Perpetual futures explained
Four questions this site answers with numbers, answered here in words first. Every explainer names its sources, states what the figure cannot tell you, and links to the live page it describes.
A perpetual future is a futures contract with no expiry date. That single missing feature is where everything else on this site comes from: with no settlement date there is nothing to pull the contract's price back towards the spot price, so the venues invented a recurring payment between the two sides to do it — the funding rate — and made positions closable by the venue itself when the collateral runs out — a liquidation. The rest is bookkeeping.
The explainers
Where the numbers on this site come from
| Figure | Right now | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Contracts covered | 50 | Every Hyperliquid perpetual whose open interest clears $5.00M. The floor, and why there is one, is on Data sources. |
| Open interest | $9.74B | Hyperliquid's book alone, across those contracts — a minority of the market's, and not comparable with an aggregator's figure. |
| BTC funding, annualised | 10.95% | Hyperliquid's current hourly rate, multiplied out to a year. Positive means longs pay shorts. |
| Widest venue spread | 121.50% | MON: the gap between the dearest and cheapest of the three venues, once their different settlement intervals are normalised. |
Every figure in this table is rendered by the server before the page is sent, from the snapshot stamped at the top of this page. Nothing here is filled in by a script afterwards.
The same rate, quoted three ways
This is the comparison the whole site exists for, and the reason a funding rate cannot be read off a venue page and compared with another. Each venue quotes the rate it charges per settlement, and the settlements are not the same length — so the raw numbers are in different units and the larger one is not the dearer one. Annualising puts them in the same unit. Today, on BTC:
| Venue | Quoted rate | Settles every | Annualised |
|---|---|---|---|
| Binance | 0.00992% | 8h | 10.87% |
| Hyperliquid | 0.00125% | 1h | 10.95% |
| Bybit | 0.01000% | 8h | 10.95% |
How that arithmetic works, and what it costs to hold a position →
The words, once
Short definitions, so the explainers do not have to stop and give them. Each one is the sense in which this site uses the word, which is not always the only sense in circulation.
| Term | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Perpetual | A futures contract with no expiry. It never settles, so it never converges to spot on its own — funding does that job instead. |
| Funding rate | A recurring payment between the two sides of the contract. Positive: longs pay shorts. Negative: shorts pay longs. The venue takes none of it. Full explanation. |
| Settlement interval | How often that payment changes hands. Hyperliquid settles hourly; Binance and Bybit settle on an eight-hour cycle. Two rates quoted over different intervals are not comparable until both are annualised. |
| APR | The rate multiplied out to a year with no compounding — the interval rate times the number of settlements in 8,760 hours. Simple, not compounded, because compounding a rate that changes every settlement would be a forecast. |
| Mark price | The price the venue uses to decide margin and liquidations. It is not the last trade: it is anchored to an index of spot venues so a thin order book cannot trigger liquidations on its own. |
| Basis | Perpetual price minus spot price. Positive means the contract is dearer than the underlying, which is normally also when funding is positive. |
| Open interest | The total value of contracts currently open. Every contract has a long and a short, so it counts each position once, not twice. Full explanation. |
| Turnover | Twenty-four-hour volume divided by open interest. High turnover means the position base is churning; low means it is being held. On Open interest it is a column. |
| Maintenance margin | The minimum collateral a position may hold before the venue closes it. It rises in steps as the position gets larger, and it is the term the widely-copied liquidation formula leaves out. Full explanation. |
| Liquidation | The venue closing a position because its collateral fell below maintenance margin. It is an event, and no venue publishes a complete feed of them — see why we publish no liquidation totals. |
| Liquidation map | A model of where liquidations would happen if positions were distributed a particular way. It is drawn from open interest and an assumed leverage mix, never from observed positions. Full explanation. |