What Is Funding Rate Arbitrage?
How delta neutral carry works, what the numbers mean, and where the risk actually lives.
What is funding rate arbitrage?
Perpetual futures use funding payments to keep their price pegged to spot: when the perp trades above fair value, longs pay shorts, and vice versa. The same asset often has different funding rates on different venues at the same time. Funding rate arbitrage opens a short on the venue where shorts get paid the most and an equal-sized long on the venue where longs pay the least (or get paid too). The price exposure cancels out — delta neutral — and the position earns the spread between the two funding rates.
What do carry APR and win rate mean?
Carry APR is the annualised value of the funding spread the position earns: what the short leg receives minus what the long leg pays. Because funding is set hour by hour, carry moves constantly, so a realistic scanner shows the carry realised over a window (24h to 30d), not just the instantaneous rate. Win rate is the share of funding intervals in that window where the carry was positive: a pair at 100% win rate paid you every single hour of the window, while a pair with a huge average carry but a 50% win rate earned it in a few spikes.
What are the risks?
Four main ones. Entry and exit costs: crossing two spreads can eat days of carry, so thin books matter. Funding flips: the spread can compress or invert, turning carry negative — watching the realised window and win rate, not the headline rate, is the defense. Liquidation: both legs carry leverage, and a fast move can liquidate one leg before you rebalance. Venue risk: each leg lives on a different exchange with its own custody, margin engine and failure modes.
How does the Strata scanner rank opportunities?
The board covers eight venues (Hyperliquid, Lighter, Lighter Robinhood Chain, Polymarket perps, Pacifica, Extended, XYZ and Ondo) and ranks every cross-venue pair by realised carry APR over your chosen window, alongside win rate, coverage and live top-of-book spread. A position simulator walks real order-book depth to estimate entry costs at your size, and saved positions track the funding a trade actually earned.
The live board is free, no login: open the funding rate arbitrage scanner.