A perpetual futures contract never expires. To keep its price close to the spot price, exchanges make one side pay the other at fixed intervals. That payment is the funding rate, and for a bot that holds positions for hours or days it is a real line in the P&L.
How it works
Every eight hours (Binance, Bybit, OKX and BingX all use 8-hour intervals on most pairs, some pairs more often) the exchange compares the perpetual price with the spot index. If the perpetual trades above spot, the rate is positive: longs pay shorts. Below spot, the rate is negative and shorts pay longs. The payment is the rate multiplied by the position's notional, charged to the futures wallet at the funding time. If you hold no position at that second, you pay nothing.
Typical rates are a few thousandths of a percent per interval: 0.01% is the common default. That is about 0.03% per day and roughly 11% per year on the notional, if the rate stayed there and you held the position all the time.
What it costs a bot
Three things decide the funding bill of a strategy:
- Holding time. A bot that enters and exits within an hour rarely crosses a funding timestamp. A counter-trend grid that sits through a pullback for two days pays or receives six times.
- Side relative to the crowd. Funding is positive most of the time because the crowd is long. A long-only strategy like Lion usually pays; a strategy that shorts extensions, like Wolf when it is short, often receives.
- Notional, not margin. The payment is on the full position size. At x10 leverage the funding on a 1,000 USDT position is the same as at x1: about 0.10 USDT per interval at 0.01%.
For the EDVI strategies the funding is small compared to the trading result because the risk per entry is a fraction of a percent of the deposit; still, over a month with many open grids it is visible.
Where it shows up
Exchanges book funding as a separate income type, not as part of a trade. EDVI's statistics collector reads these records together with the realized P&L and the fees, so the monthly profit on the strategy page and in the invoice already includes funding paid and received on the pairs the bots traded. It is not hidden and not added later.
Funding in hedge mode
With a long and a short of similar size on the same pair, one side pays and the other receives, so the net funding is close to zero. That is a side effect of hedge mode, not a strategy, and it only holds while both sides are open.
Can you avoid it?
Not by changing leverage or margin mode. You can reduce it by preferring strategies with shorter holding times, or by lowering the number of pairs that hold positions through quiet markets. But funding is the cost of holding a perpetual position, and a strategy that is right about the direction earns many times more than it pays. Judge the net result on the strategy page, which already has the funding inside.
