numbers. The screens themselves keep only what you need in order not to misread a figure on the spot — how many rows were excluded, which exchange has a problem, and what a filter does.
How it works — the funding gap between exchanges
Crypto perpetual futures (perps) have no expiry. Instead, to keep the price from drifting too far from spot, money changes hands between longs and shorts at regular intervals. That payment is funding.
The rate at which that money changes hands is the funding rate. Each exchange sets it on its own, so the same asset carries different rates on different exchanges.
So you sell on the exchange with the higher rate and buy on the one with the lower rate, holding both at the same time. Whether the price rises or falls, a loss on one side is offset by a gain on the other, so what is left in your hands is only the difference in funding.
This construction is called cross-exchange arbitrage. You hold both sides of the same asset — long on one exchange, short on another — so that the price going up or down produces neither gain nor loss, and what you take is only the difference between the funding rates.
Getting in and out costs money, though — exchange fees, the spread between bid and ask, and the worse price you get when you fill in a hurry. carryroom lists only the pairs where a gap is still left once those costs are taken out. A pair whose gap looks large but would be wiped out by costs is not listed, so there are stretches of the day when nothing meets the conditions at all.
Screens that use this: Featured pairs · Sustained carry
What the terms mean
The word you will see most on this site
- Funding — money that changes hands between longs and shorts at regular intervals for as long as a perpetual future is held. Each exchange sets its own rate, and the funding interval differs from exchange to exchange too: every eight hours, every four hours, every hour. When the rate is positive, longs pay and shorts receive. Almost all of the return ranked on this site is the difference between these payments. Some screens write it with the English abbreviation FR (Funding Rate), which is the same thing. Some exchanges display it as a funding fee. It resembles the swap point in FX, but this one is not an interest-rate differential: it is a payment made to pull the price of the future back towards spot, and the rate is set by each exchange. Some exchanges call the perpetual future itself a perpetual contract.
Direction and leverage
- Short — the side that has sold the future. You are selling something you do not hold, which is why it is also called selling short. When the funding rate is positive, this is the side that receives.
- Long — the side that has bought the future. When the funding rate is positive, this is the side that pays.
- Position — what you are holding right now. What this site ranks are pairs that hold the same asset short on one exchange and long on the other, so that the price move cancels out.
- Leverage — how many times your own money you hold as a position. The higher the leverage, the smaller the price move that reaches liquidation, and if you cannot add margin, a margin call goes unmet in time and the position ends there. The "usable leverage" shown on screen is worked out by applying each exchange's maintenance margin requirement (a stricter figure is assumed for exchanges that do not publish one).
How the returns are expressed
- Realised annual rate (expressed as an annual rate) — the average of what has actually been received and paid so far, scaled to a year. It is a plain stretch to one year: there is no compounding.
- Current annualised rate — a hypothetical: what you would get if the rate at this very moment lasted a year. It is a different number from the realised annual rate, and the two can even carry opposite signs (realised = what has happened so far; current = this one instant).
- As a percentage of notional — costs and profit or loss are not given as annual rates but as a percentage of the size of the position.
How robust it is
- Stability (15 / 30 / 90 days) — the share of that window in which the same exchange stayed the higher-rate side. At 1.00 the two never swapped. All three high reads as robust; only the 15-day figure high means it became so recently; a high 90-day figure with a low 15-day one means it is breaking down right now.
- Days observed — the number of days the pair could be seen on both exchanges. Stability is measured over 15, 30 and 90 days, so if the days observed are shorter than that, all three simply come out as the same number and say nothing about robustness.
- Giveback — how much of the accumulated profit was handed back along the way. 0.02 means it grew in almost a straight line; 0.50 means half of what had accumulated was given back at one point.
- Noise-dominated — the difference you would receive is smaller than the day-to-day swings. The return is buried in the noise, so the pair is not listed.
- Price-action regime — a marker that sorts how the price has been moving into range, trend or choppy. It is not a recommendation to trade.
How much size you can put on
- Open interest — the amount left unclosed in that market. Since you open on two exchanges at once, look at the thinner of the two exchanges. A dash means the exchange does not publish it, not that the market is thin.
- 24h volume — how much was traded over the past day. It gauges how many counterparties there are when you get in and when you get out; an asset with large open interest but little volume takes time to fill. Here too, look at the thinner side.
- The most leverage that would have survived — taken from the recent range of the price: the leverage above which the position would have been liquidated. The range is measured over the past 30 days, on the assumption that moving money to the losing exchange takes half a day, and the test is whether the position survives the worst adverse move that occurred within any 12-hour window. The long side is liquidated by a fall and the short side by a rise, so the two figures differ. This is a record of what happened in the past, and moves larger than this happen routinely.
Screens where these appear: Sustained carry · Featured pairs · the pair detail screen (reachable from each row of a list). Press the ⓘ in a table header to open the same explanation on the spot.
Putting rates on a common footing (hourly, 4-hourly, 8-hourly)
Exchanges settle funding on different schedules. Every eight hours is the most common, but some settle every four hours or every hour, and the interval can differ from asset to asset within one exchange. Rates on different schedules cannot be lined up as they are, so carryroom first converts every rate to its 8-hour equivalent: an hourly rate is multiplied by eight, a 4-hourly rate by two, an 8-hourly rate is left as it is.
The annual figure follows from that. Eight hours means three settlements a day, so a year holds 3 × 365 = 1,095 of them, and the annual rate is the 8-hour-equivalent rate × 1,095.
- 0.01% every 8 hours → 10.95% a year.
- 0.01% every hour → 0.08% per 8 hours → 87.6% a year.
The same "0.01%" is eight times as much a year when the interval differs. The pair detail screen shows the actual interval for that pair.
100% a year does not mean your money doubles in a year
An annual rate is a hypothetical: what you would get if today's rate ran unchanged for a year. Read it without these four caveats and it becomes a different number from what ends up in your hands.
- Nothing promises it lasts — the rate changes at every settlement and can turn negative. That is why carryroom shows the annual figure taken from the current rate and the annual figure taken from what was actually settled as two separate numbers.
- Receipts are added up, not compounded — nothing here assumes you put the receipts back to work. 100% a year means roughly 0.27% a day (100 ÷ 365) added up over a year.
- It is before costs — the figure after the cost of getting in and out is the net carry column, kept separate. However high the rate looks, pairs that costs wipe out do exist.
- It is a share of the position, not of your capital — you have to fund two exchanges separately, and what you put up is not necessarily the size of the position. Every column marked as a share of principal is a share of the position.
One figure is built differently: net annual rate (with reinvestment) on Yield hedge. It takes the 30-day take and assumes the same conditions repeat for a year (365 ÷ 30), so it does assume receipts are put back to work and comes out larger than the annual figures above for the same receipts.
Screens with an annual figure: Featured pairs · Sustained carry · Yield hedge
Kinds of exchange — decentralised (DEX) and centralised (CEX)
Crypto exchanges fall broadly into two kinds. Which one you trade on changes the steps needed before you can start and who holds your assets.
Decentralised exchange (DEX)
You can trade by connecting a wallet, and your assets stay in your own hands.
Of the exchanges compared on this site, 28 fall into this category: Aevo, Antarctic, ApeX Omni, Arcus, Aster, Decibel, Derive Perp, EdgeX-USDC, Extended, GMTrade, GMX V2, HL-HIP3, Hyperliquid, Lighter, Lighter RH, NADO, Orderly (WooFi), Pacifica, Paradex, Perpl, RISEx, Reya, StandX, SunX, TxFlow, Variational, Vest, dYdX.
Centralised exchange (CEX)
Opening an account and identity verification are required, and the exchange holds your assets.
Of the exchanges compared on this site, 18 fall into this category: BTCC, Backpack, Binance, BingX, Bitget, Bybit, CoinW, Deribit, Gate.io, HTX, Kraken Futures, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, Ondo Perps, QFEX, SoDEX, crypto.com.
Hybrid (properties of both DEX and CEX)
Conditions differ from one exchange to the next — an account may be required while you still hold your own assets.
Of the exchanges compared on this site, 3 fall into this category: EVEDEX, GRVT, Hibachi.
This split is not decided by whether settlement happens on a blockchain. There really are exchanges where only deposits and withdrawals pass through a chain, while the company matches the orders and holds the assets. What we look at is three things: whether you can trade by simply connecting a wallet, whether identity verification is required, and whether you keep custody of your assets. The judgement is made from what each company's technical documentation says, not from how the exchange describes itself or from the wording on its front page.
carryroom lists public data including offshore exchanges, and does not filter exchanges by whether a jurisdiction may trade on them. Some exchanges will not open an account depending on where you reside, so please check for yourself.
The classification is as of 29 August 2026. How an exchange works can change, so please check for yourself before actually using one. carryroom does not broker trades and does not refer you to exchanges for account opening; it handles no registration and no transfer of funds.
Costs and net carry
Round-trip cost — the total from opening to closing. It adds up exchange fees, the spread between bid and ask, and the worse price you get when filling $10,000 in a hurry. It covers opening and closing on both exchanges. The estimate assumes $10,000, so the cost changes when the size does.
Fees are estimated at each exchange's published standard taker fee. If you sit in a discounted fee tier, or where you can place a limit order, your actual cost is smaller than this. The "worse price you get when you fill in a hurry" is what is generally called slippage, and it is measured from the depth of the queue of buy and sell orders (the order book). The thinner the book, the larger this part becomes.
The fee is charged four times — once to open and once to close, on each of the two exchanges. The one-fill figure carryroom applies to perpetual futures runs from 0.00% at the cheapest exchange to 0.10% at the dearest. For the spot side it applies 0.10% to 0.20% (where an exchange does not publish a per-asset fee, the higher figure is used).
Some exchanges charge 0.00%, but that does not make trading there free. The spread between bid and ask, and the slip when you fill in a hurry, are charged all the same; carryroom measures both from the book and adds them to the cost.
How much you can actually put on (liquidity) — open interest and 24h volume are the gauges. Even where the rate is high, an asset with low liquidity may not let you in, or out, at the price you expected.
Net carry while held — the difference you receive, less the cost of opening and a reserve set aside in case things turn out differently. The cost of closing has not been taken out yet (you pay it when you actually close). In other words, once the cost of opening has been earned back, profit accumulates for as long as you hold. What is actually left when you close is this figure less the cost of closing.
Borrowing interest — a cost that appears, in place of funding, only on the side built with spot margin rather than a perpetual future. That side neither receives nor pays funding; instead, borrowing interest is deducted every hour for as long as the position is held. The annual rate and the net carry on screen are figures after this interest has been taken out.
Cost recovery (the column of that name on Sustained carry) — how many days the daily receipts need to earn back the round-trip cost. The calculation assumes receipts settle back to their 15-day average, so in a period when you are receiving a lot right now the figure comes out longer. Where the cost cannot be earned back at all, the screen says so.
It is one division: round-trip cost ÷ receipts per day, where receipts per day is the 8-hour-equivalent difference taken three times. If the round trip costs 0.24% of the position and you receive 0.06% a day, then 0.24 ÷ 0.06 = 4 days is the break-even point. Only past that day do receipts exceed the cost.
So getting in and out repeatedly over short holds ends with receipts that never reach the cost — being eaten by fees. For the same gap in rates, the dearer the two exchanges, the longer this takes.
For the same pair, the net carry changes with how many days you hold — receipts accumulate day by day, while the cost is close to a fixed amount. The number of days at which it turns from negative to positive is the gauge of the minimum you would need to hold.
A high funding rate does not mean a good trade. However high the rate looks, if nothing is left after costs and the reserve, the pair is not listed.
The three conditions for appearing in Featured pairs
The list on the front page shows only pairs that satisfy all three of the following at once. How many candidates failed is shown on that screen.
- Net carry is positive — holding for two days, it is still positive after the cost of opening. Candidates that fail this are labelled wiped out by costs.
- The direction is clear — the direction right now matches the direction over the past week. Candidates where the two disagree are direction mismatch.
- The return is not buried in noise — the difference you receive is larger than the day-to-day swings. Candidates that fail this are noise-dominated.
Pairs that fail one of the three can still be seen on Sustained carry and on the pair detail screen — they are not silently removed.
Screens with the breakdown: Featured pairs · the pair detail screen (reachable from each row of a list)
Reading sustained carry (the net-carry ranking)
A list of pairs whose funding gap has kept the same direction for a long time, ranked on the assumption that you hold for days to weeks. Because one round of getting in and out is earned back by holding, you read it by the annual rate and the cost-recovery days — a different use from looking only at the gap at this instant.
Pairs that have not been seen on both exchanges for at least 15 days are kept out of the main list: as written above, below that the stability figure says nothing about robustness. They are not bad; there is simply not yet enough to judge on, and they enter the list once the days observed grow.
On some exchanges, the rate is set separately for the buy side and the sell side. Where that is so, this list shows only the direction in which the pair as a whole comes out as a receipt (on one of the two exchanges you may still be paying).
The list: Sustained carry. How many rows were excluded, the reason for each exchange, and what the filters do are shown on that screen.
Reading the yield hedge
A pair that buys spot to earn interest and sells the future on the same asset to cancel out the price move. Comparisons are made in units of 30 days. Take the interest on its own and you wear the fall in price; setting a short future against it removes the price move, which is why this shape is called a futures hedge.
Only the price move is cancelled. The wait before you can withdraw what you deposited, a margin shortfall on the futures side, and a fall in the interest rate itself are all left standing. The steps for building it set out the order and what to watch.
The side that earns the interest is called crypto lending by providers in Japan, and staking or yield farming in arrangements built on a blockchain (the field known as DeFi, decentralised finance). carryroom puts these side by side by their rate and pairs them with the side that sells the future.
- Received over 30 days (the product you buy) — that product's rate converted to 30 days, as a percentage of notional.
- Received over 30 days (the future you sell) — the percentage if the current funding continued unchanged for 30 days, as a percentage of notional.
- Net annual rate (with reinvestment) — the 30-day take less the cost of getting in and out, divided by the sum of the spot principal and the futures margin, and projected as if the same conditions could be repeated every 30 days. Where a pair has enough history, the two figures above are replaced by the lowest rate seen over the past 24 hours and the average of the funding actually received and paid. It is not a forecast that this will happen.
What it takes to be marked "recommended"
The mark is not given just because the expected receipts look good. It is given only when all of the following hold.
- There are at least 15 days of realised funding, as actually paid and received, with almost no breaks in between.
- The record runs up to recently (no gap of a full day or more).
- At least 70% of the settlements were receipts — it rarely flips to paying.
- Something remains positive after the cost of getting in and out.
- The cost of buying and the cost of selling have both actually been measured.
The mark is not given to pairs whose current funding rate or interest rate merely happens to be high, nor to pairs whose record is still too short.
Usable leverage is a figure set at 80% of the most leverage that would have survived past price moves. It guarantees neither that you will avoid liquidation nor that this yield will materialise.
The amounts shown under "size backing" are a gauge of how much is currently deposited in that product, or how much room is left; they are not a guarantee that you can put that much in.
The list: Yield hedge. Where each rate came from, the costs and risks not included here, and the lag on each row are shown on that screen.
Frequently asked questions
How much can you actually put into this?
How much you can put in is set by the smaller of the two exchanges' open interest. Even where one side is deep enough, if the other is thin you can only open up to that. carryroom drops pairs that do not reach the floor ($5.0M) from the lists, and on the detail page says the size is not actually available, together with the open interest figure.
Will you receive exactly the funding rate shown on screen?
Not necessarily. The rate on screen is the value at this instant and changes before the next settlement. What carryroom ranks by is realised funding, as actually paid and received, which is a different number from the instantaneous rate. That is why both are shown side by side.
Can you end up paying on the sell side and the buy side alike?
Yes, you can. When the funding rates on the two exchanges point the same way, it does not follow that you receive on one and pay on the other. Pairs where you pay on both do exist. The "you receive / you pay" marker on each row shows which it actually is for that leg, so check there.
Does the net carry shown include the cost of getting in and out?
It does. The net carry on this site is the figure after exchange fees, the spread between bid and ask, and the price slip from filling $10,000 in a hurry have been taken out. What is taken out, though, is an estimate that assumes $10,000, so the cost changes when the size does. The cost of transferring funds between exchanges, the cost of withdrawal, and taxes are not included.
Can you compare rates directly between exchanges with different funding intervals?
You cannot compare them directly. The interval differs by exchange — every eight hours is the most common, but some exchanges settle every hour, and it can differ by asset within the same exchange. 0.01% every hour and 0.01% every eight hours differ eightfold in what you receive. The realised annual rate carryroom ranks by is what was actually paid and received scaled to a year, so this difference is already levelled out. The actual interval for each pair is shown under "funding interval" on its row. How they are levelled, and how the annual figure is reached, is set out under annualising a rate.
Is this a trade that captures an interest-rate gap between exchanges?
It is close in shape to capturing an interest-rate gap between exchanges, but what you receive is not interest. The funding rate is not interest set by the exchange; it is money passed directly between the people who are long and the people who are short that asset. What carryroom ranks is the gap that arises because that rate differs from exchange to exchange. The borrowing interest you pay when you borrow money or coins from an exchange is a separate cost, and it is shown only on the rows built with spot margin.
What is the difference between buying spot and selling the future (delta-neutral) and pairing two futures?
Between delta-neutral (buying spot and selling the future) and pairing futures across two exchanges, what differs is what cancels the price move: spot, or a future on another exchange. In the form paired with spot, what you receive is the yield on the spot side plus the funding rate on the futures side, and it is shown on Yield hedge. In the futures-to-futures form, what you receive is only the difference in funding rates between exchanges, and it is shown on Featured pairs and Sustained carry.
Do you need to connect an account?
You do not. carryroom handles public data only and connects to no account and no API key.
Will the numbers shown definitely produce a profit?
Not necessarily. What is shown is a summary of values observed in the past, and it guarantees no future outcome. Please read the Disclaimer.
At what time is funding settled?
The time differs from exchange to exchange, and carryroom does not list the times. The funding interval (every eight hours, every four hours, every hour and so on) is shown under "funding interval" on each pair's detail screen. What carryroom aggregates is realised funding, as actually paid and received, not the rate scheduled for the next settlement. For the exact times, please check each exchange's own documentation.
Why can you end up paying even though you are on the sell side?
The sell side can indeed end up paying; this is called negative carry. When the funding rate is negative, it is the long side that receives and the short side that pays. In the two-exchange form, even if you pay on one side, a difference is left as long as what you receive on the other is larger. The net carry on screen is the figure after that netting.
I am a beginner — how much do you need to start?
How much you need to start is something carryroom cannot tell you (no minimum is published here). Please check each exchange's minimum order size and minimum deposit for yourself. What can be said is that the costs on screen are an estimate that assumes a $10,000 order. The smaller the size, the more the fee ratio works against you, so with a small stake the outcome is worse than the net carry on screen.
Can it be used from Japan? Are these offshore exchanges?
The exchanges compared on this site include many offshore exchanges. They are not necessarily domestic exchanges registered with Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA). carryroom does not filter exchanges by whether a jurisdiction may trade on them; it lists public data as it is. Depending on where you live, there are exchanges at which you cannot open an account, or which you cannot use, so please check for yourself. carryroom does not refer you to exchanges for account opening.
What about taxes? Do you need to file a tax return?
Taxes are not included in the figures on screen at all (everything shown is before tax). Which category the income falls into (whether it is miscellaneous income), whether offsetting gains and losses is allowed, and whether filing a tax return is required all depend on the country and on your own circumstances. carryroom cannot judge that, so please consult the guidance of the tax authority in your country (in Japan, the National Tax Agency) or a tax accountant.
Is the principal guaranteed? What are the downsides?
There is no guaranteed principal, and loss of principal can occur. This construction is sometimes introduced as a way to earn a yield while leaving it alone, but in practice you have to keep both sides open on two exchanges at once, and if one is liquidated you are left holding the other, unhedged. The main downsides are that funds have to sit on both exchanges, that you run a loss whenever the difference you receive is smaller than the costs, and that there is no telling when the rate will change. Please also read what to watch out for.
I do not understand what the numbers mean.
The sections above on this page collect what the words on screen mean and how to read the numbers. Press the ⓘ in a table header to open the same explanation on the spot.
What to watch out for (downsides and cautions)
- Every figure is a record of what has already happened. None of it predicts future returns or price moves.
- In this construction, cutting only one side breaks the cancelling of the price move. Unlike an ordinary trade, closing the losing side leaves the other side as an unhedged position that takes the price move in full. Closing means closing both legs at once.
- The position is held on two exchanges at once, so if one leg is liquidated you are left holding the other, unhedged. Funds sit separately on each exchange, so a gain on one cannot cover a shortfall on the other on the spot.
- Where the stablecoin (a currency pegged to the dollar or similar) used as collateral differs between the two exchanges, a drift in value between those two currencies (a depeg) rides on top as a separate risk (and if the coin is issued by the exchange itself, the issuer's own risk comes with it). The net carry on screen does not include this risk.
- In the construction that borrows against spot as collateral (the side marked "spot" in the tables), the borrowing interest changes, and there is a limit to how much can be borrowed. The annual rate and the net carry on screen are figures after the interest currently quoted has been taken out.
- Estimates of costs and of the range of price moves come from past records. They guarantee no price at which you will fill in future.
- carryroom is connected to no exchange account and no API key, and it has no facility for placing orders.
Please also read the Disclaimer and About carryroom.