Hyperliquid Funding Rates Scanner

What funding actually is

A perpetual future has no expiry date, so nothing forces its price back toward spot the way settlement does on a traditional contract. Funding is the mechanism that replaces settlement. Every hour, on the hour, whichever side of the market is crowded pays the other side. When the perp trades above spot, longs pay shorts; when it trades below, shorts pay longs. The payment is proportional to position size, not to profit, so it is charged whether the trade is working or not.

That is why the rate is a sentiment reading before it is a cost. A persistently positive rate means traders are paying, every hour, for the privilege of being long. It does not predict direction, but it does tell you what the crowd is doing and roughly what that conviction is costing them.

Reading the rate without fooling yourself

The headline number is one period’s rate. Annualised, small numbers stop looking small: 0.01% an hour is roughly 88% a year, and 0.05% is well over 400%. On a position held for weeks, funding routinely outweighs the trading fees people actually worry about. The APR column exists so that comparison is available at a glance rather than after arithmetic.

The carry calculator above prices it concretely: enter a position size and a direction and it shows the daily and annual cost or income at the current rate. Two caveats are worth holding on to. First, the rate is not fixed — it moves with positioning, and today’s number is not a yield you have locked in. Second, collecting funding means holding the unpopular side of a crowded trade, which is exactly the position that suffers most when the crowd turns out to be right.

Where the carry trade actually breaks

The textbook version is delta-neutral: hold spot, short the perp, collect funding, take no price risk. It works, and it fails in specific ways. The short leg still has a liquidation price, so a sharp rally can close it while the spot leg is untouched, leaving you with the loss and no hedge. Both legs pay trading fees on entry and exit, which the carry has to clear before it is income at all. And the rate can flip negative while you hold, turning the income into a cost. For the full version with worked numbers, see the Hyperliquid funding rates guide.

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