Imagine paying $13,000 a day for every million dollars you have riding on a trade, just to keep the position open. That’s the reality facing short sellers on OKX right now, where the BTC perpetual futures funding rate has cratered to an annualized -453%.
In English: traders betting against Bitcoin on OKX are hemorrhaging roughly 1.3% daily in funding fees, paid directly to those on the long side of the trade.
The numbers are wild, even by crypto standards
Perpetual futures contracts don’t have expiration dates, so exchanges use funding rates to keep prices tethered to the spot market. When funding is negative, shorts pay longs. When it’s positive, longs pay shorts.
At -453% annualized, the cost structure for maintaining a short position becomes almost comically punitive. For context, Binance’s funding rates on comparable BTC perpetual contracts are sitting between -0.05% and -0.15%. That’s a divergence of roughly 10x.
