Conclusion up front: when you look at the funding rate now, just checking whether it’s positive or negative isn’t enough—you also need to know which platform you opened the position on. For the same coin, the cost of going long on different exchanges can differ by as much as 7–8 times.
$SOL Across the 25 platforms in the whole market, the funding rates converted to annualized average 7.5%, with Binance at 11%—all considered mild. But on Lighter it’s 84.1%. XRP, DOGE, ZEC, and LINK there are the same number. For BTC, the market average is 10.4% and Binance 9.6%, while Lighter is 42%.
Looking the other way is even more interesting: $ETH on Lighter is -35% annualized, HYPE -21%. Going long not only doesn’t require paying—you actually get paid. So it’s not that this platform is overall expensive; it’s that the long/short positions for the various coins on it are severely imbalanced—mainstream coins’ longs are crowded together, while ETH and HYPE are the ones the shorts are holding up.
Another extreme is $HFT. Only 7 platforms across the entire web list its perpetuals. On Kraken the annualized rate is -1098%, on Crypto.com it’s -202%, while Binance is exactly 0. When shorts are crowded to this extent, in theory you’d expect a squeeze. But among the top 80 liquidation winners in the past 24 hours, there isn’t any HFT at all. Shorts aren’t getting cut—they’re just continuously paying the longs. An extreme funding rate doesn’t equal an immediate reversal, don’t mix that up.
As for the broader market: in the past 24h, liquidations across the whole network totaled $144.5 million. Longs accounted for $99.46 million (68.8%), across 56,000 orders. BTC liquidations were $54.42 million, of which $45.22 million were longs. For ETH, it was $37.28 million, with $25.98 million belonging to longs. Open interest: BTC fell to 40.2 billion (-1.3%), and ETH to 20.4 billion (-0.23%). Fear & Greed Index is 29, and the Altseason Index is 70.
In practice, there are two layers of usage: first, compare funding rates across exchanges before opening positions—long-term holding cost differences can be substantial. Second, treat a platform’s abnormal funding rate as a signal of crowded positioning, not as a price signal.
When you open perps, do you compare funding rates across different exchanges first, or do you just open them on an exchange you’re used to?
Check in real time: https://www.coinboss.com/funding-rate