Almost everything written about perpetual futures treats them as a trading venue: where you go for leverage, where volume concentrates, where the next hot asset gets listed. That’s true, and it’s the least interesting thing about them. The more important story is that perps built the most underrated interest rate in crypto, and the capital priced off that rate has grown far faster than the attention paid to it.

Start with the funding rate. A perpetual future has no expiry to pull it back to spot, so the two sides exchange a periodic payment, funding, to keep the perp anchored to the underlying. When longs are crowded, longs pay shorts; when shorts are crowded, shorts pay longs. It looks like plumbing, but it is the closest thing crypto…