What a funding rate is, and why CoinMarketCap just bought Coinglass

CoinMarketCap bought Coinglass on September 25, 2026. Coinglass is the site traders open to check funding rates and liquidations. The deal puts its data in front of CoinMarketCap's 115 million monthly visitors.

In its announcement, CoinMarketCap described Coinglass as the platform traders use to track open interest, funding rates, liquidations and options across major exchanges. Founded in 2019, Coinglass covers 28 exchanges and more than 2,500 products, and serves over 5 million monthly users. Financial terms were not disclosed.

What a funding rate actually is

Perpetual futures are the most traded product in crypto. They work like a normal futures contract, with one twist. They never expire. A trader can hold a long or short position for months without rolling it over. That freedom creates a problem. With no expiry date to pull the contract price back toward the real market price, the two can drift apart.

A funding rate is the fix. Coinglass defines it as the fee exchanges use to keep contract prices in line with the underlying asset price. Every few hours, one side of the trade pays the other a small amount. That payment tugs the perpetual price back toward spot, the price of the asset on the open market.

Who pays whom, and how often

Direction depends on the sign of the rate. When the funding rate is positive, the perpetual is trading above spot, and longs pay shorts. When it is negative, the perpetual sits below spot, and shorts pay longs. The wider the gap, the larger the payment.

Most venues settle funding every eight hours. Coinglass lists the standard times as 08:00, 16:00 and 24:00 Hong Kong time, though some exchanges run four-hour or one-hour cycles. A trader pays or receives only if the position is open at the settlement moment. Close it before then, and nothing changes hands.

The amounts are small per cycle. They add up. A long position held through a long run of positive funding bleeds a little at every settlement, which is why funding is a running cost, not a one-off fee.

Here is the shape of it, in round numbers. Picture a rate of 0.01% for a single cycle. A trader holding $10,000 of long exposure would hand about $1 to the shorts at that settlement. Held all day, across three cycles, that comes to roughly $3. Small on a calm day. Punishing when funding spikes and holds high for weeks.

Why the number just came onshore

For years, perpetuals lived almost entirely offshore. US rules left them in a grey zone, so trading pooled on exchanges outside the country. That changed on May 29, 2026, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved the first US-listed perpetual futures contract. It is a cash-settled bitcoin product called BTCPERP, listed on the designated contract market KalshiEX LLC.

Regulators had cracked the door before. A US exchange self-certified two similar products in 2025, which took effect that July, but the 2026 decision was the first to clear the CFTC's full review rather than the lighter self-certification route. That contract uses the same funding mechanism to track bitcoin's spot price.

So a number that traders once watched only on offshore venues now sits inside a US-regulated market. The regulator's framework so far covers digital commodities with deep spot markets, not equities or farm goods.

How traders read the number

Funding works as a sentiment gauge too. A high positive rate means longs are crowded and willing to pay to stay long, a sign of heavy one-sided positioning. A deeply negative rate means the reverse. Coinglass notes that long stretches of extreme funding, in either direction, often flag the buildup of reversal risk, because crowded trades unwind fast.

Coinglass tracks two companion numbers as well. Open interest is the total value of contracts still open. Liquidations are the forced closes that hit over-leveraged traders when price moves against them. Read together, the three show where positioning is stacked and where it might break. That mix is what CoinMarketCap paid for.

David Salamon, chief product officer at CoinMarketCap, put the appeal plainly. "Open interest, funding and liquidations are where the market's risk is actually taken, and Coinglass made that visible to everyone," he said. That is the logic of the deal. CoinMarketCap sells attention to prices. Coinglass sells attention to risk.

One caution. Funding shows how positioning is leaning, not where price is going. Crowded does not mean wrong. Traders who short a market only because funding looks stretched have been run over before.

What to watch

Coinglass says it will keep its brand, team, website and pricing, and run as an independent business under CoinMarketCap, which Binance has owned since April 2020. Whether that independence holds is the thing worth watching. A data site owned by an exchange group invites fair questions about neutrality, and traders lean on funding numbers precisely because they are meant to sit above any single venue.

Nothing about the daily tool changes yet. The funding rate on Coinglass reads the same on September 26 as it did a week earlier. What shifts is reach. A risk signal that used to live in a corner of trader chat now ships to a mainstream audience, right as US regulators start letting the product it measures trade at home.