81% of the Funding Rates I Checked This Morning Were the Same Three Numbers

I pulled the live funding rate for every coin listed on all 5 of Bybit, Binance, Bitget, Gate and MEXC this morning — 433 coins, 2,165 individual readings. Before looking at direction or spread, I just rounded each one to 2 decimal places and counted how many distinct values showed up. I expected hundreds. There are basically five.

Five numbers, 81% of the market

Annualized (rate × 3 payments a day × 365 days), five values kept repeating: 0%, ±5.48%/year (0.005% per 8-hour period) and ±10.95%/year (0.01% per 8-hour period). Of the 2,165 readings, 1,763 — 81.4% — landed on exactly one of those five numbers:

That's not a coincidence of rounding. It's the interest-rate component of the funding formula showing through unmodified. Perpetual funding is built from two pieces: a premium index that tracks how far the perp price has drifted from spot, and a fixed interest-rate term most exchanges set at 0.01% per 8 hours (or half that). When the premium index is close to zero — which is the default state for a huge share of listed pairs, most of the time — the formula has nothing to add, and the rate you see is just that fixed term. Not a read on crowding. A default.

257 coins pinned everywhere, all at once

The starker number: 257 of the 433 coins — 59.4% — sat on a floor value on every single one of the 5 exchanges simultaneously this morning. Same coin, five separate venues, five separate order books, and the "market" produced the identical round number on all of them every time. Familiar names, not obscure ones:

On the other end, only 23 of the 433 coins never touched a floor value on any of the 5 exchanges — meaning every single reading for that coin, on every venue, reflected a real, independently-moving premium. That list includes BTC and SOL, plus mid-caps like APT, ONDO, STORJ, PAXG, SAND and STX. Being on that list isn't about market cap alone. COTI and HOME — both deep in negative territory in Sunday's direction survey — are on it too. It's about whether a coin currently has enough two-sided flow to keep pushing its premium index away from zero.

Majors aren't immune either

I expected large-cap coins to escape this almost entirely. They don't. Checking BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, BNB, DOGE, ADA, AVAX, LINK, SUI, TON, ARB, OP and PEPE across the same 5 exchanges, 43.1% of readings still landed on a floor value — mostly the 10.95% ceiling, and mostly on Binance, Bitget and MEXC rather than Bybit or Gate:

LINK and SUI hit the ceiling on 4 of their 5 exchanges this morning. BTC never did, on any of them — every one of its 5 readings was a distinct, non-round number, which is exactly what you'd expect from the most liquid perpetual on earth generating a constantly-adjusting premium. Gate stands out as the exchange where majors escape the floor most often, matching the lower floor-share it showed across the full 433-coin set too.

Why this happens, and why it's not a bug

None of this means the exchanges are faking data. The interest-rate component exists precisely so funding has a sane default when there's no meaningful spot-vs-perp premium to price — without it, a rate would either sit at a noisy near-zero number every 8 hours or the formula would need a special case for "no signal." A flat 0.01% (or 0.005%) does that job. The problem isn't the mechanism. It's reading every funding number on a page as if it were freshly computed from crowd behavior, when for 4 out of 5 readings this morning, it wasn't computed from anything happening right now at all.

What I actually do with this

I stop trusting a funding number the moment it's a round one. 5.48%, 10.95%, −5.48%, −10.95% or 0% flat — if a rate lands on exactly one of those five values, I treat it as "no signal" rather than "mild positioning," because that's what it is. A number like BTC's 2.19% on Bitget or ETH's 1.64% on Gate, ugly and non-round, is the one worth reading as an actual crowd read. It's a small habit, but it changes how I use the live funding rates page day to day — I scan for the numbers that don't look designed, not the ones that do.

Run your own position's cost through the funding calculator before assuming the rate you see reflects real positioning, and read how funding actually works if the premium-index/interest-rate split above was new to you — it's the same mechanic behind the cross-exchange spread I measured two days ago, just viewed from the other side.

Before you read a funding number as a signal

1. Five numbers explain 81% of the market. 0%, ±5.48%/year and ±10.95%/year covered 1,763 of 2,165 readings across 433 coins on 5 exchanges this morning.
2. Those round numbers are the interest-rate default, not a positioning read. They show up whenever the premium index is close to zero — the normal state for most pairs, most of the time.
3. Almost 6 in 10 coins were pinned on every exchange at once. 257 of 433 coins sat on a floor value simultaneously across all 5 venues — the same "signal" repeating identically everywhere.
4. Majors aren't exempt. 43.1% of large-cap readings hit a floor too, though BTC, SOL and AVAX stayed fully market-priced on every exchange checked.

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