PerpAtlas Research · July 18, 2026 · Realized funding history + verified fees
"Collect funding with no price risk" is one of the most-repeated ideas in crypto, and it is
genuinely a real strategy. It is also routinely oversold. Here is the mechanism, and then the costs
that decide whether it actually pays — using our own realized-funding data.
The two shapes of the trade
Spot-vs-perp (cash-and-carry). When a perp's funding is persistently positive,
you go short the perp and buy the same amount of spot. You're delta-neutral: price moves cancel, and
you collect funding from the shorts-get-paid side while holding spot. This is the cleaner version and
the one most "funding yield" products run.
Perp-vs-perp (cross-exchange). The same coin funds differently on different
venues (median 17 annualized points across majors).
You go long the low-funding venue and short the high-funding venue, and collect the difference. No
spot needed, but now you're exposed on two venues.
The costs nobody puts in the headline
Double fees. Two legs to open, two to close. At VIP-0 taker rates that's up to
~0.22% round-trip on the pair (both legs, in and out) — which has to be earned back in funding before
you make a cent.
Capital on both sides. You post margin twice, and must keep both legs from being
liquidated if price runs — so you can't use much leverage, which caps the yield on capital.
The spread is not stable. This is the big one. For BTC, funding on Binance and
Bybit had the same sign only about 74% of the time over the last 90 days
(ETH: 77%). The gap you opened the trade to capture narrows, disappears, or flips regularly, and
rebalancing costs more fees.
Execution and slippage on the thin mid-caps where spreads are widest — exactly
the coins whose funding is most volatile and least persistent.
The uncomfortable arithmetic: a cross-exchange spread of, say, 17 annualized points is ~1.4% a year.
A round-trip on both legs can cost 0.2%+ in fees alone, and the spread flips roughly a quarter of the
time. The edge is real but thin, and it lives or dies on execution cost and how long the spread
persists — not on the headline number.
When it actually works
Persistent, large, liquid. A big spread on a liquid coin that has stayed
one-signed for a while beats a bigger spread on a thin coin that whips around. Persistence >
magnitude.
Low fee tier or maker execution. The trade is fee-sensitive; running both legs
as maker (0.02% versus 0.05–0.06% taker) rather than crossing the spread can be the difference
between edge and no edge.
Spot-vs-perp on a clean positive-funding regime is generally more robust than
chasing cross-exchange mid-cap spreads, because you remove one venue's counterparty and liquidation
risk.
Scale and automation. The per-unit edge is small, so it rewards size and tight
operational execution — which is why it's mostly a desk/bot strategy, not a manual one.
How to screen for it
The starting point is the current cross-venue spread per coin, ranked. Our
live monitor sorts every cross-listed perp by that spread, and the
realized-funding history tells you whether a given
coin's funding has actually been persistent or just noisy. Screen on the monitor, confirm
persistence in the history, and only then price in your real round-trip cost. If the spread doesn't
clear fees plus a margin for the flip risk, it isn't an arb — it's a bet on the spread.