Which Exchange Pays Shorts Most Often? 12 Months of Realized Funding

PerpAtlas Research · July 18, 2026 · Built from 4,860+ realized funding settlements pulled from six exchanges' public history APIs

Perpetual funding is positive when the perp trades above spot — and in crypto it usually does, because leveraged demand leans long. Positive funding means longs pay shorts, so a patient short position doesn't just bet on price: it collects a running yield. The question this piece answers with data is how often that happens, and where it happens most.

On a basket of 9 major coins over the last 30 days, funding was positive in 63% to 76% of all settlement periods depending on the exchange — i.e. shorts were paid far more often than longs on every single venue. The structural long bias is real and measurable.

How often were shorts paid? (last 30 days, all six venues)

Share of funding settlements that were positive (longs → shorts), same 9-coin basket priced on all six venues, BTC…AVAX:

Exchange	% periods positive	Median 30d funding
Bitget	75.9%	+0.302%
KuCoin	75.1%	+0.406%
OKX	72.8%	+0.246%
Binance	69.3%	+0.280%
Gate	69.0%	+0.145%
Bybit	63.2%	+0.213%

Basket: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, BNB, ADA, LINK, AVAX. "% periods positive" pools every settlement across all coins on that venue in the window. "Median 30d funding" is the median across the 9 coins of each coin's summed realized funding — median, not mean, because a handful of new-listing contracts elsewhere carry −1000%+ annualized funding that would swamp an average. A positive median means the typical major-coin long paid (and short collected) over the month.

Over a full year (the three venues with 12-month history)

Only Binance, Bybit and KuCoin expose a full year of funding history through their public APIs (OKX and Bitget cap at ~3 months, Gate at ~30 days — our archive is now extending those forward week by week). For the three with complete data, the same basket over 360 days:

Exchange	% periods positive	Median 360d funding	≈ annualized
Bybit	67.1%	+2.795%	+2.83%
Binance	62.7%	+2.411%	+2.44%
KuCoin	59.9%	+2.591%	+2.63%

The ranking is not stable — it flips by regime

Notice Bybit sits lowest on the 30-day board (63%) but highest over the full year (67%). That is the important caution: "which venue pays shorts most" is a statement about a window, not a permanent property. Funding tracks each venue's own order flow, and order flow shifts. Per-coin, over the 12-month window on the three full-history venues:

Coin	Binance	Bybit	KuCoin
BTC	75.7%	72.3%	62.3%
ETH	72.4%	69.4%	59.3%
SOL	54.3%	58.2%	52.4%
XRP	56.4%	61.9%	66.8%
DOGE	67.4%	68.2%	61.3%

BTC and ETH paid shorts in roughly 60–76% of periods everywhere; SOL was close to a coin-flip; XRP actually favored shorts most on KuCoin. No single venue wins every coin.

How much money is it, really?

For majors the answer is "steady but small": the median annualized funding on the basket ran in the low single digits — a few percent a year to hold a short, before fees. That is a world away from the new-listing extremes we documented separately (contracts settling hourly at thousands of percent annualized). The takeaways:

Being short a major perp has paid a small positive carry more often than not, on every venue we measured — a structural tilt, not a strategy on its own.
The venue that pays shorts most changes with the window and the coin; check the current number, don't assume last quarter's leader.
Funding dwarfs fees for held positions but is itself dwarfed by price moves — this is a cost/ carry factor to optimize, never an edge to chase with leverage.

The live monitor shows the current cross-venue funding spread per coin; this analysis rebuilds from our realized-funding archive, which grows every week.