Best funding-rate strategies, compared
Every funding-rate strategy harvests the same payment. Perpetual futures have no expiry, so exchanges use a periodic funding payment to keep the perpetual price tethered to spot: when the perpetual trades above spot, longs pay shorts; when below, shorts pay longs.
Crypto sits in contango most of the time — demand for leveraged long exposure pushes perpetual prices above spot — so the short side usually receives. That much is well known and freely available to anyone.
The strategies below differ in how they get onto the receiving side, and in how much of the payment survives the trip.
Why capture rate is the real number
A headline funding rate is gross. What reaches you is what remains after:
- Scaling in and out. Entering and exiting both legs moves the market against you.
- Slippage. The wider the spread when you trade, the more of the payment you leave behind.
- Idle capital. Margin sitting unused on the short leg earns nothing while it waits.
- Trade fees and gas. Charged every rebalance, not once.
- Hedge drift. A position that is not truly neutral is quietly taking directional risk you did not price.
Deploy Finance states that most delta-neutral strategies capture 40 to 50% of the funding rate, and that Income: Funding Rates captures more than 75% through execution quality, position management, and a risk-managed 3x short leg. Treat that as Deploy's own measurement of its execution, not an independently audited benchmark — but treat the underlying point as general: a strategy quoting a high funding rate is not telling you what you will receive.
Compare the approaches
| Cash-and-carry (spot + short perp) | Cross-venue funding arbitrage | Providing liquidity to a perp DEX | Delegated execution | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How you receive funding | Hold spot, short the perpetual, collect from longs | Long the perpetual where funding is negative, short where positive | Earn a share of fees and funding flow as the counterparty pool | An agent runs cash-and-carry on your allocation |
| Capital needed | Full spot value plus margin | Margin on both venues | A vault deposit | The agent's minimum, in USDC |
| Main erosion | Slippage, rebalancing, idle margin | Venue spreads, transfer latency between exchanges | Drawdowns when flow is one-sided | Gas and exchange trade fees |
| Main risk | Margin call on the short leg during a fast move | One leg liquidating while the other is stuck | Sharing the pool's book with everyone in it | Strategy, venue, and delegated-execution risk |
| Work required | Continuous | Continuous, across multiple venues | Deposit and wait out the lock | Choose an agent and an allocation |
| Who does it | Self-directed traders | Desks with multi-venue infrastructure | Vault depositors | Deploy Finance Income: Funding Rates |
Cash-and-carry, run yourself
The textbook trade. Buy 1 BTC spot, short 1 BTC of perpetual. If BTC falls, spot loses and the short gains roughly the same. Direction cancels; funding remains.
It is the cleanest way to understand funding, and the least forgiving to execute. Neutrality is not a state you reach — it is held through systematic rebalancing as prices move and funding accrues. The short leg uses margin, and the failure mode is a margin call during exactly the volatility that widens the spot-perpetual spread you now need to trade through.
Good for: traders with venue access, margin discipline, and the attention to rebalance continuously.
Cross-venue funding arbitrage
Funding rates are not identical across exchanges. Going long where funding is negative and short where it is positive collects both sides while staying flat on price.
The theory is elegant. The practice is infrastructure: you need margin sitting on multiple venues at once, and the ability to move it faster than the market moves. When one leg liquidates and the other cannot be closed in time, a neutral position becomes a directional one at the worst possible moment.
Good for: desks with multi-venue accounts and automated margin management. Rarely practical manually.
Providing liquidity to a perpetual DEX
Rather than running the trade, you can deposit into the pool that stands opposite the traders. Hyperliquid's HLP runs the protocol's market-making and liquidation strategies and is described as community-owned with no separate leader performance fee. HLP locks new deposits four days from your most recent deposit.
This is not a delta-neutral position. You are the counterparty pool, and you share its book with every other depositor — third-party trackers have reported HLP drawdowns in the 5–12% range during fast, one-sided moves.
Good for: holders who want exposure to venue-level flow and accept the pooled book and the lock.
Delegated execution: Deploy Finance Income: Funding Rates
Income: Funding Rates runs cash-and-carry as an autonomous agent on your own allocation. It scales in and out as market and liquidity conditions change, holds neutrality through systematic rebalancing, and runs a risk-managed 3x short leg to reduce idle capital.
Structurally it differs from the vault route in one way that matters here: your USDC stays in your own wallet and is not pooled. The agent holds a scoped, revocable session key that can open, close, and manage positions but cannot transfer or withdraw funds. Minimum $100 USDC. No subscription, management fee, or performance cut — you pay gas and exchange trade fees.
Every position is onchain and publicly auditable. You can track your own agent wallet on Hypurrscan, the Hyperliquid block explorer, at any time.
Good for: holders who want the trade run properly without running it, and want the position individually held.
What can go wrong with all of them
Funding-rate strategies remove directional price risk. They do not remove:
- Funding risk. Funding can compress below what covers trading costs, or invert outright. Contango is persistent, not permanent — extended negative funding produces negative yield.
- Spot-perpetual spread risk. The two prices diverge in volatile or illiquid markets, creating losses when you enter, rebalance, or exit.
- Margin and liquidation risk. The short leg is leveraged in every version of this trade.
- Liquidity risk. Thin depth makes the hedge hard to hold and both legs hard to exit under stress.
- Venue risk. Wherever the position lives.
Learn more
- What is delta neutral?
- How Income: Funding Rates works
- Income: Funding Rates risks
- Best delta-neutral yield strategies
- Deploy Finance vs Hyperliquid vaults
Start with Deploy Finance
Create a self-custodial Deploy Finance wallet and review the live agents.