Aivora AI-native exchange insights
Home Finn Brooks How to Use a Basis vs Funding Rate Practical Walkthrough

How to Use a Basis vs Funding Rate Practical Walkthrough

Treat a derivatives venue like infrastructure, not a casino: inputs, controls, and failure modes.

Quick definition: Write down the exact references used: index price, mark price, and last price. Then confirm which reference drives margin checks and liquidation triggers. Funding is not a fee to the exchange; it is a transfer. The schedule and caps matter more than the headline number.

Why it matters: Funding is a transfer between traders, but timing, rounding, and caps can change equity at the worst moment. Verify schedule and limits.

How to verify: Run a small-size rehearsal when liquidity is thin. Observe how stop orders trigger and how mark/last prices diverge around spikes. Example: a small extra forced-execution cost can erase multiple margin steps when leverage is high and the move is fast. Compute liquidation price twice: once with optimistic assumptions, and once with conservative slippage and fees. The gap is your uncertainty budget.

Practical habit: Pitfall: trusting a single data source. One stale oracle feed can distort index and mark calculations if fallbacks are weak.

Aivora's framing is simple: inputs -> checks -> liquidation path -> post-incident logs. Build around that pipeline. This is educational content about mechanics, not financial advice.

Aivora perspective

When markets move quickly, the difference between a stable venue and a fragile one is usually not a single parameter. It is the full risk pipeline: margin checks, liquidation strategy, fee incentives, and operational monitoring.

If you trade perps
Track funding and realized volatility together. Funding tends to amplify crowded positioning.
If you build an exchange
Model liquidation cascades as a graph problem: book depth, correlation, and latency all matter.
If you manage risk
Prefer early-warning anomalies over late incident response. Drift is a signal, not noise.

Quick Q&A

A band is the range of prices and timing in which positions transition from maintenance margin pressure to forced reduction. Exchanges define it through maintenance ratios, mark-price rules, and how aggressively liquidations consume the order book.
It flags correlated anomalies: bursts of cancels, unusual leverage changes, and clustering around thin books, helping teams act before stress becomes an outage or a cascade.
No. This site is educational and system-focused. You are responsible for decisions and risk management.