FundingGapHow FundingGap calculates funding APR and net profit
Every number on FundingGap comes from public exchange data and a few simple formulas. This page lists them, so you can check our math and adjust it to your own fees.
1. Normalising funding intervals
Exchanges settle funding at different intervals: usually every 8 hours, but some contracts settle every 4, 2 or 1 hour, and Hyperliquid settles hourly. Comparing "0.01%" on one exchange with "0.01%" on another is meaningless unless the intervals match. We first convert every rate to an hourly rate:
hourly rate = funding rate ÷ interval (hours)
Example: 0.01% every 8 hours is 0.00125% per hour, while 0.005% every hour is 0.005% per hour. The second one pays four times more, even though the headline number is half.
2. Annualised rate (APR)
APR = hourly rate × 24 × 365
This is simple interest, with no compounding. It assumes the current rate stays the same for a year, which it never does. Treat APR as a way to compare opportunities on one scale, not as a forecast.
3. Choosing the long and short exchange
For each coin, we look at every exchange that lists a USDT perpetual (USDC on Hyperliquid) and pick:
- Short: the exchange with the highest hourly funding rate.
- Long: the exchange with the lowest hourly funding rate.
funding spread (APR) = APR(short) − APR(long)
Before picking, we drop legs that fail two checks:
- Liquidity: each leg needs at least the chosen 24-hour trading volume (default $1M). We filter legs first and then pick the pair, so one illiquid exchange with an extreme rate cannot hide a good pair between two liquid ones.
- Same coin: tickers are not unique across exchanges. We compare the per-coin price (adjusting for contracts like 1000PEPE) and flag differences above 3%. If most exchanges agree on the price, only the outlier is excluded; if we cannot tell which one is the real coin, the whole coin is excluded.
4. Estimated net profit
The table and cards rank by estimated net profit for your chosen holding period, with $10,000 of capital at 1x leverage by default. Capital is split evenly, so each leg is a $5,000 position. Leverage changes the position size, not the rates.
net = funding income − trading fees − bid/ask spread
- Funding income = hourly spread × 24 × days × position size. It assumes current rates stay constant for the whole period.
- Trading fees: four taker orders (open and close on both exchanges) at each exchange's base-tier taker fee.
- Bid/ask spread: from the live best bid and ask. Opening and closing a leg crosses its spread once in total (half in, half out). If an exchange does not report its order book, we assume 0.1% per leg, which is deliberately conservative so that missing data does not push a coin up the ranking.
Default taker fees (base tier, from public fee schedules as of October 2026; adjust them in the calculator if you have a VIP tier or fee discounts):
| Exchange | Taker fee |
|---|---|
| Binance | 0.050% |
| OKX | 0.050% |
| Bybit | 0.055% |
| Bitget | 0.060% |
| Gate | 0.050% |
| Hyperliquid | 0.045% |
Not included: slippage beyond the best bid and ask for large sizes (see the order book depth section in each coin's detail view), withdrawal and transfer fees, and the USDT to USDC swap needed for Hyperliquid.
5. Entry basis
The exchange with the higher funding rate usually also has a higher price, because funding is driven by the premium. The entry basis is how much more expensive the short leg is than the long leg when you open, using mid prices:
entry basis = (short price − long price) ÷ average price
If the two prices converge by the time you close, a positive basis is extra profit and a negative one is a loss. Because convergence is not guaranteed, we show the basis separately and do not include it in net profit.
6. Settled history and stability
Current rates can be a one-off spike. In each coin's detail view we fetch the settled funding history of both exchanges and compute what the pair actually earned over the last 3 and 7 days. The stability badge summarises it:
- Stable: positive for at least 5 days in a row, and the realised 3-day APR is at least half of the current APR.
- Spike: the last 24 hours lost money in this direction, or the realised 3-day APR is zero or negative. The spread just appeared and may vanish.
- New: less than 2 days of history, usually a newly listed coin.
- Mixed: anything in between.
7. Top picks and the volatile filter
The top cards show the highest estimated net profit among opportunities below 200% APR. Spreads above that are almost always small coins at extreme funding caps, often on hourly settlement, and can flip within hours. They stay in the full table, highlighted as volatile.
8. Liquidation estimate
For a leverage of L, each leg loses its margin after a move of roughly 1/L against it. We subtract 0.5% for maintenance margin:
liquidation move ≈ 1 ÷ leverage − 0.5%
At 3x that is about 32.8%. Real liquidation prices depend on each exchange's margin tiers and on cross or isolated margin mode, so treat this as a rough guide. More in Risks of funding rate arbitrage.
Data sources and refresh
All data comes from the exchanges' public APIs: funding rates, intervals, next settlement time, mark price, 24-hour volume and best bid and ask. The scanner refreshes every 30 seconds. FundingGap does not place trades or connect to your accounts. It only calculates.