On 7 October 2026 the US 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.361% intraday and the 30-year 5.730%, both the highest since 2002. Risk assets sold off with it: bitcoin fell 2.7% to $83,336, ether 5.2% to $2,559, and XRP 5.5% to $1.42.

The macro half has been written up everywhere. This covers only the question our own data can answer: on days like this, who is actually paying whom in the perpetual market.

Correcting a default assumption

The most repeated line about perpetuals is that longs pay shorts. For BTC it holds. As of 2026-10-08 06:00 +08:00, BTC perpetuals have settled 7,416 times since January 2020, 85.95% of those periods carried a positive rate, and the full-period mean is +0.010681%. ETH is nearly identical at 86.22% positive.

Widen the lens to the whole market and it inverts.

The same snapshot covers 534 symbols and 1,029,262 settlement records. Broken out by year:

  • 2025: 460 symbols, 300,090 periods, 205,842 of them positive (68.59%), full-year average −0.007055%
  • 2026 to date: 534 symbols, 718,212 periods, 543,161 positive (75.63%), average −0.005227%

Two consecutive years in which the market-wide average funding rate is negative.

Diagram: a horizontal baseline with many short vertical lines densely packed above it and fewer, much longer lines below; although the lower lines number about a third of the upper ones, their length is several times greater, tipping the overall area below the baseline

Three quarters positive, average negative

Those two figures are only interesting together.

Most periods positive but the mean negative can mean only one thing: the negative periods are much larger per period. Positive funding is mostly small amounts hugging the baseline, while negative funding concentrates in a handful of violently imbalanced moments and a handful of instruments, and one of those can wipe out hundreds of positive periods.

That is the real shape of market-wide funding — not a curve oscillating symmetrically around zero, but a distribution that is mildly positive most of the time with an occasional deep negative tail. We sorted this year’s cumulative values across contracts previously and found a median of −0.56%, with 244 of 450 negative — the cross-sectional view of the same fact.

So what about a day like 7 October

A macro-driven selloff is exactly when negative funding tends to cluster: longs deleverage, the perpetual moves to a discount against spot, and the rate follows it down.

What can be confirmed so far is the monthly reading. BTC perpetual funding totalled 0.060452% over the seven days from 1 to 8 October, ETH 0.079555% on the same basis (summed period by period, as of 2026-10-08 06:00 +08:00). For comparison, BTC logged 0.456151% across all of September and 0.613952% in August. The daily run-rate for these seven days is visibly below the previous two months.

The 30-day cross-section is still tilted positive, though: of the 529 symbols that qualify for the window, 444 are cumulatively positive. This week’s pullback has not yet changed the direction at a one-month horizon.

What it means for a hedged book

A balanced book does not care how far price falls, only whether funding turns negative and for how long. Three things follow from the data above:

  1. On BTC and ETH, negative funding is the minority case — but it has run eight consecutive days.
  2. On most mid- and small-cap instruments, negative funding is the norm rather than an accident. Extrapolating BTC’s 85.95% onto a newly listed name will mislead you.
  3. The policy rate is a separate line of the same ledger. With the 10-year at 5.361%, whether a funding-only book is worth running requires subtracting the risk-free rate first — we worked that through in what is left after subtracting the risk-free rate.

What to watch next

  • Whether BTC’s October total returns to the 0.4% monthly order of magnitude. If it does not, the deleveraging is not finished.
  • The share of instruments running negative. Currently 85 of 529 over 30 days; that ratio rising is the signal that matters.
  • The rates side. The Treasury scheduled three auctions this week, including a $39 billion 10-year. Auction results feed straight back into yields.

No forecast here, only observable indicators. Funding approaching zero or turning negative in flat and bearish markets is a condition this strategy genuinely meets — the 2022 row on our performance page is where that came from. It did not happen this week, which does not mean it will not happen next.

Sources: Treasury yields and crypto prices from public market reporting on 2026-10-07 (10-year 5.361% intraday and 30-year 5.730%, both highest since 2002; BTC −2.7% to $83,336, ETH −5.2% to $2,559, XRP −5.5% to $1.42), with the yield readings cross-checked across NBC News, FXStreet and Yahoo Finance in agreement; the $39 billion 10-year auction size comes from the same reporting. All of our funding figures come from the backend period-by-period snapshot as of 2026-10-08 06:00 +08:00, summed period by period. Past data does not indicate future returns.