What Funding Arbitrage Means in Arbitron
Funding-rate arbitrage means holding a position to collect funding payments rather than to capture a price spread. It inverts the classic two-leg game: there the gap between two exchange prices is the profit and funding is a side effect; here funding is the profit and price exposure is something you hedge away or take on purpose. New to intervals and who pays whom? Read Funding Rate Explained first.
The opportunity comes from a differential, not from a single rate. One exchange paying +0.05% per interval is only worth chasing if you can hold the other side somewhere cheaper. Arbitron's job is to surface where two exchanges disagree on funding for the same coin — the gap between them is what you are trying to capture, and the next section covers the two structures Arbitron actually supports for capturing it.
Set expectations up front: Arbitron has no single "funding arbitrage" button. The flow is two steps that live in different parts of the app — you discover opportunities on the Funding Scanner, then you capture them by opening an ordinary trading card or a cash-and-carry position on that pair. The rest of this article walks both steps.
How a funding differential pays you
Price moves cancel across the two legs, so you stay market-neutral and keep the funding differential at every settlement.
Two Ways to Capture Funding
Arbitron gives you two distinct vehicles for funding capture, and they behave differently. Pick based on what you can hold and how market-neutral you want to be.
Perp / perp — one-leg card in Hold Mode
- Perp/perp via a one-leg card in Hold Mode. You open a single real perpetual leg on the exchange whose funding pays you, and let the engine hold it across settlements. Hold Mode is the key switch: it stops the worker from auto-closing the card when the price spread reverts, so the position actually survives to the next funding payment. Crucially, Hold Mode exists only on one-leg (directional) cards — see Trading Modes and One-Leg Arbitrage. You carry directional price risk on that leg; funding is your compensation for holding it.
Spot / perp — Cash & Carry
- Spot/perp via Cash & Carry. You buy the coin on spot and short the same coin on a perpetual, so the price exposure cancels and the short perp's funding becomes near-pure income. This is the cleanest delta-neutral way to harvest funding, and it is the only place in Arbitron where funding is broken out as its own line item: the Cash & Carry view decomposes your result into Realized + Funding - Fees = Net, so you can see exactly what the funding stream earned.
One warning about the classic two-leg spread card: it is not a funding-capture vehicle. Two-leg cards open and close on price-spread thresholds, have no Hold Mode, and their PnL is computed from the spread — not from an isolated funding figure. Funding still flows through the position, but you cannot point at a "funding profit" number on a classic card. If your goal is to harvest funding, use one of the two vehicles above. Do not try to make a classic card hold for funding: the engine will close it on the spread.
Two ways to capture it
Perp / Perp — one-leg + Hold Mode
Directional- One real perpetual leg on the paying exchange
- Carries directional price risk
- Funding is the carry you hold for
Spot / Perp — Cash & Carry
Neutral- Long spot + short perp, same coin
- Delta-neutral on price
- Funding is near-pure income
Reading the Funding Scanner
The Funding Scanner is the discovery surface — the Funding tab on the Scanner. Each row is a cross-exchange pair for one coin, ranked so the most attractive differentials float to the top. The table is a snapshot refreshed roughly every 20 minutes, with current rates overlaid live (about every 30 seconds) on top of that snapshot. So the longer-window columns are recent history, while the "current" figure stays close to real time.
Spread columns are absolute
The spread columns — Current (next-payment differential), 24h, 7d, 30d, 180d — are all cumulative funding differentials over that window, and they are stored as absolute values. A big number tells you the size of the opportunity, not which way to trade it. Direction comes from the separate Short Side indicator, which names the leg you should short (the one being paid). Do not try to read direction from the spread number's sign — there isn't one. And note these are funding differentials, a different thing from the price spread you trade on a classic card; the two are easy to confuse.
Carry Score rewards steadiness
The Carry Score rewards quality, not just size. It is an annualised funding Sharpe ratio — the mean differential divided by its volatility, scaled to a year — so a pair that pays a steady 0.01% every interval scores better than one that averages more but lurches around. The legend bands it from Negative through Low, Moderate, Strong, to Exceptional as a reading aid. Treat those bands as colour cues, not hard thresholds: there are no published cut-off numbers behind them, and a higher score simply means more reward per unit of wobble. The score shows "—" when there is not enough history to compute it (fewer than three samples, or zero volatility).
Min Vol and overlap keep you honest
Two columns keep you honest about whether the opportunity is real. Min Vol is the volume of the thinner of the two legs — your true tradable ceiling, because you can only size the pair as large as the smaller side allows. And the longer windows (30d, 180d) are overlap-bounded: if one leg listed later than the other, the stats count only the period where both legs existed, so you are never shown funding you could not actually have hedged. A pair where one side has almost no history is flagged as not hedgeable.
Click any row to open the drilldown. It expands the same pair into rate history for both legs, a cumulative-income step chart, a rolling Carry Score, the next-payment snapshot with countdowns, and a position-size box that converts the differential into dollar income for a notional you type in. Use the drilldown to confirm the differential is persistent — a flat, boring line you can hold beats a spike that already passed. Save the filters you like as a preset (with an optional Telegram alert) so the scanner keeps re-finding that shape of opportunity for you.
Anatomy of a scanner row
From Opportunity to Position
- 1
Open the position yourself
This is the step the scanner does not do for you. There is no "trade this" button on a funding opportunity — once you have found a pair worth holding, you open the position yourself on the dashboard. For perp/perp, create a one-leg card on the coin and exchange whose funding pays you (the Short Side column told you which leg that is) and enable Hold Mode. For spot/perp, open a Cash & Carry position on the pair.
- 2
Turn on Hold Mode so it survives settlement
Be precise about what Hold Mode does: it suppresses the automatic spread-driven close, so the card stays open through funding settlements instead of taking profit the moment the price spread mean-reverts. Scale-in still works, so you can build the position over time. But because nothing closes it automatically, only a manual Force Close — or a loss/liquidation safety net — will end a Hold card. You own the decision about when the funding edge is gone. (Reminder from the previous section: this lever is one-leg only.)
- 3
Or open Cash & Carry, governed by basis
For Cash & Carry, entry and exit are governed by basis, not by a spread threshold. You set a desired basis (the minimum spot-vs-perp gap you are willing to open at) and a re-quote threshold; the engine builds the position when the basis is good enough, then walks through Building, Open, Unwinding, and Closed. You hold while funding keeps paying and unwind when the basis converges or the funding turns against you.
Respect two timing realities. After any card closes, an order cooldown gates how soon it can re-enter, so you will not thrash in and out. And if an exchange rejects an order around settlement, every card on that exchange skips signals for 60 seconds — a deliberate cooldown that avoids hammering an exchange that is busy settling funding. Plan entries and exits a little away from the exact settlement minute.
From opportunity to position
- 1
Find a differential on the Funding Scanner
- 2
No trade button — you open it yourself
- 3
Open a card on the pair, short the paid leg
- 4
Enable Hold Mode (one-leg cards only)
- 5
Hold across funding settlements
- 6
Force Close when the edge is gone
Estimating the Return (Before Fees Eat It)
The calculator below turns a funding differential into dollars. Pick the per-interval rate on the leg you short (the one paying you) and the rate on the leg you hold long (the one you pay), set the funding interval, and it shows the net you collect each interval, per day, per 30 days, and as an annualised figure — on a $10,000 position, gross of fees. Watch the edge shrink as the long leg's rate climbs toward the short leg's; if it crosses over, the number turns red and you are paying to hold instead of being paid.
For a full income-and-breakeven view, use the standalone tools: the Funding Rate APR Calculator turns a per-interval rate into an annualised figure, and the Arbitrage Calculator nets spread, funding, and fees together so you see the real number. Annualised funding rates look enormous — a 0.03% rate over an 8-hour interval is roughly 32% a year — but that is the gross, headline figure, before anything is subtracted.
The single biggest mistake in funding arbitrage is ignoring fees. The dollar figures in the scanner drilldown are gross funding income — they do not subtract trading fees or slippage. Every position you open and close pays maker/taker fees on both legs, and on thin coins slippage can dwarf several intervals of funding. Before you commit, make sure the funding you expect to collect over your intended holding period clears the round-trip cost. See Exchange Fees for where those costs come from.
Tracking Funding Live
Funding Soon, on the dashboard
Once you are holding, two surfaces tell you what funding is actually doing. On the dashboard, the Funding Soon card aggregates every imminent funding payment across your open positions inside a 60-minute window and shows the net dollar amount you are about to receive or pay, broken down per card. It is your early warning that a settlement is coming, and which way it will go.
Cash & Carry shows settled funding
For cash-and-carry positions, the Cash & Carry view is the source of truth on realised funding: it polls each exchange for actual settled payments and shows them in the PnL breakdown as a distinct Funding component, alongside Realized and Fees. This is where you confirm the strategy is working with real settled numbers, not estimates.
Remember that funding intervals differ by exchange and even by symbol — 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours — and Arbitron reads the real interval from each exchange rather than assuming a fixed schedule. A pair can have one leg settling every hour and the other every eight, so payments will not always line up. Watch the per-leg countdowns, and judge a position by the funding it actually collects over time, not by a single attractive snapshot rate.