What is a funding rate?
A funding rate is the periodic payment that keeps a perpetual futures price tethered to the coin's spot price. Because a perpetual has no expiry to pull it home, the venue charges one side money at regular intervals until the perp trades back near spot. The rate is quoted as a small percentage per funding interval — 0.0100% per 8 hours is a common centralized-venue shape; Hyperliquid runs the same math every hour.
Who pays whom
The sign decides, and it never moves: a positive rate means long positions pay short positions. A negative rate means short positions pay long positions. Zero pays nobody. Intuition: when the perp trades above spot, longs are the crowd bidding it there — they pay shorts to unwind the premium. When the perp trades below spot, the flow reverses.
How the payment is computed
At each settlement the venue computes the payment from the current inputs; the rate in force at that moment applies for that interval only. Two dispositions matter for arithmetic:
payment = position size × rate(fraction)
Example: a 10,000 USDC long with a +0.0100% rate on an 8-hour venue pays 10,000 × 0.0001 = 1.00 USDC per settlement, three times a day — 3.00 USDC per day, which is 0.03% of the position per day, about 10.95% a year on the simple convention (rate × settlements per year). A short at the same rate receives it instead.
Hyperliquid pays funding hourly (an 8-hour rate takes effect one eighth per hour), and caps a day's contribution on the funding side at 4%. The settlement interval is part of the fact: comparing a 1-hour quoted rate to an 8-hour quoted rate without rescaling overstates the difference.
What funding is not
It is not a fee the venue keeps — funding transfers between traders. It is not protection from price moves: a fully funded position still loses if the market falls. And the current rate is not a promise about the next settlement; it recomputes live.
Check one yourself
The funding rate calculator runs this arithmetic with your position, your direction and the venue's interval — with a live venue prefill where one exists, and the annualized simple-rate convention stated on the page.
Where the whole market sits
Tollbridge's live perp list shows current funding for every supported asset with its data age, and each asset page reads the funding question in the market's own vocabulary — the S06 Funding anomaly and S07 Funding persistence questions in the question sheet.
Educational research, not financial advice. Funding costs, price moves and settlement timing change without notice; nothing here predicts them. Risk details: Tollbridge's track record page states how probabilities are recorded and graded.