Part of the daily Oracle dashboard · updated every morning
Perpetual futures never expire, so exchanges use a funding payment — settled between longs and shorts, typically every 8 hours — to keep the perp price tethered to spot. When perps trade above spot, funding is positive and longs pay shorts; when perps trade below spot, funding is negative and shorts pay longs. We publish a cross-exchange 8-hour average, in percent.
Funding is a positioning gauge: it prices how crowded the long side is. The exchange default is 0.01% per 8h (≈11% annualized) — readings near that are simply "normal". Sustained elevated funding means leveraged longs are paying heavily to stay in — historically a mania tell; deeply negative funding clusters around washouts and capitulation lows.
| Range | Reading |
|---|---|
| below 0% | negative — shorts pay longs; washout territory |
| 0% – 0.02% | normal — balanced positioning |
| 0.02% – 0.06% | elevated — longs crowded, leverage building |
| above 0.06% | extreme — mania-grade crowding |
Funding can stay elevated for long stretches in strong uptrends — it is a crowding gauge, not a timing tool. Our own research pipeline tested funding-based carry and timing signals under pre-registered conditions and found nothing deployable standalone; we publish it as context, not as a signal (how we test).
DVOL (30d implied vol) — today: 39.8 annualized % · normal range
MVRV Z-score — today: 1.76 σ · accumulation / neutral
NUPL — today: 0.345 · optimism / anxiety
