Who is paying to hold Bitcoin risk.

What funding actually is

A perpetual future never expires, so exchanges use funding to keep it glued to spot: every 8 hours, whichever side is crowding the trade pays the other. When the perp trades rich to spot, longs pay shorts. When it trades cheap, shorts pay longs. The rate is small per interval, but it compounds — and it is the market's most honest confession of positioning, because it is money actually changing hands, not sentiment survey talk.

How the desk reads it

Flat-to-slightly-positive funding is a healthy tape — spot demand leading, leverage along for the ride. Persistently rich funding with flat price is a crowded long that needs constant new money to hold; it usually ends in a flush. Deeply negative funding into a falling market is capitulation pricing — historically closer to lows than highs. The reading gets its meaning from open interest: the same funding print with double the notional at stake is a very different market.

The retail and top-trader long/short ratios add the who: when small accounts lean hard one way and the largest books lean the other, the desk sides with the bigger balance sheets.

Where the numbers come from

Readings are taken from deep, continuously traded USDT-margined perpetual markets and refreshed through the session. Levels, flows, and the full three-scenario outlook built on top of this data ship in the Bitcoin coverage stream twice every market day — and every call is scored in public.