Perpetual futures on bitcoin are often sold to leveraged traders, including in Europe, on the promise of a funding rate that compounds to roughly 11% a year if the default reference value holds. A review of twelve months of actual Binance and Bybit data for BTCUSDT contracts, covering October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026, suggests the real figure is far more modest once fees, timing and settlement currency are taken into account.
Funding on these platforms settles at fixed moments: 0h, 8h and 16h UTC, which corresponds to 2h, 10h and 18h Paris time during the summer. Only the position held at the exact settlement instant receives or pays the funding amount, a detail that matters for anyone trying to time entries and exits around these windows rather than holding continuously.
The theoretical calculation often cited for BTCUSDT uses a default rate of 0.01% every eight hours, equivalent to 10.95% annualised. Over the 1,095 payments recorded on Binance's BTCUSDT contract during the twelve-month period, the sum of actual funding came to 3.37% of notional, well short of the theoretical figure. Notably, the 0.01% reference rate was never exceeded at any point during the period studied.
Negative payments and uneven months
Of the 1,095 payments, 258 were negative, nearly one in four. Three consecutive months, February, March and April 2026, produced an unfavourable monthly balance for the short leg of the trade. The best months were July and August, each delivering around 0.6% in funding return.
Measured against the capital actually tied up as margin, assumed at one quarter of the position size, the return before fees comes to 2.7% for the year on Binance. On Bybit, the same contract over the same period returned 2.77%, with a 0.6 percentage point gap between the two platforms once compared on equivalent terms, favouring Bybit by that margin against Binance's result on this specific comparison.
Fees change the breakeven point
Opening and closing a funding-neutral position across both legs carries a round-trip fee typically assumed at 0.10% of notional. At the theoretical reference rate of 0.03% a day, it would take 3.3 days of funding payments to cover that cost. Using the actual average daily rate observed over the twelve months, approximately 0.009% a day, the breakeven stretches to 11 days, a meaningfully longer holding period than the theoretical model implies.
The inverse contract and the bitcoin price
Binance's inverse contract, margined in bitcoin rather than a stablecoin, produced a funding return of 4.17% in bitcoin terms over the same twelve months. But bitcoin's price fell over the period, from $114,000 on October 1, 2025 to $84,900 on September 30, 2026, a decline of 26%. As a result, a position holding the inverse contract still lost approximately 22% of its dollar value despite collecting positive funding throughout, a reminder that the currency in which a position is margined can outweigh the funding income itself.
This article is sponsored content provided by DCY, whose website is dcy.fund.
